What Are the Rules of War?
Posted Thursday, April 26, 2001, at 7:11 PM ETIn an article in today's New York Times about a deadly raid he led while in Vietnam, former Sen. Bob Kerrey says that during a visit to West Point last week he "read the rules of war" for the first time. What are the rules of war?
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StumbleUponU.S. military personnel are governed by two sets of guidelines on how to behave during war or lesser conflicts. One is codified in the Army field manual The Law Of Land Warfare, first published in 1956, which draws on international law, such as the Geneva convention. The manual's basic principle is that military personnel should "refrain from employing any kind or degree of violence which is not actually necessary for military purposes and that they conduct hostilities with regard for the principles of humanity and chivalry." More specifically, it describes such things as how civilians and the sick and wounded should be protected from combat; the proper treatment of prisoners of war; and restrictions on certain types of weapons. The second set of guidelines, subsidiary to the first, is known as rules of engagement. Rules of engagement are specific to each military situation and can be modified as circumstances change. For example, rules of engagement might state that soldiers cannot fire on suspected enemy positions without positive identification of the enemy (being fired upon is always considered positive identification). Or that a U.S. airplane cannot fire on aircraft simply for buzzing it but must wait for more overtly hostile action. Of course, none of the laws and rules undermines the ultimate right of self-defense.
As a result of such things as the My Lai massacre of villagers by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, soldiers receive much more instruction about the laws of warfare. During Vietnam military personnel were given at best cursory lessons; today everyone in the armed forces is required to attend a yearly class on the subject. And the whole notion of rules of engagement was far more lax during Vietnam than it is now. Today, for example, soldiers do not just get verbal instructions, but might also be issued cards with written instructions on the current rules of engagement of their particular mission.
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Explainer thanks Col. John Nelsen and Christopher Bassford of the National War College.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
Most of you don't get it. They are not rules to make it a game. They are not rules imposed to make war more challenging. The Law of Land Warfare sets ethical guidelines for combat in a fluid situation. Those rules don't mean that if you violate them you must be punished. It means that something unethical may have taken place and you should stop to examine what you did. War is an emotional event that clouds our judgment and perspectives. It is due to those clouds that may obscure our view that we have to have these ethical rules to follow. Hitler, Tojo, Milosovic, Stalin, and others have fought strongly for what they believed in, but none of them had ethics to keep them in check!
--Philip R. Rozenski
(To reply, click here.)
For those of you who have never been involved in a conflict, nor ever been in the military, let me put it this way. Assuming that we all read the Posting Guidelines before we started typing away, I wonder: Are we all following the rules of engagement when we become offended by the article and want to really say what's on our mind? You don't have to answer that! What I am trying to say is, it does not matter what mission (military, civilian, private, etc.) you are running, when you find yourself going through survival mode, rules of engagement simply become a very formal, well thought of, complimentary document on which two super powers employ the most agreeable terms at the time which will bring a resolution to whatever disagreements have been making them scratch their political itch. Right now we are actually applying rules of engagement towards China. That being whatever it takes to downscale life-threatening situations. When that doesn't work, you might as well throw the book out the window! I am making it clear, though, that I am not referring nor talking about atrocities of war; a totally different subject. Your mission could be purely Humanitarian, but when your life becomes threatened by the very ones you are trying to help and they start to persecute you, you will do the same as many other people from many other cultures do. The Americanism and Patriotism goes out the window! I think I said enough.
--Rod
(To reply, click here.)
All this talk about Bob Kerry killing a few civilians is baffling to me. People are talking about rescinding his medals. Hello! Every Air Force bomber pilot killed civilians in Vietnam -not to mention thousands in WWII and wiping out entire villages in N. Korea. We seem to have this skewed logic that it's okay to kill civilians with impunity as long as we do it from 30,000 feet. Somewhere between the stratosphere and the ground we're cleansed and sanctified.
--Dan Habecker
(To reply, click here.)
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