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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.
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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