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So there is one thing about both sides' media coverage of Russian-Ukranian war that bugged me for the last two years - accusations of deliberate targeting of civilian buildings, specifically non-military hospitals, schools, malls and houses. Am I wrong in thinking that regardless of evidence in specific cases probability of this happening is so low that we should expect to see almost zero cases of it?
I specifically talking about deliberate strikes because there are many alternative explanations revolving around mistakes, negligence, and faulty weapons. Of course all blame for this still lays on the initiator of the war but I think claims of deliberate hits are generally explained by these reasons.
Specific targeting of civilians is not new to wars, it was done quite often for loot and plunder in the old times and with mass proliferation of planes and missiles it, and Douhet's doctrine were at its height in WW2. Strategic bombing(e.g. targeting general use infrastructure and in some case industry somewhat related to the war) never went out of fashion and was used in almost all wars where the participants had a large enough air fleet since. But terror bombing(e.g. striking civilian targets for the purpose of lowering the enemy morale) is generally not used because time and time again it was proved ineffective and even damaging to its goal. I can't recall any country that engaged in the open terror bombing campaigns from, again, WW2,
and if you decide to go this route you should be open about it. Main effect is on morale, it should be supported by propaganda and fiery speeches of inevitable death in case of continued defiance.I was quite obviously wrong about this(Thanks @ymeskhout for the correction). There is a modern tendency of doing things almost in the open and then fervently denying that you did them, that Russia follows often(recently with Prigozhin's untimely demise). What I wanted to communicate is that terror bombing needs to be open, or almost open because this doctrine by necessity requires large parts or even majority of your air force to have a desired effect. . I'm interested in the process that happens before such strike as imagined by people who disagree with me. Does Russian/Ukrainian command has a secret policy of terror bombings but to keep it secret limits it to some fraction of its forces? What do they or some random rogue commander hope to gain from it? How do they justify wasting precious ammunition on targets that aren't relevant to the war effort?I don't think that on any side of the barricades there exist some human-hating berserks that can answer "blood for the blood god, skulls for the skull throne!" to all of these questions and even if they did exist we would expect them to not have any power from the evidence we see.
I generally find the idea of rules in war to be completely disingenuous and actually kind of stupid. The point of having a war is to win the war quickly. And dragging it out on the pretense of following the “rules” (in quotes because really, the rules mostly exist for propaganda purposes and only matter in the context of things that countries we don’t like are doing and creating a causus belli for stopping them or arming enemies) doesn’t really benefit civilians as much as advertised. A war that drags on for years longer than it has to because the tactics that would win it are “illegal” doesn’t actually protect civilians. They live in a bombed out country with no infrastructure, a tanked economy, and completely disrupted lives (especially if they don’t live in heavily protected green zones). The fields of Ukraine haven’t produced much since the invasion and what they have produced cannot go anywhere because of the war. They have a deep recession that makes it hard for average people to live, most industries have pulled out and anyone with brains and a passport have left for better economic prospects elsewhere and won’t be returning. Schools have been shuttered for the most part, so kids are missing out on years of school. And so what’s left of Ukraine is a basket case even if infrastructures hadn’t been targeted.
If targeting infrastructure and so on could have decided the outcome of the war in a matter of weeks or months, all of that could have been rebuilt. People could return and rebuild the economy and schools and run businesses and invented things in Ukraine rather than Poland.
The Laws of War really aren’t that detrimental to the effectiveness of modern armies in waging a conventional war. Like, at all. The Laws of War don't stop armies from rolling over their enemies with ruthless efficiency. They don't stop you from launching a surprise attack on sleeping solders, blowing their food and water supplies to kingdom come and letting them die of exposure, nor gunning them down as they flee. They didn’t stop Schwarzkopf from massacring retreating Iraqi columns with impunity, nor Thatcher from sinking an Argentine cruiser outside of the 'exclusion zone', and then leaving the surviving sailors to fend for themselves, just because she thought it was looking a bit sus. The Americans basically wrote the Laws of War, you can be sure they didn’t write them in such a way that they would intentionally hamstring themselves.
On the counter side, Japanese war crimes against both civilian population and enemy soldiers did nothing to aid them in the war. The Japanese were unable to break the morale of their enemies, their vicious tactics won them no strategic advantage, the Americans simply returned inhumanity for inhumanity, and hundreds of thousands of Allied and Japanese and Chinese soldiers and civillians died hideously and unnecessarily and to no net benefit. Meanwhile the treatment that they inflicted upon the Chinese (among others) has created an enmity that is still going strong one hundred years later. Hardly a strategic win.
Terror bombing simply doesn’t work, and that includes bombing of civilian infrastructure that the military typically doesn't need anyway. We didn't really know that in 1940 but we do now. In WW2 neither the British, nor the Japanese, nor the Germans rose up against their masters as the proponents of such bombing hoped. When bombed, civilians become outraged at their enemies. When bombed terribly, they become deeply despondent. Attacks on factories, rail hubs etc are at least somewhat effective, but of course those are all legitimate targets anyway. The only exception I can think of is the atomic bomb, and that was less about the number of people killed and more about being a demonstration of an unbeatable weapon.
You could argue that modern legal norms have made occupations more difficult, and while that is a far more defensible position (though one I would still argue), it really has nothing to do with the Laws of War. Occupations are not wars. But anyway, the enmity that the rapes of Nanking and Belgium created were not at all worth whatever trifling military advantage they bestowed, even before taking into account the propaganda wins they gave their enemies, and inevitable reactions they invoked from other nations.
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Even in war, the golden rule still applies. If you employ tactics that are against the rules of war, so will your opponents, and leaving you with no net benefit. So you end up in an even more destructive war, worse for both sides, for no gain.
Indeed, consider the use of gas in the First World War: the idea was "if we try this new hideous weapon once, we will break through the enemy, the war will be over immediately, and many fewer lives will be lost in the end". What actually happened is that the new weapon turned out less infallible than expected, the other side immediately started using it as well, and the bloodbath went on as before, with one more hideous weapon thrown in the mix. Worth noting that even Nazi Germany, not exactly well-regarded for their humaneness or reasonableness, refrained from using gases in WW2 because they were afraid of this happening again (while of course having no scruples in using them against captive civilians who could not fight back -- restraint from self-interest, not from compassion).
(Arguably, nuclear weapons might have been an exception, but in my understanding Japan was already burning and starving by that point, so they couldn't have mounted much more of a fight with or without nukes.)
Chemical weapons actually have problems of not being worth so much. Except against civilians.
Very often, maybe almost always, bringing regular artillery shells will be better use of anyones resources.
I have a Soviet book for children about artillery, published in the 30s, and back then chemical weapons were still considered useful. An example they give, let's imagine there's an enemy mortar team hiding in a grove. The grove is too big to just level with explosive shells, but we can drop some gas shells upwind from the grove to force them out.
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I was re-watching Apocalypse Now recently, one of the best movies of all time, and not least because it deals with this exact issue.
The central conflict of the movie is the opposition between the two ways of dealing with war.
One, which you and Colonel Kurtz advocate, is to face to the horror and embrace savagery in order to stop it. Kurtz has done unspeakable things, but he surmised that he had to become a monster with terrible resolve to make conflict end instead of prolonging it.
The second, is the one shown to various degrees on the way to Kurtz, of which Lt. Col. Bill Killgore is one of the iconic representatives: war must be tamed and turned into a simulacra of "back home" to preserve sanity and civilization.
While the whole journey is littered with examples of the absurdity of the latter view, where war is no longer about winning but finding a good surfing spot, where GIs aren't fighting for anything but R&R and where they are told off for writing obscenities on their machines of death; I think it would be a mistake not to notice that Kurtz's simple wisdom has rendered him entirely insane.
It does seem absurd that we could turn war into a wholly civilized affair, and attempts at doing so are inevitably crushed by ruthless Napoleons, but down the path of ruthlessness lies total war and the worst horrors humanity inflicts upon itself. If anything can be done in the name of a swift victory, anything can be done.
Hmm.
People fight wars, and sometimes they approach the war in a civilized fashion. When they do this, sometimes tame war gets them the result they're looking for: the enemy caves, they win. For a fictional example, see this speech from King Henry V:
The offer of quarter, of peaceful surrender, is an attempt to civilize war, no? And the threat of wanton rape and destruction is the recognition that the savagery is still waiting in the wings. In the play, Harfluer surrenders, and its people are spared. If they'd resisted, they would not have been so lucky.
And then sometimes, the people trying civilized war don't get what they want, and they decide it's not worth going further, and they eat the loss. I was recently listening to some analysis of the Rhodesian Bush War; the Rhodesians fought with unparalleled ferocity on a tactical level, racking up one of the highest kill ratios ever recorded, but eventually the strategic and political situations grew untenable, and they capitulated to their enemies more or less completely.
But what happens when you try civilized war, you don't get the win, and you can't accept the loss? You can try again, but what if you still don't have an acceptable resolution? ...Well, evidence suggests that you escalate. The civilization starts slipping. In the Civil War, we saw Sherman's march to the sea, which was a pretty serious escalation in savagery from what came before, in that it deliberately targeted the wealth and property of the general southern population. In WWII, we saw strategic bombing, firebombing, then nuclear bombing. Civilization is costly, and when the cost gets too high, we cut corners.
All of the above is probably obvious, but it's to point this out: are the civilized wars actually civilized, or were the combatants just lucky to get a resolution before the civilization slipped too far? I agree that Kurtz is insane. He's insane because he can't quit. Killgore and the others are trying to quit; they've personally folded out of the game, they aren't actually trying to win any more. They're fortunate to have that option.
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Under this theory wouldn’t they be ruled by Putin which is basically the same thing as not having a future?
Besides I feel like Russia tried those tactics and it only United Ukraine to fight more.
A country that is a Russian satélite hasn’t had a future of its peoples for centuries unless you some how got be a handful of oligarchs.
Losing was never an option especially since they’ve seen Poland get rich and in 20 years could be the wealthiest country in Europe. While being Ukranian under Putin means for a girl hoping to find a 50 year old American to marry on a website and for a man being a janitor in London.
Well, I’m thinking from Putin’s POV in which his side gets all of Ukraine with very little fuss, and thus has a quick win and a relatively intact territory. Or you can consider Iraq and Shock and Awe which did bring about a relatively quick end to the war itself (the occupation was different) and the deposition of Saddam Hussein as nobody wanted to fight for him.
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No, the point is to get something that you couldn’t have otherwise. The continuation of politics by other means, as it were. And just as politics isn’t limited to short-term gambits, neither is warfare.
The expected value of raping your way through the countryside is probably not worth the attention from other powers. This is by design.
The value of “raping your way through” is that 1) the population is demoralized into no longer wishing to fight, 2) the war ends quickly before the value of th3 land sinks too far, and 3). It warns off any other parties to not get involved. If Kyiv had been reduced to near rubble by the end of March, there would not be a protracted war with the resulting damage to the rest of the country. There would not be the political will to continue arming Ukraine (plus they’d have surrendered already) or to continue to poke at Russia and expand nato and so on because we’d be on notice that fucking with Russia means you no longer have a Capitol. Of course you could think about it in reverse — had nato bombed Moscow in March, we’d be done with the war and most of Ukraine would be intact and ready to join the EU.
If this strategy is so effective, why do you think Russia didn't do it?
My viewpoint is that they tried (see Mariupol, Bucha, power substation bombing, targeting railway stations with fleeing civilians, regular rape and looting being considered as acceptable) but it has not worked.
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The point of war isn’t to win quickly. The point of war is to achieve a political objective, and speed is just one factor to consider.
Would bombing civilian infrastructure, looting and raping the populace, and obliterating their people speed up a war? Possibly.
Would this also alienate your allies, impact your own people’s perception of your armed forces, leave you with psychologically damaged soldiers, and ultimately risk other countries deciding that if you’re willing to do that, you’re willing to do that to them and they should get involved more actively? Possibly.
There’s also that most people generally don’t like to think of themselves as monsters, even towards their enemies. It would be a lot faster to put death-row inmates in a pit and shoot them - the end result is the same - but we don’t do that because of how it makes us as the killers feel.
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Not really? Lets ignore any ethical benefits here.
Having a rule "our soldiers are supposed to not loot, rape and murder", with an actual enforcement is a very useful tool. It makes more likely that population will not hate you. Partisans are inconvenient at best.
If you treat PoW decently, then it makes more likely that enemy soldiers will surrender.
"target military targets, not civilian ones" is useful coordination method for winning war and not wasting ammo. Can be also useful as propaganda tool.
"no chemical warfare" is useful rule, because chemical weaponry is not so useful. Unless you target civilians.
Preferring to use mines with lower ratio of problems after war is also quite good idea.
Terror bombings are extremely ineffective strategy anyway.
(though total bans on mines, cluster munitions and so on are stupid)
If you're going to reason this way, then if someone comes up with circumstances where it's effective, you should then favor it. In fact, you should admit this ahead of time. "I normally oppose loot, rape, and murder, and targeting civilians, because it isn't effective. But if it was effective, I would then approve of it." For instance, dropping atom bombs on Japan is often criticized as targeting civilians, but I'd argue that it was very effective.
The claim was that "I generally find the idea of rules in war to be completely disingenuous and actually kind of stupid."
My claim is that having rules is for many cases is outright effective coordination mechanism.
And overall having actually enforced rules in war, even if other side is not doing this, an effective tool.
not really sure about this one I admit, but I was not claiming that all rules ever proposed were a good idea (and explicitly mentioned cluster munition and mines bans as silly)
But note how occupation was handled by USA and USSR. Outcome is that when opportunity appeared nearly all countries which were occupied by USSR in Eastern/Central Europe started to help Ukraine to keep Russia as far as possible. While Germany grumbles a bit about USA but has no deep revulsion (and in fact, hosts USA bases).
Note that I would take ethical issues into consideration. But wanted to start from establishing that noticeable part of such rules is even improving war efficiency, not degrading it.
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