CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

In common with many colleagues the author personally wrote ‘final’ letters (though
hardly as eloquently as Ballou’s) to his wife and unborn child shortly before
commencement of the land campaign in the first Gulf War, 1991. The difficulty of
writing such a letter was greatly reduced by a firm and unwavering view that what was
about to be done was necessary, justified and honourable.
For many soldiers the 2003 Gulf War was far more problematic. The case for
justification having been unconvincingly made, many felt a much greater reluctance to
risk their lives and their families’ happiness. 264 Similarly the families of casualties were
much less accepting of the losses they had suffered because they did not accept that
their loss had occurred in a justified conflict. After the death of three Black Watch
soldiers in Iraq in November 2004, the brother of one of them, Pte Lowe, said his
brother had loved his job but neither he nor his family understood why the British Army
was in Iraq, making his brother’s death much harder to accept. 265 (See also p132). A
reluctance to accept casualties is an effect of lack of justification for conflict which
operates, then, at all three levels, international, national and individual, but particularly
at the latter two.
Nor is it necessarily confined to acceptance of ‘friendly’ casualties; a lack of
justification for the conflict might also lead soldiers individually (as well as nations
collectively) to a greater reluctance to inflict casualties both on the enemy and on the
inevitable neutrals. In the summer of 2004, 1 st Battalion The Princess of Wales’s Royal
Regiment (1PWRR) had a particularly eventful tour in Southern Iraq, in the area of Al
Amarah. During their six month tour of duty they fired more rounds than any British
Battalion had done since the Korean War. Every soldier had been involved in a
‘contact’, most believed they had inflicted casualties and one soldier believed that his
section had killed no fewer than 36 insurgents. All soldiers in the battalion were
immensely proud of the unit’s record and conduct; they were performing well and had
great confidence in themselves. * Yet there were the beginnings of doubt in the
operational end state. 266 The mission, primarily related to the keeping open of a CIMIC
* The Battalion won both a Victoria Cross and two Distinguished Service Orders during the tour, in
addition to two Conspicuous Gallantry Crosses and a staggering eight Military Crosses.
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