CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

….. strategies calling for use of overwhelming and decisive force can raise issues
of proportionality and discrimination. Strategies and tactics that lead to avoidable
casualties are inconsistent with the underlying intention of the just-war tradition of
limiting the destructiveness of armed conflict. Efforts to reduce the risk to a nation's
own forces must be limited by careful judgments of military necessity so as not to
neglect the rights of civilians and armed adversaries.
In light of the preeminent place of air power in today's military doctrine, more
reflection is needed on how traditional ethical restraints should be applied to the use
of air forces. For example, the targeting of civilian infrastructure, which afflicts
ordinary citizens long after hostilities have ceased, can amount to making war on
noncombatants rather than against opposing armies. Fifty years after Coventry,
Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ways must be found to apply
standards of proportionality and noncombatant immunity in a meaningful way to air
warfare. 81
The use of air power against, primarily, the Serbs in the Bosnian conflict and again over
Kosovo, proved to be in many ways just what the Bishops feared. In 1995 and again in
1999, NATO air power was used coercively in order to avoid exposure of ground
troops. James Der Derian neatly summarises both the political attraction and the moral
danger of the west’s waging war by leveraging its technological advantage:
(The United States’) diplomatic and military policies are increasingly based on
technological and representational forms of discipline, deterrence, and
compellence that could best be described as virtuous war. At the heart of
virtuous war is the technical capability and ethical imperative to threaten and, if
necessary, actualize violence from a distance – with no or minimal casualties.
…..virtuous wars promote a vision of bloodless, humanitarian, hygienic wars.
We can rattle off casualty rates of prototypical virtuous conflicts like the Gulf
war (270 Americans lost their lives – more than half through accidents), the
Mogadishu raid (18 Americans killed), and the Kosovo air campaign (barring
accidents, a remarkable zero casualty conflict for the NATO forces). Yet, in
spite of valorous efforts by human rights organizations, most people would
probably come up short on acceptable figures for the other side of the casualty
list. Post-Vietnam, the United States has made many digital advances; public
body counts of the enemy are not one of them. 82 (original emphasis).
To Der Derian’s concern over the enemy body-count must be added a rather greater
concern over the civilian casualties, largely avoided by the desert-focussed nature of the
1991 Gulf war * but insufficiently so in the Kosovo air campaign and a matter for serious
* Even then there were high-profile incidents of attacks on military/governmental infrastructure that the
Iraqis claimed had inflicted significant civilian casualties.
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