CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

least sophisticated, least-trained and (the key point here) youngest of would be killers.
Wars in Africa, especially, have been marked by the massive rise in deliberate use of
child soldiers 159 . As William Shawcross notes:
In countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone, UNHCR and other agencies had to
deal with crises in which state structures had unravelled and violence had
become an end in itself, profiting warlords and their factions …. The nefarious
proliferation of cheap small arms since the end of the Cold War had vastly
worsened the problem and spread violence to children. “For many children
today,” said Ogata (senior UN official), “thou shalt not kill is no longer the
norm; it is not even a pious wish.” 160
Aside from the obvious immorality of this in itself, the challenges it poses to regular
soldiers confronted by armed children are clear. Major James Coote describes the
impact of seeing one of his soldiers severely injured in Iraq by a petrol bomb thrown by
a child of around eight years old:
We had been stoned by kids before, seen the gunmen using women and children
as human shields and as carriers to take weapons across the street from one fire
position to another, in themselves cowardly acts, but this was the first time
someone had sent a child to physically attack us. It was extremely difficult for
me to calm myself and the company down, particularly as one or two of the
younger lads were understandably traumatized by the experience. 161
Trooper Ken Boon recalled his inability to fire at an attacking child: ‘…. a young lad in
his early teens threw a grenade at me, I could have shot him easily but instead I took
cover because I can’t kill a child that had probably been told to throw it.’ 162
Commendable though his humanity may have been, it could also have cost him and his
colleagues their lives.
It is not, of course, entirely new for children to have a role in warfare: medieval knights
were served by pages and esquires undergoing their own introduction to the manly
world of warfare; the ships of Nelson’s navy included boys in their complement; and
drummer boys were an established part of most European Armies of the 18 th and 19 th
Centuries. Youngsters significantly below conscription age managed to join up in the
First World War and the Hitler Jugend was armed towards the end of the Second. But
these youngsters have either played a peripheral and ancillary role – spared actual
combat, and their deliberate targeting frowned upon – or they have been an occasional
oddity (the Virginia Military Institute cadets at Newmarket or the boys of the military
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