CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

This might be seen as the fulfilment of what Fuller presciently termed the ‘hidden
impulse in the technological epoch of war’, namely ‘the elimination of the human
element both physically and morally ...’. 88 He points to the advent of nuclear weapons
as confirmation of an argument he had made (his manuscript was completed but
unpublished when the first bombs were detonated) and warns of the dangers of man’s
own inventiveness: ‘From out of the first flint axe and bended bow has at length
emerged a Frankenstein monster – the inventiveness of today – that is destroying man’s
own work, his own culture, his own civilization, his past, his present and his future.’ 89
Already war has very nearly become a thing in itself – that is, an activity
divorced from the very idea of peace – with destruction as its sole aim. Today
this is becoming more and more apparent, because every type of atrocity is
excused on military grounds, as if military reasons were the sole, let alone the
highest values in war. ... ....
It is in this appalling dissolution of morality that armaments have played so great
a part. Though man fashions them, it is they which endow him with the power
to destroy, and to-day it is they which have got their maker by the throat. 90
As a final example of this tendency towards allowing technology to remove moral
agency from the battlefield, we can consider the United States Army’s current major
weapons procurement programme, Future Combat Systems (FCS), described as ‘the
Army’s modernization program consisting of a family of manned and unmanned
systems, connected by a common network, that enables the modular force, providing
our soldiers and leaders with leading-edge technologies and capabilities allowing them
to dominate in complex environments.’ 91 A combination of communications,
computers, intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance systems is intended to
‘synergistically interact enabling the Future Force to see first, understand first, act first
and finish decisively.’ 92 At the heart of the concept is a belief that smaller, more agile
forces can be achieved by relying on superior intelligence, coupled with greater stand-
off distance to provide the protection once only possible through heavy, and strategic
mobility-limiting armour. The risk is that if the promised superiority in intelligence is
not delivered, or lacks sufficient granularity, protection will in fact be achieved by
abandoning both proportionality and discrimination. All recent experience of complex
non-linear battlefields would point to just this.
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