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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.
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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