CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

of double effect is of dubious value; negative publicity and international condemnation,
which the asymmetric opponent actively seeks to bring upon us, must inevitably
undermine the regular’s will. The West’s future thinking about war, its doctrine, its
tactics and the preparation of its people will have to take account of this issue.
4.5 Summary
As with issues of jus ad bellum, the last one hundred or so years have seen an increasing
codification of issues once the realm of moral judgement and matters of honour and
professional conduct. The just war requirements of proportionality and discrimination,
and the concepts embedded in chivalric codes, have been subsumed into a substantial
body of IHL. More recently still a new area of international law – human rights law –
has also started to impact on military conduct, though it has been argued here that this
has had rather less substantial impact than many politicians and media commentators
have claimed. What has become clear, however, is that the increasingly complex
character of contemporary conflict, with traditional boundaries and distinctions blurred
either by circumstance or through deliberate intent of some of the protagonists, is rather
less amenable to clear cut legislation than has been warfare in the past. IHL/LOAC,
human rights law, the laws of occupation, or the domestic law of a soldier’s own nation
or the nation in which he finds himself operating, may all make demands of his conduct
at different times or even concurrently. The principal conclusion to be drawn from the
arguments of this chapter is that a soldier instinctively versed in sound moral principles
offered by just war doctrine, will be better able to make the ‘good faith’ judgements that
would stand him safe with any reasonable jury.
Although much of the focus of contemporary debate about conduct in war has been with
the trends imposed by the preferred ways of the west’s potential enemies, this chapter
has argued that the west’s preferred way of making war, also poses challenges for jus in
bello. The value of the term ‘asymmetric’ has been questioned throughout this chapter,
though its entry into both common parlance and the expert lexicon is recognised.
Nevertheless, the asymmetries sought by the Western way of warfare must also be
considered. The democratic peace thesis can be understood as an extrapolation of the
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