Setting Just Limits to New Methods of Warfare*

by Dr. Robert Hickson, USA

In light of the history of warfare – both the discovery and development of new arma- ments and the passionate use of "armed ideologies" – it is a moral certitude that unexpected new combinations of advanced science will be applied technocratically in future forms of war. These new weaponized technologies – in both lethal and non-lethal forms – will also, most probably, be used in "police work" and "peace-operations", and in "neo-imperial constabulary actions" along the borders of Empire, on the ambiguous frontiers of conflicting and alien civilizations and religious cultures. It will be very difficult to set and keep humane moral limits in such a fevered dialectical context of ideology and technology. The long-developing and self-destructive movement towards "total war" – or what some recent Chinese military thinkers have called "unrestricted warfare" – will take us to the foundations of our existence. A strategic-minded British General saw this with piercing clarity, more than a half-century ago.

It was almost five years before his death, after a long, active and reflective life, that Major General J.F.C. Fuller published The Conduct of War, 1789-1961: A Study of the Im- pact of the French, Industrial, and Russian Revolutions on War and Its Conduct1 It is a farsighted and paradigmatic book which General Fuller (1878-1966) himself was inclined to consider as "the most important he had written".2

His book examined the long-growing and destructively cumulative developments in society towards new forms of war that were more and more unlimited, ambiguous, and intentionally undefined; and, hence, more and more coldly abstract and impersonal and altogether conducive to barbarism and civilizational disaster. Moreover, he saw these great evils growing within the feverish atmosphere and manipulated mass-psychology of "democratic governance", further exacerbated by revolutionary new techniques and purposes of "total wars" which also required the humiliating "unconditional surrender" of a defeated people. That "absolute surrender" was, furthermore, preparatory to their protracted "re-education" ("Umerziehung", in German), "social-engineering", or "demiurgic transformation" into something "new", which was often euphemistically called "nation-building" and all that.

For example. General Fuller's important Chapter XI, entitled "Soviet Revolutionary Warfare", speaks about their deceitful use of "Peace as an Instrument of Revolution," and this could also be applied today to new forms of American "Messianic Democracy" and its policies of "creative destruction" and "democratic transformation" abroad.

On the premise that "there are no technical solutions to moral problems," and also on the premise, that "whoever is morally and spiritually uprooted himself tends to uproot others," we can see the moral difficulty of setting and preserving properly proportional limits in the just conduct of modern war. It is certainly the case that setting moral limits is itself always a profoundly human problem, and so is the keeping of proper limits, especially under the stress of war. And here is where the self-understanding provided by the virtues becomes important.

For, it is one of the functions of the four cardinal virtues – prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance – to foster wise limits and to develop dispositions or habits of promptness and constancy and fitting moderation. There are, however, no "techniques" that can be truly substituted for the virtues, which are themselves ordered perfections of common human potentialities (powers or capacities). And the virtues themselves presuppose human free will and voluntariness and, as a consequence, moral responsibility and moral accountability.

Setting just limits in the matter of going to war (ad bellum) and in the matter of the conduct and fitting conclusion of war (in bello) is, indeed, a very great challenge to our intel- lectual and moral life, especially admidst the changing conditions and experimental atmos- phere of modern science and technology. The French, Industrial and Bolshevik Revolutions, so keenly analyzed by General Fuller, have impelled us more and more towards "total war," but applied modem science now goes even further.

For example, if a country decides to use, as an offensive weapon, "computer network attack" against an actual or potential opponent, what constitutes a legitimate military target? Moreover, in long-range "strategic information warfare," what, indeed, constitutes a licit military target? Can one permissibly attack an enemy's financial institutions or stock market? Who is a combatant and who is a non-combatant in the new field of "modem information warfare," which entails "disruption, destruction, and deception in information systems" (according to the definition of the U.S. National Security Agency – NSA)? And how does one know when one is even under attack in "strategic information warfare"? What, indeed, are the "indications and warnings" of an actual or impending assault? What is our criterion of judgment so as to aid our just response, according to the "principle of discrimination" and "proportionality"?

1 J.F.C. Fuller, The Conduct of War, 1789-1961: A Study of the Impact of the French, Industrial, and Russian Revolutions on War and Its Conduct (New York, Da Capo Press 1992 — first published in 1961).

2 This view was conveyed by General Fuller to his friend and admirer, Brian Holden Reid, author of the book, J.F.C. Fuller: Military Thinker.

* The complete essay you can find in: Neo-Conned! – Just War Principles, a Condemmnation of War in Iraq (Vol. 1); Neo-Conned Again! – Hyprocrisy, Lawlessness, and the Rape of Iraq (Vol. 2); IHS Press of Norfolk, Virginia. Forthcoming in early 2005.