CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

aversion of Western democracies to fighting ‘symmetric’ wars; the extreme costs – in
money and lives – of a major conflict between broadly equally matched powers had
been all too fully demonstrated by the First World War. The driving force has been to
seek war on terms that minimise risk and cost. This has had particular impact both on
the occasion and conduct of interventions and has led to a reliance on technology,
through which has been sought a significantly advantageous asymmetry.
Risk aversion can limit willingness to intervene or restrict intervention to non-military
and often non-decisive means; it can promote a perception of selective intervention that
undermines claims to moral universality; it can lead to conduct that transfers risk to the
population at large – often those whose ‘rescue’ is providing the jus ad bellum for the
intervention in the first place; and it can result in an inadequate commitment of
manpower that in turn impacts on the conduct of operations.
The desire to minimise both cost and the risk of casualties to ones own side, is an
entirely natural, laudable and morally sound one. However, just war limits this with a
requirement that the risk transferred to non-combatants be proportionate to the military
objective sought (the so-called doctrine of double effect). In humanitarian intervention
operations, when rescue of the civilian populations, or a section of it, is the basis of the
jus ad bellum a different mindset is required, more akin to that of the policeman than
that of the conventional warrior. Moreover, the concept of ‘enemy non-combatant’, that
allows us to avail ourselves of the doctrine of double effect is of dubious if any value in
many contemporary conflicts; not just in interventions and peacekeeping but in war
against non-state entities, for example. Yet at the same time, a growth in risk aversion
has led to a tendency in the west to prefer means of warfare, based on technological
superiority, that can limit both proportionality and discrimination.
To this can be added a concern that the drive to reduce risks to our own troops leads to a
reliance on technologies that allow as to lesser or greater degree to remove the soldier
from the battlefield all together. As such he becomes no longer a warrior but rather a
technician. Not only does distance complicate discrimination (despite the claims for the
‘precision’ of much modern weaponry, which can, of course, also hit ‘precisely’ an
inappropriate target) but, most concerning of all, the moral agent, and most effective
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