CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

ceding initiative to the enemy. Western strategy since the Second World War, then,
whether in its response to the Cold War threat – Massive Retaliation – or in more recent
wars of intervention, has tended to favour the third option. This has important
implications for jus in bello.
The relevant trends in the West’s preferred way of using force are, then, largely driven
by risk and casualty (and perhaps cost) aversion. This has led to a reliance on
technology – taking to the logical conclusion a strand of progress that has existed
throughout the history of warfare: the development of weapons whose range
(predominantly) allows you to engage your enemy before he is able to engage you. For,
as JFC Fuller wrote as long ago as 1941, discerning it as a ‘constant tactical factor’:
‘Every improvement in weapon power, means of movement and protection has aimed at
lessening terror and danger on one the side by increasing them on the other.’ 11 Today,
this reliance on technology has brought with it a tendency to try to remove to the
greatest extent possible our own soldiers from the battlefield. In doing so it also
removes from the battlefield the moral agent; the arbiter of proper and improper
conduct; the only agent for compassion and humanity.
A further, unintended, consequence of the drive to ‘sanitise’ war, is that it may have
made war more likely. If democracies are, as the Democratic Peace theory supposes,
averse to war because of its cost, then as its costs reduce then they may be more inclined
to use it as an instrument of policy. In other words the (all too often illusory) concept of
‘clean’ war, may make it an altogether more palatable policy option for Western
politicians. For example, Michael Byers argues that:
(A)fter decades of massive defence spending, the United States is assured of
victory in any war it chooses to fight. High-tech weaponry has reduced the
dangers to US personnel, making it easier to sell to domestic constituencies. As
a result, some US politicians had begun – at least until the quagmire in Iraq – to
view armed conflict as an attractive foreign policy option in times of domestic
scandal or economic decline, rather than the high-risk recourse of last resort.
This change in thinking has led to a more cavalier approach to the jus ad bellum,
as exemplified by the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive self-defence, and is
beginning to have a similar effect on the jus in bello. 12
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