Asymmetry and Jus in Bello

“According to some military analysts, this merely reflects what has become an increasingly common tactic of insurgent groups involved in asymmetric warfare in urban environments. Militant groups routinely opt to deploy in areas where they will be able to conceal their presence among the civilian population. Even the so-called ‘collateral damage’—the standard euphemism for unintended civilian casualties—can pay dividends in terms of propaganda coups.”

Jane’s Intelligence Digest, August 3, 2006

It is interesting, and not altogether surprising, how recent discussion concerning the Israeli-Hezbollah war has pitted two important components of just-war theory against one another. In judging the ‘justness’ of combat, we generally submit it to two tests, one designed to access the intentions of the combatant and the other to access whether the combatant’s actions are proportional to his goals. In my discussion last week of the incident at Qana, in which an Israeli attack appeared to kill many civilians without destroying military targets, I claimed that Qana had failed the proportionality test, given the press report of the incident, but Qana also provides an illustration how notions of intentionality and proportionality clash. Further, it highlights a question in urgent need of an answer: how does one respond when a foe willfully ignores war conventions during combat?

First, to address the clash of intentionality and proportionality, I want to begin from the premise that Israel has signaled its desire—its intention—to destroy Hezbollah munitions and soldiers. To date, it has done this mostly via air-bombing campaigns and rocket attacks based on intelligence. Second, Israel has signaled its desire to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties. Evidence of this includes its willingness to warn civilians in advance of attacks as well as the numerous civilian structures in Lebanon not bombed. This second premise is likely to be the source of great debate, and given the limits we all have of battlefield knowledge, one must proceed according to one’s intuition; if you feel, as I do, that Israel has nothing to gain from the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, then the premise is granted. Obviously, Israel’s armed forces have the capability to do far more damage than it has, and if its operational goal is to inflict damage upon Lebanese civilians, it is doing a lousy job of it. Regardless of sympathies or politics, most folks expect Israeli rockets to hit their corresponding military targets, and to my mind, that expectation says a lot about our collective judgment of Israel’s intentions.

Because all but a fringe of people are confident regarding the justness of Israel’s intentions, most of the criticism of Israel is focused upon the proportionality of its response; however, comparing Israel’s intentions to those of Hezbollah yields some interesting points for discussion regarding proportionality. If Israel’s intentions are just, what does one make of Hezbollah’s? For example, is Hezbollah just in its unguided rocket attacks on Israeli cities? Is Hezbollah just in concealing its deployments among the civilian population? It is these questions that put intentionality and proportionality on a collision course.

To take the questions in turn, in applying the intentionality test to military actions, the first requirement is to ascertain the military importance or necessity of the act. Regarding Hezbollah’s unguided rocket attacks, there very clearly is no military necessity because they can’t know what they’re shooting at. The rockets lack guidance; they are purely point-and-shoot weapons, except of course, the guerillas are ‘pointing’ them from a distance of upwards to 40 or 50 miles. In such a context, “aim” is a very loose concept. In addition, Hezbollah intelligence concerning Israeli targets on the ground can’t be very good. One imagines there is not a lot of focus in this area, because even if they did have solid knowledge of targets deep inside of Israel, they have no capability to hit what they’re aiming at. Without mincing words, the unguided rocket attacks are very clearly meant to promote mayhem and civilian death and are clear violations of the intentionality test.

The second question, that of placing deployments among civilians, is a little tougher to answer. While the war conventions are clear regarding the needless endangerment of civilians during combat, there are reasonable arguments to be made concerning military necessity regarding the way Hezbollah fights. The current war conventions in this regard work very well in set-piece Napoleonic battles, but no one has fought that way for 100 years. Very often, it’s the civilian infrastructure—telecommunications, transportation, energy, etc.—that is the focus of modern-day warfare, and where there is civilian infrastructure, there are civilians. In sum, I’m less inclined to censure combatants for operating in the proximity of civilians, for there really is no avoiding it. To me, the main point here is to forbid compelling the civilian population to serve as shields, either by detaining civilians who wish to flee or by taking cover in civilian centers that are essentially immobile (i.e., hospitals).

Having said that, I’d like to revisit the first question, because it most directly bears upon this clash I’ve talked about between intentionality and proportionality. As stated, Hezbollah’s rocket attacks very clearly fail the intentionality test. Not one or a couple, but every unguided rocket lacking a military target fired into a civilian center is unjustifiable according to existing war conventions. Would this not suggest a fundamental rejection of the conventions regarding jus in bello?

There is an interesting historical analogy to the current Hezbollah rocket attacks. Consider the advent of the Kaiser Wilhelm Geschutz, or Paris Gun, during World War One; this extremely large artillery piece was designed by the Germans for the sole purpose of bombarding Paris from great distances, but while technology had advanced greatly in terms of firepower, guidance systems did not. These weapons were essentially ‘dumb’ bombs, lobbed in a general direction with a general knowledge of distance. In fact, they were worse than traditional field artillery, which were guided by the oldest guidance system known to man: a pair of eyes (usually aided by field glasses). By range finding, field artillery units could eventually hit targets of military necessity, and the more skilled the unit, the less range finding necessary. Obviously, with the Paris Gun, such range-finding could not rely on sight. When one considers other factors—the Paris Gun’s shells could travel as much as 25 miles above the earth—it becomes clear that the shells and missiles were affected by much more than the suddenly quaint notion of wind speed and direction. In the spring of 1918, the Germans fired well over 300 shells, of which only 183 landed within Paris’s city limits. The Paris Gun attacks claimed 256 lives, most of them likely civilian, including the notorious bombing of St. Sepulchre during Good Friday services killing 88. In Charles Horne’s Source Records of the Great War, a British press report concerning the first usage of the Paris Gun remarked that “The effects of the bombardment were entirely without military importance, the only results being some destruction of property and the killing and wounding of a number of harmless citizens, including many women and children.”

In effect, the Katyusha rockets fired into Israel are not at all different, for there really is no intention to destroy military targets. Defenders of Hezbollah would point out the vast military superiority of Israel and how this fact leaves Hezbollah little choice in determining its methods, believing that if enough pain and suffering is inflicted upon the Israeli people, they will call off the dogs. Of course, our current war conventions would beg to differ with this method of combat, but let’s for a moment engage in a little thought exercise and grant such a premise: does history suggest that making total war in this way is effective? And more importantly, does flouting the war conventions regarding intentionality justify a response in kind, such as waging disproportionate warfare?

Total war—or making war against a military’s ‘enabling’ civilian infrastructure—is at least as old as the American Civil War, which saw for the first time the large-scale militarization of rail travel, manufacturing, etc. The doctrine that evolved over time in military circles counted destroying that war-making capability as a prime goal. Note that in this context, ‘total war’ is still centered upon military necessity, but merely expands targets to include those of strategic and tactical value. Conversely, there is another theory of war that some military thinkers gleaned from the American Civil War, which is often crudely described as ‘taking war to the people’ or ‘ taking the will to fight out of the people.’ This usually means indiscriminately slaughtering civilian populations in order to blunt their appetite for war. Our war conventions have always sought to separate ‘total war’ from this rather depraved method of warfare. What’s interesting, though, is that there is little historical evidence to suggest that making war against the civilian population—without being mindful of military necessity—is a successful strategy. More often, it just pisses people off more than they likely already are. Think of the Paris Gun…and then think on who won the war. In nearly every instance—from the Boer War to Vietnam—indiscriminately slaughtering civilians has never produced the desired capitulation, and I doubt much that Hezbollah will accomplish much of anything with its Katyusha attacks, other than making it unacceptable to the Israeli people to settle for anything less than total victory. Hezbollah’s attacks have actually guaranteed against an early cessation of hostilities as such a response would be political death for any Israeli politician.

The more challenging question is whether a failure to abide by conventions in one regard justifies similar responses in another. The conventions themselves would suggest not, but given the quotation above from Jane’s concerning the nature of asymmetrical warfare, I think this is probably the murkiest area of the war conventions. Asymmetrical warfare, terrorism, and non-state combatants have thrown our concepts of just war into disarray, and as weapons technology proliferates, these problems won’t get easier to address.