CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

CHAPTER 3: FUTURE CONFLICT AND ISSUES OF JUS AD
BELLUM
3.1 Introductory Comments
The foregoing chapters have sought to make the case that a requirement remains both
for moral justification for the occasion of the use of armed force and moral restraint in
the nature of its use. The remainder of this thesis will now consider the challenges
presented by contemporary conflict in order to assess the suitability of the just war
doctrine for providing that moral framework. An attempt will first be made to outline
the principal characteristics of contemporary and near-future warfare. The implications
of these for the just war doctrine will then be considered. Issues of jus ad bellum will
be examined first, followed by those of jus in bello. However, it is recognised that in
reality rarely can the two be so simply separated; conduct of a war often impacts on its
legitimacy.
3.2 Future War
Predicting the nature of future conflict is likely to hold as many pitfalls for the ethicist
as it so often has for the strategist. In 1999 James Turner Johnson characterised
contemporary warfare as taking
the form of local conflicts, more often than not civil wars, in which no great
alliances of nations are involved; these have been wars fought for reasons based
in local rivalries, typically inflamed by historical animosities, ethnic disparity, or
religious difference, rather than for reasons of global realpolitik; they have been
fought not with nuclear weapons (or, indeed, other types of weapons of massdestructive
capability) or the latest in military technology, but instead with
conventional weaponry, often of old design, and often limited to the rifles,
knives, grenades, and light, crew-served weapons which individual soldiers can
carry on their persons. A further feature of empirical contemporary warfare is
that it involves face-to-face uses of military power by the participants against
one another, not the remote destruction of distant, unseen, and often abstract
targets. 1
Whilst this is a fair description of the majority of conflicts of the last decade of the
Twentieth Century, looking back from just halfway through the first decade of the new
millennium this looks woefully incomplete. Similarly, Mary Kaldor argues that ‘(t)he
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