This sounds real good, and I’m for it, but…Ken wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 8:46 pm Militaries shouldn't be killing anyone gratuitously. They should be engaging in military operations (war) in the manner that results in the least loss of life and destruction on both sides while achieving the military objective. Killing soldiers sometimes has a place in that calculation if that is what is necessary to achieve the military objective. Sometimes it doesn't (for example killing prisoners). But killing civilians has no place in war.
In reality, why shouldn’t and don’t armies kill civilians like they did in the Old Testament times? I propose that the biggest reason for militaries not to do it, is not simple ethics, but instead that it is bad strategy, ineffective use of resources.
This is why the ethics get quickly swept away by every nation when the calculation for winning changes. Rules of war are subservient to winning.
Killing civilians unfortunately does have a place in every war. Why would we pretend that isn’t the case? It is usually called collateral damage, i.e., the bombs dropped, the mussels fired, the bullets shot, were done so because there was a calculation made that the target was important enough to destroy that civilian deaths didn’t matter enough. And in the cases mentioned of Dresden, Hiroshima, civilian deaths mattered even less.
The US and probably every nation, values their soldiers lives higher than the enemies civilian lives. Remember why the atomic bombs were dropped? The US was already winning the war at that point. But the US didn’t want to lose the soldiers it would take to storm Japan proper. In other words, the US decided Japanese civilian lives lost didn’t matter as much as losing American soldier lives.
There are thousands of Americans who would immediately kill enemy civilians if the stakes were high enough. And that is my point. Soldiers who are shooting and killing people are already so very morally compromised, that killing a civilian is a terribly small step. This is why soldiers are known to rape, plunder, kidnap, etc. throughout the earth and back through history. Their conscience is seared.