CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

had been over Bosnia not so much to a hardening of political will as to a belief that new
weaponry reduced the political cost or war:
The accuracy of new airborne weapons systems lowered – or appeared to lower
– the political costs of using them. Clinton went to war, believing that new
technology would bring speedy, risk-free victory. At the beginning of his
Presidency, Tomahawk missiles could take out discrete buildings. By April
1999, the missiles were sufficiently precise to strike the Serbian leader’s very
bedroom. Such weaponry appeared to offer America guilt-free war. That was
the theory: in practice, there are never any silver bullets. Targets were missed
and innocent civilians were killed, and even when they hit the targets, the
weapons didn’t finish the job. 76
On the jus in bello side, and very much connected to the first point, we have to consider
the risk transfer that our technological advantage achieves: not just from us to the
enemy but also to the civilian population. In complex emergencies involving non-state
entities as principal protagonists, and in humanitarian interventions fought to protect an
element of a civil population from oppression or violence at the hands of a legitimate or
de facto government, the term ‘enemy non-combatants’ is meaningless. In such
circumstances the doctrine of double effect is of doubtful legitimacy and issues of
proportionality and discrimination must be subject to greater scrutiny. Yet a
combination of technological capability and risk aversion tempt us into tactics that
seriously call into question our jus in bello.
Next we must consider whether our technological advantage, coupled with doctrines of
‘overwhelming superiority’ (see p199) may have reached a stage whereby we can inflict
slaughter rather than engage in combat. Exacerbating this issue is the tendency for
technological capability to remove man from the decision making cycle and in doing so
extract from the battlefield the moral agent and with him the capacity for compassion.
4.2.2.1 Risk Transference
The technological developments represented in airpower (both manned and unmanned),
in particular, provide a seminal example of Fuller’s ‘universal tactical constant’ and
push risk transference as far as it has yet been achieved. Both its destructive power and
272