CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

The US assault on Fallujah received a uniformly bad press in Europe. What was
drowned out in the torrent of abuse was the abundant evidence (credible to this
potential critic) found of the presence of ‘foreign fighters’, the use of mosques
for the storage of weapons, ammunition and explosives, the torture and murder
of hostages .... 116
Regular forces that are the targets of irregulars – terrorists, guerrillas or partisans – then
face the moral difficulty of distinguishing friend – or more likely neutral – from foe.
There is also the simple fact that in this form of warfare the military are brought into
greater contact with non-combatants – ‘enemy’, neutral, friend, or most likely a mixture
of all three – than they are in conventional conflict. This may be one reason why we
find more numerous incidents of alleged mistreatment. It was an attempt to remove this
civilian ‘terrain’ from the equation that led to Britain’s misguided – and ultimately
disastrously inhumane – introduction of ‘concentration’ camps in the Boer War. In
fact, proper engagement with the civilian population is a key activity in countering
asymmetric warfare.
Furthermore, the lack of distinction between acts of war and acts of crime means that
military forces find themselves not only engaged in traditional and non-traditional
combat operations but needing, too, to deal with organised crime, drug production and
transportation, and human-trafficking. The nature of contemporary security challenges,
much wider than traditional defence issues, will result in a need ‘to collaborate not only
with forces from other countries but also with civilian, non-governmental relief
providers.’ 117 Much of this is new territory for military forces and beyond their
traditional training and moral mind-set.
The omnipresent nature of the media adds further to this dimension. The ability of non-
state actors to influence the decision-making process in democratic states, particularly,
through media impact on public opinion, plays a key role in the development of
asymmetric warfare. The so-called ‘Mogadishu-effect’ after the US withdrawal from
Somalia following the very public and brutal killing of eighteen US soldiers in 1993 118
is a glaring example of the West’s potential vulnerability to this. Instead of traditional
war reporting we have a reporting war 119 which provokes and promotes the use of media
events such as hostage-taking and highly stage-managed executions such as those seen
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