CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

immediate objective is the destruction of the latter’s overall military power ….’ 171 Pre-
emptive attack is characterised as one in which the enemy has ‘already set in motion’ its
own attack but that attack is not yet ‘consummated’ or, indeed, ‘well underway.’ 172
These distinctions are good enough for our purpose.
Historically there has not until recently been any great stay on preventive war. It can be
reasonably argued that until the beginning of the Twentieth Century preventive war was
the norm, entered into in order to preserve, or alter in the aggressor’s favour, the so-
called ‘balance of power.’ They were wars that anticipated a rival’s future capacity as
much as his future intent and sought engagement on the most favourable terms, largely
predicated on an assumption that engagement was, in any case, at some stage inevitable.
The Balkan Wars of the late Nineteenth/early Twentieth Century and, indeed, the First
World War all stand as examples. Because of Russia’s alliance with France, Germany
had to assume that any war with one would lead to war with the other; she would have
to fight on two fronts. Her answer to this (the Schlieffen Plan), based on Russia’s
predicted slower mobilisation, was a decisive attack on France (through Holland in the
original but altered by von Moltke the Younger to be through Belgium). With France
defeated the German army would be transferred to the East by railway. The timing left
little margin for error or hesitation and, effectively, meant that any mobilisation by
Russia, Germany or France must inevitably result in war. 173 Moreover, Germany in
1914 was keen that war with Russia should be fought before the military balance tilted
further in the favour of the entente powers – particularly with the completion of
strategic rail links between the Russian interior and the German frontier. Similarly,
Austria-Hungary’s determination to use Franz-Ferdinand’s assassination as the pretext
for war with Serbia can be seen as an example of preventive war. 174
In the context of international relations in which raison d’etat was the guiding ethic, and
one in which it might reasonably be argued that the costs of war, even for the loser,
were marginal, 175 preventive war made sense. The wholesale destruction of the First
World War changed that leading, inter alia, to the creation of the League of Nations and
a growing conviction that only self-defence could justify resort to force; a concept that
reaches its epitome in the Charter of the United Nations. The advent of nuclear weapons
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