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I believe in the old school logic of ius in bello - that there are certain destructive practices that armies are likely resort to out of sadism/schadenfreude/righteous anger despite the lack of practical military benefit, and that banning them is a useful precommitmemt that will help us resist our own desire to act out our vices when the opportunity arises.
On that model, punitive bombing of civilian targets is the sort of practice you would want to ban. Bomber Harris said out of one side of his mouth that bombing civilian housing in German cities was part of an "industrial web" attack designed to make the newly-homeless workers less productive. Out of the other side of his mouth, he said a lot of great lines about winds and whirlwinds that implied his real motivation was simply to inflict pain on a deserving target. If we hadn't bombed German civilian housing, the war would have turned out the same way, except for fewer dead British aircrew and fewer dead German civilians.
Bomber Harris can plausibly claim ignorance - it wasn't obvious in 1942 that you couldn't win a war using air attacks on civilian morale. His successors can't. But people keep doing it - see Brett Devereux on the long and undistinguished history of strategic air power.
I thought it was broadly accepted that you can win a war doing civilian strikes. Wasn’t that the point of Sherman’s March to the Sea. A partial reason for nuking Japan. Mongol war theory.
Post 1950-Western doctrine doesn’t seem to work but that’s because we’ve had limits on how savage we could be.
The US did incinerate North Korea's cities, burned down most of the standing structures. That and the destruction of the ground campaign basically knocked North Korea out of the war and so the Chinese did nearly all the fighting. Destruction does work to an extent.
But it certainly didn't endear North Koreans to America. Warfare isn't just about pure destruction but achieving various goals and avoiding bad end states. A North Korea traumatized and hyper-militarized turned out to be a thorn in America's side. Better to end the war earlier rather than go too far into North Korea and bring in China.
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The March to the Sea was part of a larger strategy of cutting the South into isolated pieces and destroying Southern logistical/warmaking capacity. They didn't march through Georgia randomly torching houses or killing civilians and the overall strategy was not to threaten annihilation. Somewhat separately, Sherman aimed to demonstrate to Southern civilian (especially elites) that the CSA government was impotent to stop US forces from going wherever they wanted, but that wasn't really critical to the operation and the mechanism of action wasn't inflicting brutality on Southern civilians.
At the limit this is true (if you can actually credibly threaten genuine annihilation, your opponent will become a lot more responsive, though even that is problematic), but the Soviets were no more successful in Afghanistan, for example, despite being far more savage than US/coalition forces. The naive faith in the power of brutality is not well-evidenced. We have countless examples of calculated (and not-so-calculated) savagery backfiring.
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Non-combatants of a belligerent really like the pretense that only its soldiers will die.
Break that illusion and they'll double down, just like a Palestinian. And at that point your solution to the existence of that people has to be final; generally this would consist of nuclear annihilation, but the problem other nations have with that is that 'making clear that you will genocide your enemies' may cause them to pre-emptively strike you with the same weapons.
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These attacks were only one part of a larger military victory
That feels to me like the same thing as saying they are useful. In the case of Mongols it allowed them to control far more territory because if any one group stepped out of line they were slaughtered. If every group stepped out of line at the same time then the Mongols probably can’t win.
If you’re able to do mass civilian damage then you probably do have the means of winning in that sector. It seems most of the examples are more to pacify the population. If your less locally powerful then your probably only have enough bombs to choose between factories or civilians and the factory is likely better.
Yes, killing your enemies is good actually. But that doesn't mean a particular attack is a good use of resources, and it doesn't say anything about whether that attach is necessary or sufficiant to acheive victory.
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Certainly I don't mean all war crimes are nonsense but the prohibition on economic targets is.
Residential areas are certainly the lowest roi when it comes to targets but were very common in ww2 unfortunately.
You and nato agree on the matter.
https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/events/transcripts/1999/05/25/press-conference
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