Military Ethics and Strategy

[autisticdragonkin]

Here is a thread for the discussion of what an army can and should do in order to defeat an opponent. Whether there is such a thing as a war crime and if so what are they.
I made it to avoid derailing the Brussels bombing thread

Seeing as how there was so much off topic discussion of military brutality going on in this thread I made a new thread to discuss it
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/military-ethics.18640/

 

[Ponderous Pillock]

X-posted:

Sadly I can name several opposition groups:

Al-Nusra, Hezbollah, Rojava and Fatah Halab (the latter is 'merging' into the Syrian National Council alongside the FSA and Islamic Front) and these three are "the big three" when you factor out Rojava, which wants a similar deal to Iraqi Kurdistan.

I think we may see a softening of the Iranian Kurdish position simply due to how pragmatic the Iranians can be when they sense an opportunity.

The Iranians are currently in the opening salvo of a proxy war with primarily Saudi Arabia, but they have half an eye on how Turkey has been behaving. Under Erdogan the I.S has found an easy route into their own territory and a market to sell black market oil at far below the market price. This trade hasn't stopped entirely in spite of airstrikes and Erdogan swearing up and down the Turkish-Syrian border is secure.

Erdogan is a neo-Ottoman and seems to be waiting for the right time (largely when the Kurds tire themselves out, or wound I.S ennough) for him to send troops over the border. The sheer amount of armour and personnel carriers sent down in recent weeks (complete with extensive launching off points being constructed) points to this.

I actually see a Kurdish state of some description as an inevitability by this point, and the West should be prepared to usher in a new state and help it become stable by hurling as much investment as possible at it.

A more sensible Turkish leadership would argue that the Kurdish homeland would be Rojava and Iraqi Kurdistan (Kurdish Republic), they could do a deal with the government there and thus send all the pesky Kurds south and out of Turkey. Kurdistan replaces lost people with kurds and sees a boost to its economy, Turkey solves a long term political issue.

Highly optimistic, but a workable solution.

We were actually winning the Vietnam war and would have conquered the North. We "lost" Vietnam because of propaganda and lies on the home front, not because of what was actually happening there.

Now, I met a very nice man once. He was an elderly gent and had a lovely Mexican wife and had indeed retired to North Western Mexico (Baja) for the climate. In spite of the fact I was by far his junior he called me Sir, a quirk I found amusing.

He was what they called a "Liquidator" which I am sure sent a bit of a shudder through the older folks on this board, but for those not in the know, his job was to hunt down and destroy Vietcong cells, disarm their traps, and defend various FOBs and positions as and when required. You had to have a certain... resolve to be a liquidator and doubly so to come out of it alive.

Unlike the sterotypical vet he was happy to talk about his own harrowing experience. I asked him why he felt they lost the war, in spite of the fact that, on paper, they always won their skirmishes against the Vietcong and larger battles against the NVA. He said four things:

Loss of Men
Loss of Equipment
Loss of Resolve
Loss of Morale

It also didn't help that the South Vietnamese were all corrupt as anything, ran at the first sign of trouble, or were themselves Vietcong. The US might have been winning the war in the physical battles, but they sure as hell were losing the wider psychological war on their own men and their allies.

 

[autisticdragonkin]

Now, I met a very nice man once. He was an elderly gent and had a lovely Mexican wife and had indeed retired to North Western Mexico (Baja) for the climate. In spite of the fact I was by far his junior he called me Sir, a quirk I found amusing.

He was what they called a "Liquidator" which I am sure sent a bit of a shudder through the older folks on this board, but for those not in the know, his job was to hunt down and destroy Vietcong cells, disarm their traps, and defend various FOBs and positions as and when required. You had to have a certain... resolve to be a liquidator and doubly so to come out of it alive.

Unlike the sterotypical vet he was happy to talk about his own harrowing experience. I asked him why he felt they lost the war, in spite of the fact that, on paper, they always won their skirmishes against the Vietcong and larger battles against the NVA. He said four things:

Loss of Men
Loss of Equipment
Loss of Resolve
Loss of Morale

It also didn't help that the South Vietnamese were all corrupt as anything, ran at the first sign of trouble, or were themselves Vietcong. The US might have been winning the war in the physical battles, but they sure as hell were losing the wider psychological war on their own men and their allies.

I think what some people like @Internet War Criminal mean when they say that the united states was winning is that the united states could have defeated North Vietnam if they didn't hold back at all. If the united states did a full out invasion of north Vietnam potentially using WMDs then they probably could have "won" the war. That is not the same as a Weimaresque stab in the back as the united states would have gained nothing from doing that and made a lot of enemies, probably making the USSR and China closer and thus more dangerous enemies.

The west is doing the same thing against ISIS. If they wanted they could just use WMDs to kill every ISIS soldier in under 24 hours. There is less of an obvious practical problem with it as ISIS is currently the enemy of all world powers but unless every nuclear power contributed a nuke together it would still greatly harm the reputation of whoever actually takes these measures. In addition the benefit of such measures is still quite questionable as it likely wouldn't stop islamic terrorism

 

[AnOminous]

Here is a thread for the discussion of what an army can and should do in order to defeat an opponent. Whether there is such a thing as a war crime and if so what are they.
I made it to avoid derailing the Brussels bombing thread

This bullshit is why you got a shallow thoughts ban in the first place.

An army does whatever it can to win, period. That's their only ethics.

 

[autisticdragonkin]

This bullshit is why you got a shallow thoughts ban in the first place.

An army does whatever it can to win, period. That's their only ethics.

Just doing what is necessary to win is a form of ethics (ethical egoism or virtue ethics)

 

[AnOminous]

Just doing what is necessary to win is a form of ethics (ethical egoism or virtue ethics)

I repeat that bullshit like this is what got you that ban.

 

[Zoobles]

This bullshit is why you got a shallow thoughts ban in the first place.

An army does whatever it can to win, period. That's their only ethics.

There are a million laws of war created through international treaties, and there are rules of engagement enforced by individual militaries for their own troops. To say that "an army does whatever it can to win" is completely inaccurate. There are soldiers imprisoned at Leavenworth for war crimes, and countries that have received international sanctions for illegal military activities like DPRK and Iran.

 

[AnOminous]

There are a million laws of war created through international treaties, and there are rules of engagement enforced by individual militaries for their own troops. To say that "an army does whatever it can to win" is completely inaccurate. There are soldiers imprisoned at Leavenworth for war crimes, and countries that have received international sanctions for illegal military activities like DPRK and Iran.

They're there for violations of the USMC, which is domestic law.

Some of this conduct may have arguably constituted "war crimes" but no Americans are prosecuted by the International Criminal Court under customary international law for such things. It is vanishingly unlikely that any Americans would, in fact, be subjected to such international jurisdiction considering that we have withdrawn from the body and no longer recognize its jurisdiction.

Simply because conduct undertaken during a war is a crime of some sort also doesn't make it a "war crime" necessarily, a term which proscribes a narrow range of conduct well outside normal conduct.

Any nation which feels its existence is at risk is going to do whatever is within its power to stop that, and deal with the consequences later.

 

[autisticdragonkin]

They're there for violations of the USMC, which is domestic law.

Some of this conduct may have arguably constituted "war crimes" but no Americans are prosecuted by the International Criminal Court under customary international law for such things. It is vanishingly unlikely that any Americans would, in fact, be subjected to such international jurisdiction considering that we have withdrawn from the body and no longer recognize its jurisdiction.

Simply because conduct undertaken during a war is a crime of some sort also doesn't make it a "war crime" necessarily, a term which proscribes a narrow range of conduct well outside normal conduct.

Any nation which feels its existence is at risk is going to do whatever is within its power to stop that, and deal with the consequences later.

But there are some cases in which treaties against performing certain actions can benefit both sides in a war (for example banning chemical weapons)

 

[The Knife's Husbando]

As I've said before, the only difference between a "War hero" and a "War criminal" is which end of the bayonets your family is on.

 

[AnOminous]

But there are some cases in which treaties against performing certain actions can benefit both sides in a war (for example banning chemical weapons)

Both sides in most conflicts actually agree with these, which is why things like the Geneva Convention against certain weapons actually "work."

It is often noted that the Nazis (specifically IG Farben) invented, for instance, sarin nerve gas.

It is not from some squeamish morality, though, that the Nazis failed to use sarin and other nerve agents they had invented, against Allied personnel. They simply feared, pragmatically, that the use of such agents would provoke retaliation in kind and, indeed, the Allied powers had similarly awful nerve agents in store if it came to that.

It would not increase their chance of victory to use such agents.

As terrible as nerve agents are specifically, and chemical weapons in general are, they're very limited in utility for military uses. They're mainly area denial weapons. You can keep someone out of an area by deploying things that make an environment lethal. You also keep yourself out of the same area. Even with environmental protection suits and the like, most of these things are so lethal that even incidental contact results in nearly immediate death.

They're also good for massacring large amounts of civilians in a contained area of some kind.

This is why these kinds of agents have not been used, generally, for military purposes.

The main use of sarin in modern times was by an obscure Japanese cult, known as Aum Shinrikyo, which used it for insane reasons when it launched a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system. These movie-villain-level maniacs also had produced a fair amount of VX, ebola, other shit like that, had even sought to buy stolen nuclear weapons in Russia, and murdered a lot of their critics, and been ignored and allowed to get away with this by buffoonish Japanese police.

In any event, part of why rules like the Geneva Convention actually "work" in terms of being agreed to by all sane parties to military conflicts, is that using nerve agents does not appreciably increase the chances of military success, but it vastly increases the penalties for losing.

Back to my original overbroad statement about the only real military ethics being winning. Because once you win, you decide what the ethics are.

As I've said before, the only difference between a "War hero" and a "War criminal" is which end of the bayonets your family is on.

I'm going to disagree with this, with two examples.

The Nazis specifically and the Axis in general are considered (rightly) two of the vilest powers ever to wage war.

However, the general opinion of Nazi general Erwin Rommel is that he was an honorable man.

Similarly, Admiral Yamamoto is widely admired for his personal integrity and skill.

(As everyone knows, Rommel was allowed to commit suicide after plotting to kill Hitler because Hitler feared the consequences of branding such a well regarded general a traitor, and of course, we assassinated Yamamoto to increase our chance of victory.)