CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

The first was the partial nonsense of an alleged American aversion to casualties.
The second was the myth that we had entered an era of post-heroic warfare. A
greater sensitivity to American history, as well as some empirical research on
attitudes, past and present, should have promptly shot these myths down in
flames. American society has always been casualty-averse when either it does
not care about the issues in dispute or it realizes that Washington is not seriously
seeking decisive victory. 26
The key phrase is ‘discretionary conflicts’ – those conflicts entered into, usually from a
sense of moral obligation, in order to effect humanitarian aims, rather than out of the
necessity to defend vital national interests. This would accord with the TISS findings
and is also supported by growing US public disillusionment with the conflict in Iraq as
casualties grow and the linkage with US national security, so played-upon by the Bush
Administration in 2003, is increasingly difficult for the US public to perceive. A
Washington Post/ABC News poll in mid-2005 found 75% of respondents thought the
casualties unacceptable and 60% believed the war not worth fighting. 27 In fact such
disillusionment began to set-in very quickly after the end of the war proper (President
Bush’s ‘Decisive Combat Operations’), as the prospect of reaching a quick satisfactory
conclusion receded and that of a protracted counter-insurgency campaign increased. 28
Rising casualties, a lack of obvious progress and a growing feeling that US interest was
no longer being served by involvement in Iraq, made the conflict an election issue for
the US, being a key factor in the Republicans’ loss of control of both the Senate and the
House of Representatives in the 2006 mid-term elections. 29
General Sir Rupert Smith also, in his analysis of the developing characteristics of
contemporary conflict 30 , identifies trends which help explain this aspect of the Western
approach to war. Of the six inter-related trends that Smith articulates, two are especially
relevant here: firstly, because in modern conflict the result is not determined decisively
by force of arms, such conflicts are generally unbounded by time – rather they have the
capacity to be enduring; secondly – and closely related – protecting the force has taken
on a much greater importance than it had in industrial-age warfare. Western nations
have (nearly all) abandoned conscription and it is difficult to see how they could ever
return to it except in circumstances of (publicly recognised) gravest emergency.
Western inventories of key capital equipment such as warships, military aircraft, tanks
and armoured vehicles are at an all-time low and the industrial capacity for producing
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