For Humanity’s Sake, Keep Red Crosses on Medevac Helicopters | Hacker News Reader

For Humanity’s Sake, Keep Red Crosses on Medevac Helicopters

warontherocks.com

78 points737min77 comments

One thing I think should be made clear, that I don't think the author spells out for people who just know war by book, is that enemies frequently don't respect that red cross. In fact, like a swinging radio antenna from a backpack, it is a target and tactical advantage to pin ambulatory vehicles - whether they be airborne or land-borne. Some of this probably has to do with some knowledge that foremost military institutions will prioritize evacuation of injured and casualties at a high threshold in the face of their own safety.

Our military has no grounds to complain about people "not respecting" rules of war.

A lot of online commenters make a big deal out of the military's rules of engagement and how they're "more strict" than police.

What they don' tell you (or don't know) is that in Iraq, US soldiers were often given engagement rules like "from this point on the map onward, shoot anything that moves."

In Afghanistan, through 3-4 different administrations, drone rules of engagement have been a joke.

I wasn't in Iraq so I can't speak to that.

> In Afghanistan, through 3-4 different administrations, drone rules of engagement have been a joke.

I can speak to this though, I was in Afghanistan in 2011-2012. It was my job to aid troops in getting drone and air support. Can you be specific about who operated the drones you're mentioning? In the DOD we required three levels of verification to occur; every request started with "troops in contact" which requires that not only are troops engaged, but they have to be able to demonstrate that they cannot move (eg: "we are dead in the water if we sit here.") In the midst of this they had to be able to concisely define the target, usually with a building grid, but also describing the target with orientation (trees, other objects, etc), and third someone like me had to verify all of those facts by feeds, radio, binoculars, or sight on seen to pass order to an Air Officer who would design a proposal, which usually got passed all the way up to regimental office. As far as I know, for CentCom under Mattis this was not unusual - if provably difficult.

With respect to ROE, the ROE in Iraq and Afghanistan were different. The one in Afghanistan required you be shot at in order to engage. This resulted in an abundance of injured or mamed troops, because the way the military does operations require them to blanket and leaflet towns they're going to invade. So yes, the Taliban usually knows you're coming weeks in advance, and the townspeople who aren't Taliban affiliated have left.

That's not to justify, "This area is a free for all", and doesn't sound much like the military I know.

Edit: I do highly support the idea of boots on the ground over drones. We never had any missed targets that I was aware of and BDAs (battle damage assessments) were always accurate to our desired outcome in my experience. That said, the reliance on drones in areas where we couldn't bring artillery created a real race for resources, which is where you get stories like Dakota Meyers.

Edit:

Last one, I promise.

> Our military has no grounds to complain about people "not respecting" rules of war.

This is junk. War is messy, it's the byproduct of deplomacy breaking down. It's on everyone who has experienced the theater of war to talk about how the rules were or were not applied. Sometimes you may not like the answer that results in an exception, but it's useful for warrior to understand the baseline reality that they will face and expect - I say this on either side, whether you're a US troop or a warrior in the Taliban. These laws come into conflict in complicated ways many times. One classical example:

When I first learned to shoot the M2 (which is a 50 caliber machine gun) I learned you cannot shoot them at people. You can, howver, use them to assault vehicle born targets, targets with necessary distance, targets behind cover, targets using armor, etc... When you have a vehicle loaded down with explosives racing through a winding ingress point, knowing in all likelihood of they succeed that another attack is imminent, do you debate the law of land and warfare or do you zero in on the engine block and let fate take it's course?

> The one in Afghanistan required you be shot at in order to engage.

But then you get things like this which seem to be operating under different rules.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/us/airstrike-us-isis-dam....

"In fact, members of a top secret U.S. Special Operations unit called Task Force 9 had struck the dam [...] despite a military report warning not to bomb the dam, because the damage could cause a flood that might kill tens of thousands of civilians"

This is why I asked who was operating the drone. Too frequently people wave their hands and say "drones" or "military" in reference to whatever they're disatisfied with. US SOCOM does not follow the same rules or procedures line companies do.

From a policy perspective, or even a civilian one more generally, is this all that unreasonable? It's not as if SOCOM is not military, and while I agree it's risibly stupid to slander all for the actions of some as I often see people do on the internet, I'm not sure why the distinction matters in the context of asking whether US military forces in general may violate, or are directed to violate, what some international bodies hold to be laws or conventions of warfare.

Yes, I do think it's unreasonable. .

When people speak in generalities it makes conversation vague but entertaining. It doesn't differentiate between policies that work and ones that don't. eg: most civilians don't understand the difference between this graph: DOD <> State Department <> SOCOM.

I'm not trying to shade the person that responded to me, but I think this is a learning opportunity. They clearly know very little about what they're talking about in general, but it sounds like they've heard detailed specific stories and applied it to the wider concept. This is entertaining, maybe to some (to me it's not, I don't like being cast as a war criminal by presumption), but utterly lacking in information to learn from (future policy) or worth remembering (history). Instead, it's only function is divisiveness and furor.

War won't stop any time soon and warrior culture needs to go in existing so long as war is constant so that we continue to fight wars with discipline and some amount of honor. If you remove information and history in favor of conjecture, we can do neither.

More specifically, there's a lot of stories I could tell about having to interact in near-proximity to SOCOM that may shed light on why strange things seem to happen with them so often. That said, if I'm spending all my time trying to understand if said criticism also involves me (in a totally different department, whose acting on totally different policies) then that information will never make it to the reader because my line is busy.

Also, I'll leave you with this: There's a lot we don't know about the Korean War and Vietnam (aside from video, which isn't that great). It's largely because veterans refused to share their stories, officially or unofficially. If I, in order to share anything, have to overcome that I am a monster in your mind first, I probably won't speak. When you accuse someone of war crimes it's not a joke, and let's be real - that is exactly what many people casually do when talking about war. The realities on the ground at war are informed by policy and real-world split second decision making which is reinforced by training. It's invaluable that we have an atmosphere where people are understanding and discerning between fact and fiction if we're ever to do things better.

> most civilians don't understand the difference between this graph: DOD <> State Department <> SOCOM

I certainly don't, at least inasmuch as it is a surprise to learn there are policy differences between DOD and SOCOM, which I understand to be one of its constituent parts, and also as a military command not given latitude to set policy in ways that would conflict with any cabinet department. I'm not sure I'm understanding you correctly there, though, because my own perspective is limited.

I was aware the State Department and DOD are different departments with their own agendas which to say the least don't always run side by side, but it's news to me that State operates any weapons systems, as you seem to be saying they do. Again assuming I've understood you correctly here, that is also quite surprising, and on both points I'd be obliged for any references you could point me to.

> there's a lot of stories I could tell about having to interact in near-proximity to SOCOM that may shed light on why strange things seem to happen with them so often

Not that I'd blame you for continuing to demur, but I'd be interested to hear any such stories you find yourself inclined to tell. As you accurately note, there's a learning opportunity here; however undesirable warfare may be, as you also note and as anyone who reads the headlines should know, it is not going anywhere any time soon. That being so, I'd like to know more accurately if I can how my country goes about it, the better to understand what's happening today and try to predict what might happen tomorrow.

My contact information is on my profile if you have IRC

> where people are understanding and discerning between fact and fiction if we're ever to do things better.

Which bits of the linked news article were fiction?

I wasn't referring to your article, more stressing why it's important to be specific about details. In this instance, folks are asking why it's important who controlled the drone resource, at times arguing that it doesn't matter. My argument was that if you want a policy change, knowing who to make it with is important.

If folks just walk around with overly broad criticisms such as "war bad" then folks won't listen.

Essentially parent commenter is making a No True Scotsman Fallacy.

Whatever they said is irrelevant. We were drone-striking weddings. For a decade.

In a country with no functioning police/military, carrying an AK was considered enough to make you a combatant.

Imagine if Canada invaded the US and decided that a couple of guys with hunting rifles in a pickup truck riding back from a hunting area were "enemy combatants."

Ehhh, the policy divide between the DOD, SOCOM, and the State Department is not bridged by "no true Scotsman". If you're going to criticize something, knowing who and what you're criticizing is a good first step.

The State Department using drones to bomb weddings and the policy that allows it is not congruent to the policy that allows a Marine in the ground to declare "troops in contact" and perform a 9-line. They're informed by very different things.

The key differentiator in my mind is one policy that works and one policy that clearly doesn't because I keep reading about it in the news. If you want a policy changed so bad, why is pointing out who the policy rests with - and an example of a similar policy that works - so problematic to you?

I take your point, but I don’t think innocent foreigners care about the distinction between US departments when their family is killed as collateral.

If I was speaking to an Afghani whose family had been devestated by a loved one dying due to combat I absolutely wouldn't be quick to correct the semantics of their language or argument. I'd speak to them with same reverance and scope that I'd speak to a Gold Star family.

KennyBlanken, who I replied to, mixed the facts of several incidents into one and presented them as a singular coherent idea. I think I'm allowed to dissect an argument on a public forum, if I so see fit, at that point.

If I'm going to try to argue that my country shouldn't in the first instance start wars in which innocent people get killed, better I should have some idea of the details of what I'm talking about so people are more likely to take me seriously, don't you think? I'd rather give myself a chance to maybe change three people's minds than shout pointlessly at three thousand. If you really feel your time better spent on the latter, though, far be it from me to persist in arguing otherwise.

If drones were used as you state, then how do you explain this?

https://twitter.com/evanhill/status/1436422176425578496

You can Google the ROE change. It's public information if you don't believe me.

ROE doesn't apply to drones, it applies to troops on the ground. Drones are usually acting in a couple capacities (this is not dogma, just my experience)

1. Intel gathering

2. Troop support

3. intelligence resources

Intelligence resources, and all things State Department, would fly cleanly outside of DOD mandates or procedures. To my knowledge, they have their own set of criteria that was very different from what I had to abide by.

>I learned you cannot shoot them at people.

That's not true though, .50 has never had an issue being used on an antipersonnel role

I tried to list off the exemptions I remembered, but it's been a decade. That seems sensible to me. I still have most of my old training materials if folks are interested.

I just wanted to clarify that it was a myth, I might have come across as a bit rude so I do apologize for that :D

Just curious from the sidelines, tacp, fo, or similar?

I was enlisted as a 2844 but got stationed at an infantry unit (most 44's at the time went to a depot). My job in country was most similar to a JTAC, but it really depended on what the unit needed. If they didn't have folks confident on 9/10-lines then I'd do that, other times I worked a COC, other times I'd work on the electrical wiring for trucks, stand post, or sub-in for gunner, vehicle commander, etc. At one point I even worked prisoner escort/safety.

Heh, not far off the original romads then. Thanks for sharing your experience.

If the rules were that restrictive, how did we end up the collateral murder video?

When and where were you deployed?

> What they don' tell you (or don't know) is that in Iraq, US soldiers were often given engagement rules like "from this point on the map onward, shoot anything that moves."

Is this your personal experience? Where did you get this from? This isn't my experience having done OEF 02/OIF 03 as an 11b in the 82nd, and I was in the follow on forces for both wars so I saw a pretty loose ROE in both countries.

The guys that served after 08 would have no idea what you're even talking about because their ROE was extremely restrictive, essentially they had to be shot at first and use of indirect fire required multiple layers of permission.

There are people who will complain about anything related to war no matter what. It doesn't matter what the military does or what actually happens. All they understand is that war=violence=bad.

Just as one data point I happen to personally remember, the US blew up an MSF hospital in Afghanistan:

https://www.msf.org/attack-kunduz-trauma-centre-internationa...

Of course it's possible to name incidents that sound bad on paper after spinning the narrative to serve the purpose of arguing that war=violence=bad. This happens all the time. That's the whole point I'm trying to make.

Any time the military kills a terrorist, a certain group of people will say "You monster! He had kids for God sakes! Look at these pictures of his family! He never got a fair trial!" When a genuine fuckup happens, these same people naturally jump on the opportunity and criticize endlessly. The American population is especially apt for this kind of behavior.

They literally blew up a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders. How is your reply in any way relevant? Is the argument that we're supposed to ignore civilian deaths when judging whether war is a good idea?

Yeah, cute to spin it this way but it's more like the military kills a terrorist and also a large number of civilians surrounding that terrorist and then half of the media play apologetics for an operation that essentially caused the deaths of innocent people - with terrorist deaths as a rounding error.

The last problem the American people have is that they're too anti-war. It's literally the opposite.

I don't know anything about this other than reading it here, but according to Wikipedia at least, the US claimed this was a mistake, apologized for it, and paid reparations.

Not that that makes this ok, but it does put it in the category of "error", not deliberate targeting of civilians (if you believe that narrative, of course).

>paid reparations

Not sure how well that aged now that the US essentially took all the money from the Afghan central bank.

Also, there have been leaked documents showing that the US would delibrately target ambulances and civilian infrastructure. I don't understand why anybody would take the US military's word as gospel without substantial evidence (and no, apologising and paying reparations after controversy is not compelling evidence that these actions were not delibrate).

> enemies frequently don't respect that red cross. (...) it is a target

This is also what i've witnessed in the past decade of protests in France. I remember when i was younger there were not many casualties and they were easily taken away by firefighters or volunteer medics. Since at least 2016 though, i've personally witnessed (and heard many more instances of) cops explicitly targeting medics with their weapons, destroying their medical equipment, or otherwise preventing medics from reaching a person in need of medical attention.

I'm not saying medical duty is not worth doing or that we should not protest the government, though. But to heartless attackers, a "journalist" or "medic" sign attests you're on the 'wrong' side and should be attacked.

During the Chilean social revolt of 2019, police where explicitly attacking both volunteer Healthcare workers and their supplies as well as official ambulances and emts

So yeah, even when not related to warfare per se, it happens

From videos of US protests in recent years, it's pretty clear that certain factions are teaching protesters to abuse these "rules".

Same as if these red cross helicopters were to be armed and attack while still painted with a red cross. The enemy would quickly start disregarding any labels. Same for 'medics' at a protest.

Interesting. Does medevac actually result in improving combat effectiveness directly? It seems that in a great-power war you rescue a fraction of combat personnel who will be injured and they will not return to combat any time soon.

The value then is entirely in believing that your guys have your back if you’re hurt, which I can imagine has a massive effect on morale. I suppose the existence of dedicated medevac also provides some constant reminder of humanity, which also has a similar effect plus the additional motivating factor of outrage when your med guys are hit.

Of course I could be entirely wrong and we could be frequently rescuing soldiers and putting them back into duty quickly. Curious to see what the numbers say.

In modern theater, if you're getting put on a bird you're probably going home. I've seen this with a few exceptions. CorpsMen and medics can take care of a lot of stuff in the field, and many things will just get wrapped up until you get back to base. The emphasis on modern military medical care is to return the troop to combat effectiveness, but a bird being called usually means you have exceeded what can be offered locally.

A wounded combatant who could benefit from medevac is no longer a (edit: combat) asset to their fellow combatants, but is someone who may need one or more other people to try to keep them alive, or more people to carry them to a safer location. Their wounds or injuries may prevent the group from moving as easily.

In the cold calculus of ground warfare, a wounded combatant in the field is more valuable to the opposition than a dead combatant precisely because a dead person needs less support from their fellows. Rapid medevac has changed the historical wounded:killed ratio from about 3:1 to about 4:1 in recent US ground wars. Getting a wounded combatant to definitive medical care in the first hour after they are injured makes a huge difference in outcomes, which benefits troop morale.

When reading pieces like that, and watching a lot of documentaries on the First and Second World War I always am reminded of a quote my SO presented me once:

"In war, people who do not know each other kill each other on the orders of people who know each other but do not kill each other."

But on topic: I just don't know what happened to the world and to political doctrine in the last 20 to 30 years. I just don't understand this world anymore.

I grew up near the iron curtain on the western side. Filled with propaganda about how the West (and especially the US) were the better system. How democracy made people free and how socialism put people behind walls and made them unfree.

I grew up in a system of socially responsible capitalism with the government and other institutions somewhat ensuring that the everybody participated in economic uplift.

After the Wall fell it seems to me the west did not habe to pretend anymore and more and more restraints fell. Everything became capitalized as well as we are allowed to do everything because we are the good guys seems to have become a thing (or more of that at least).

I can't understand killing civilians with drone strikes at weddings (or anywhere), waiting for the ambulance and others to help and then striking again. I don't understand pushing Russia even closer towards China. I don't understand the EU pulling refugee boats back into the Mediterranean to sink there.

Somehow I am only in my forties and the world doesn't make any sense to me anymore.

I found Game of Thrones a huge help in making sense of the world - it's always been a bunch of inbred families working out their inbred family's dramas. A good leader sees their citizenry as a valuable resource and a bad one sees them as a liability, but their goals are always in respect to the other players, not their people.

Maybe we actually had better leaders before the turn of the century, it's hard for me to be sure. But either way, the sheer arbitrariness of it all being down to humans as idiosyncratic as the people I know in my daily life made a lot more sense after I watched game of thrones.

If I rememeber correctly, in Korea medevac helicopters were marked as per the international conventions (Geneva or Hague, not exactly sure) and they still took fire anyways. Also, there's another issue that won't and can't be mitigated by any visual means, many aerial engagements on a peer to peer conflict happen outside of visual range and on that case any non visual IFF would have to be radio based and due to the inherent proximity of medevac missions to the forward line of contact would be very susceptible to electronic warfare. So I'd argue that red crosses on front line medevac helicopters aren't that important

Why not just have it be contextual?

Keep the cross if fighting an actual country. Remove it if fighting terrorists or other non state groups.

That was my thought as well. If you're a boxer, you have rules that you must follow. In a match you don't need to worry about getting hit below the belt. If you ended up in a street fight however, you can't make that same assumption.

It's not just the markings, it's training for the crew since being a gunship vs being unarmed is different, different equipment inside for the litter vs door guns, less medical equipment because you need to have ammo, different crew since a gunner isn't a medic, etc

> First, if a situation is so dangerous that a medevac cannot land, it will require more than helicopter-mounted medium machine guns. Instead, it calls for a full gunship escort.

Ltc kettles would disagree:

https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/01/23/lt-col-c...

If only Namir Noor-Eldeen insisted on strapping red cross to a random Van trying to rescue him

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaqY12VHFv4

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/05/wikileaks-us-a...

The link where the author cites citizens are asking for machine guns in medvac helicopters goes here: https://medevacmatters.org/

Most of those posts just seem to be arguing for better training?

Here's one that is arguing for dropping dedicated medevac: https://medevacmatters.org/2012/02/28/the-politicization-of-...

That seems different where medvac’s can be converted to standard choppers versus evacing troops from helicopters with machine guns on them as standard operating procedures.

It does specifically mention armed helicopters, several times:

"The MEDEVAC leadership refuses to remove the red crosses and arm their helicopters even though doing so would allow faster responses to some requests for evacuation of wounded troops."

"AMEDD is pursuing a public relations campaign to stop the movement to arm the MEDEVAC helicopters as reported by this email to Michael Yon site in early February 2012"

Is the recommendation to replace the cross with machine guns figurative or literal? It doesn’t seem obvious why the cross needs to go if the gun is added?

It needs to go if the vehicle becomes a combatant vehicle. The crew using personal weapons in self defence doesn't count, but medevac helicopter equipped with weapons to lay down support in hot landing zone is no longer a vehicle that can claim protection of red cross/red crescent, but a valid target for fire.

It's literal. The red cross is supposed to mean that it's humanitarian, neutral and carries no weapons.

You don't see them medevac-ing the enemies, so they are not neutral.

A big reason for medevac is to free soilders from caring for the wounded, so they can continue firing weapons at you.

Neutral seems like a crazy idea to me. It's a critical part of the offense.

I don't see it, so it does not exist?

Do you see a lot of medevacs?

The Geneva convention basically states that whomever the injured is in the care of is charged with giving them adequate care. If that care requires medevac it's going to happen.

The protections accorded the wounded and sick apply to friend and foe alike without distinction

https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN31133-FM_4-0...

https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul...

Have the opponents of the last few decades of us war followed Geneva conventions?

> He felt that bringing a just war to a swift end justified almost any act.

Looking at recent history, I find myself agreeing more and more with him.

War is horrible. War always involves innocent people dying, even if it is just you 18 year old kids either forced or enticed to join the military. War creates casualties both physical and mental in the people that fight it. I would bet if you include mental health, the vast majority of people who were actually involved in combat, came away with some kind of long term consequence.

Yet at the same time, war can be a necessity. Take of example WWII. There was no way Hitler could have been stopped without war. At the same time there was a lot of damage to German civilians.

The truth is that there is no way you can fight a clean war.

Having all these talks about “rules of war” just puts lipstick on a pig and makes a queasy public more willing to go along.

If it worth killing people for to achieve you objective, then go do it, and try to make it as short as possible. If it is not, then don’t start a war.

But making War into a type of game (these people are ok to kill, these people are not, and lawyering over how connected something is to war), I actually find kind of sick, as if it was just a big game.

>The truth is that there is no way you can fight a clean war. Having all these talks about “rules of war” just puts lipstick on a pig and makes a queasy public more willing to go along.

If you don't want the other guy to gas your troops, you can agree to in exchange not gas their troops. There's nothing artificial or contrived about that.

The whole “you can’t gas my troops, but you can shoot them or blow them up, or burn them to death with a flame thrower, seems pretty contrived.

World War II didn’t have gas, but it was still pretty horrific.

An example more relevant to recent memory would be, "I won't torture and kill my POWs if you don't torture and kill yours."

They're not grandstanding or moralizing, they're making an agreement.

World War II didn't have gas because it was tactically and strategically useless, not because of international conventions. Mass bombing and firebombing of civilian targets contravenes international conventions too, but that didn't perceptibly slow anyone down, especially after the Axis powers very helpfully did it first.

Ultimately there are no laws in war save vae victis, and while I believe the attribution of the idea to Bismarck is only apocryphal, I agree that the best and only way to curtail the brutality of warfare is to make war with maximum intensity in the cause of making war maximally short - if you can possibly manage it, by not having a war at all.

I think Americans are unable to really understand this, and I think that's because our history offers only two examples, none remotely within living memory, of what it's like to have a war here. It's easy for us to think about making war because, with the exception of those who actually participate and are no longer conscripted in any case - and thus whatever happens to them can be trivially written off by those inclined as "what they signed up for" - we never have to fear that anyone will bring war home. Hitler couldn't even get an invasion across the English Channel; who's going to get one across an ocean?

The sole exception is nuclear warfare via intercontinental missile, and indeed we find this a uniquely horrifying concept in the American psyche, even now. In theory that's because of radiation, but I don't think that's so; I think it is because that's the only plausible mechanism by which we need fear anyone bombing our cities, and that is something we never needed fear before. And it is worthy of note that, whatever the diplomatic exertions required to ensure this does not occur, we have always been willing to pursue them as tirelessly as the occasion has required.

> Ultimately there are no laws in war save vae victis, and while I believe the attribution of the idea to Bismarck is only apocryphal, I agree that the best and only way to curtail the brutality of warfare is to make war with maximum intensity in the cause of making war maximally short - if you can possibly manage it, by not having a war at all.

I agree.

Pretending that we can have a “clean” war just makes war more likely and makes wars drag on ultimately killing even more people and causing more destruction in the long term.

"World War II didn't have gas because it was tactically and strategically useless"

Do you really believe that? That would imply that if one side side started doing it, the other would have just laughed at their waste of resources and continue enjoying the benefits of doing without. I don't think that this is what would have happened. Tactical and strategical situations weren't as "inviting" for gas attacks as the endless stalemates of ww1, but useless? I don't think so. The game of eye for an eye does not need any international conventions.

An important caveat in all intensity for shortness tradeoffs is that the entire argument breaks down if the change can be negated by the other side doing the same.

> Do you really believe that?

Yes. Why not? I mentioned the firebombing of cities earlier. Fire makes more fire, but gas doesn't make more gas. That disposes of strategic utility, and on the tactical side, mobile warfare in armored vehicles largely obviates any benefit. Besides, it's not like, in total warfare, the production of chemical weapons at industrial scale doesn't require resources that could otherwise be put to purposes and weapons that aren't so narrowly contingent in their potential benefits - for one example, incendiaries.

> That would imply that if one side started doing it, the other would have just laughed at their waste of resources and continue enjoying the benefits of doing without.

No, it wouldn't; of course if one side had started doing it others would have matched the escalation, just as with strategic bombing. Why do you think no side started? I like to hope at this point we've disposed of the idea that it was out of the goodness of their hearts.

I have a few points to make here:

World War II did have gas. Japan used chemical weapons in China.

Setting that aside for a moment, the various theaters of war did not all immediately escalate to total war all at once. Rules of war were initially followed but selectively abandoned over time when one side or the other also abandoned either the same rule or a complementary rule. For example, consider treatment of POW’s. There are complementary international laws at work here: it’s a war crime to kill a surrendering enemy rather than take them prisoner, but it’s also a war crime (perfidy) to falsely surrender only as a ruse to kill your would-be captors. After running into enough Japanese perfidy (and very little genuine Japanese surrender), American troops in the Pacific stopped bothering with taking prisoners. This was dramatically different from what would happen in theatres such as North Africa.

You also mention strategic bombing, but that was also a story of tit-for-tat escalation, aided along by genuine targeting mishaps. The Germans notably refrained from civilian targets during the early Battle of Britain, only to embrace terror bombing during the Blitz. This escalation was supposedly a response to some British bombing raids that, supposedly by accident, hit civilian targets in Germany.

When it comes to gas, the reason it wasn’t used outside of China was because no one had an incentive to escalate to that particular measure. Germany didn’t use gas because if they did, the retaliation would have devastated them—German logistics were overwhelmingly horse-centric and Germany did not have anywhere near enough gas masks for their horses. The Soviets didn’t use gas because Germany had a well known advantage in chemical warfare and they didn’t want to invite Germany to retaliate with gas. The western Allies didn’t use gas because they, unlike the Axis and Soviets, did not generally violate the laws of war unless the enemy violated them first.

As another general point, many of the war crimes committed in World War II were purely evil to the point of counterproductivity. For instance, mistreating and murdering prisoners of war eliminates any incentive for the enemy to surrender, while terror bombing usually makes enemy populations more rather than less motivated to continue supporting the war effort.

> World War II didn’t have gas [...]

Ummm, what now? 6 million Jews and other groups would disagree with that.

Ok, I'm being a little quippy, obviously you weren't referring to the Holocaust, rather to the actual war. But I think there are actual reasons the world bans certain forms of warfare. They really are worse, in various ways. E.g. chemical weapons, as far as can tell, are worse to die from than a gunshot, leave more and worse long-term damage for people that didn't die, are worse to watch so leave worse psychological damage to survivors, etc. The world largely agrees that this is a more barbaric way to kill someone.

And you know what? The world coming together to decide that some things are too barbaric, so we won't use them, is a pretty good outcome. Less ways to kill each other is a good thing! I wish people extended this to more forms of warfare, not less.

(There are also game-theoretic reasons to police certain things more than others. You can't possibly ban every form of warfare, at least now - but if everyone agrees to be super-harsh against anyone using certain methods, we can at least stop those methods from being used. Just a diffuse "super harsh on anyone doing warfare" isn't feasible and won't have an affect, but a directed "super harsh on anyone using chemical weapons" actually might lower the body count, which again, is a good thing!)

Ok, so killing non-combatants aka civilians to trying to force the opposition to stop the conflict faster? More biological and chemical weapons, which causes mass amount of damage by not killing people but by remove their combat effectiveness to also able to stop the conflict faster?

>But making War into a type of game (these people are ok to kill, these people are not, and lawyering over how connected something is to war), I actually find kind of sick, as if it was just a big game.

It's called the great game for a reason. But this is important because wars are most often waged with limited goals and it is better to sit on the negotiation table with some cynical politician and not someone that has held their kid while covered in burning napalm.

You really don't want some multi generational revanche to move the other side, especially when you may be on the losing side next time.

To illustrate - a clash over Taiwan that ends with mostly military casualties - can be reached some form deal. But nuke a US or China tier one city - and you are talking fight to the last drop of blood.

You don’t think a parent would be upset by an 18 year old son or daughter who was blown up by a bomb simply because they were in the military?

People come to the negotiating table not because they see don’t think what the other side did was bad, but because they see no way forward to achiever their goals through war.

Advancement in medevaccing wounded within golden hour reduce body bags. Body bags on evening news end wars. Reduced casualties is how lopsided forever wars go on maintenance mode. For humanity's sake, show the inhumanity of war. Peer warfare is another discussion.

Rules of war are predominantly to protect the losing side. US troops in Middle East should allow enemy or neutral non-combatants to evacuate enemy wounded without a fight. In terms of what US should do to evacuate it's wounded, it's a utilitarian rather than moral decision based on what's less likely to sustain additional casualties and whether enemy forces are inclined to respect unarmed red cross vehicles/personal or use them as easy targets. Let's hope we don't live to see a conflict where US is at the mercy of rules of law to protect our own troops and civilians. I am also not advocating our asymmetric engagements, just pointing out that our primary protection there is our own military superiority.

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