CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

whose average weight has continually fallen at the same time that firing
frequency has increased. They have also been shrinking in size, so that many
look as though they were specially designed for children rather than adults. 19
This adds to the third issue to fall from the NATO analysis: the emergence of non-state
actors as significant potential adversaries, which will in turn throw up a range of ethical
questions both in terms of how, and against whom/what, we respond militarily and how
we can expect hostilities to be conducted.
A further issue related to technology, not considered in the NATO analysis but of great
relevance to this thesis, is the degree to which for Western nations there has been a
growth of weapons technology that places distance between the operator and the
intended victim. This is an asymmetry in warfare that has always been sought and
today hands this particular advantage to modern sophisticated military forces – in
essence those of the Western industrialized nations. However, not only has this forced
potential adversaries to seek asymmetries of their own, but it also raises issues of jus in
bello: there is a danger, that in attempting to place the soldier/sailor/airman out of
harm’s way we at the same time relegate him to the status of technician – no longer
party to a warrior code – and remove his ability to act as moral agent on the battlefield.
This issue will be considered in detail in Chapter 4.
Accepting that the ‘new wars’ postulated by Kaldor 20 and others is an incomplete
picture and that such a model for conflict might better be regarded as having augmented
rather than supplanted the traditional model, there is nevertheless a clear need to
examine the character of these ‘new wars’. A failing in most of the literature on the so-
called Revolution in Military Affairs is that it has sought to address technological
change in isolation from socio-political; it addresses the effect of technological
development only in terms of traditional warfare, failing to consider the impact of new
wars. Thus it has led, on the part of some, to a potentially false assumption about the
West’s (and particularly the US’s) superiority in weapons and information technology
leading inevitably to military supremacy. The concept of New World Order –
intervention by a militarily invincible West in the name of democracy and universal
human rights – is predicated on this as much as it is on major power consensus. The
reality – a far more wide-ranging paradigm-shift in the nature of conflict – has rendered
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