Of Course You Know, This Means...

War!!

Had some thoughts upon war, mainly fictional treatment of same.

• Seriously irked by this idea, abroad in the land, that there's some problem with fighting enemy forces who are innocent. Uh, yeah, they actually all are, always, unless you specifically see them commit a war-crime. Again, it's a war, not an execution, and the whole concept of "war" in modern law hinges on the idea that the individual, lawful combatant, following duly constituted authority, is blameless so long as he obeys the laws of war.
  
  Frankly, I think that even extends to fighting child-soldiers, if there's no other way to stop them. Sure, it's hard on your men to have to do it, but (in principle) it isn't wrong to use as much force as necessary to subdue them. Definitely the major proportion of guilt rests with those who create child-soldiers, rather than with the guys whose alternatives are "shoot them" or "be killed by them". There's no virtue in dying in battle if it means failing in your duties as a soldier. Besides, any "less-than-lethal" methods that can reliably incapacitate targets have a very real risk of killing children or the elderly—and many child-soldiers are hopped up on various drugs that often render less-than-lethal methods ineffective, anyway.
• Just in general, in all discussions of the use of force, it must be remembered that what justifies force is actually "double effect". You're never fighting to kill the enemy, whether as a soldier or as an individual acting in self-defense. You're always, rather, fighting to remove the threat that he poses.
  
  It's just, the only reliable way to render a person no-longer-a-threat, is to incapacitate them, and anything that will reliably incapacitate a human in a safely-short amount of time, stands a good chance of being fatal. But, remember: if the other guy poses enough of an immediate threat that you have to use force to subdue him, and he dies because of it, that's not your problem.
• A part of my felinoids' code of chivalry is not killing women, for two reasons. First, they restrict women from combat roles except in directly defensive fighting (their military has a lot of women in it, but they're in non-combat support roles)—and intentionally killing noncombatants is "murder", not war. Second, their chivalry is more overtly feminist than ours, and it's seen as redress for the centuries when their women's status was like that in our ancient history—before their new religion came along, they had the same honor-killing, bride-selling, marriage-by-capture, etc. as the pre-Christian Greeks or Romans.
  
  I don't remember if I'd mentioned it before, but the Peacekeepers pretty much station women anywhere they do men. The felinoids—who kill, I think, about half a million Peacekeepers in a few years' worth of war—would just as soon the humans not make them kill women. But they're not idiots; just like the rule "don't shoot the farmers" is amended by the additional fact "the farmers have machineguns and they're aiming at you", so too is the rule "don't shoot girls" amended by "the girls are trying to kill you".
• An interesting thing, and one I have not seen in much science fiction (because most SF authors seem to be too lazy to address the issue), is that the humans and felinoids had to create synthetic nutrients, amenable to each other's metabolism, if they took prisoners of war. Because some of us know that aliens and humans are unlikely to be able to eat each other's food.
  
  My felinoids still bring real food—"grasshoppers", mostly—on their ships, rather than synthetic nutrients or in-vitro meat. They have no moral qualms about meat-eating; do you think obligate carnivores would ever develop vegetarianism? Besides, even though their actual social organization is closer to jackals than cats, you can't put hundreds of large predators in fairly cramped quarters for months without tempers flaring. Decent food is one less source of stress.
• I like coming up with alien ROE. I think I've touched on this before, but my felinoids are pretty nice—they offer surrender before battles, for instance, whenever they don't need to retain the element of surprise, and they'll usually tend enemy wounded (though they take them prisoner). Except, if a unit deliberately provokes them by committing atrocities, they become markedly less nice. They stop offering surrender, they continue attacking retreating enemies until contact is completely broken, and they leave enemy wounded where they fall.
  
  Even then, though, if someone throws down his weapons and surrenders, they'll take him prisoner rather than bayonet him, and they won't do anything to those wounded they're leaving. There are, after all, a number of levels in between "war of gentlemen" and "no quarter".
• Speaking of SF foodening, I think my Peacekeepers' MREs are basically Cup Noodle, with, one hopes, somewhat better nutrition. I have something not unlike the thing in Bebop, with the heating element in the bottom; I just like the idea.
  
  Come to think of it the actual military rations probably aren't quite like Cup Noodle, since that's rather bulky, but you know the sort of stuff I mean. The aforementioned Bebop-esque thing is something a civilian eats, while traveling in space.
• I think I've mentioned this before, too, but it bears repeating ad infinitum: nobody really fights over territory. Peoples come into conflict over territory, but almost all wars are actually triggered by something else, that causes the conflict to get dangerous.
  
  I myself have said, remember, that the only thing for humans and aliens to fight over is habitable planets, since no spacefaring civilization would be that hard up for any natural resource.¹ That's the easy part. The hard part is, "What does one side or the other do, to make tensions flare up?"
  
  And seriously, I cannot stress this enough, no misunderstandings. I honestly cannot think of a single misunderstanding that ever caused a war. Which is not to say the tensions cannot flare because of some cultural difference, but it can't merely be something completely innocent, like "we greet the enemy by powering up our guns", like started the Minbari War in Babylon 5. Wars are not that stupid—in the Minbari example, no culture greets potentially hostile strangers by baring a weapon, except that the writers needed the war to be started over a misunderstanding. I.e., PlotInducedStupidity.
  
  What does cause wars, is things that one side thinks is more serious than the other does. For instance, in mine, the felinoids didn't like the humans dissolving freely-entered contracts purely for regulatory purposes—as many modern nations have occasionally done, since Benito Mussolini invented their economic system. In the felinoids' history, only slaves could have their contracts dissolved by fiat like that. Everyone knows what empires do, when you treat their citizens like slaves.
• You know the problem with all those "we re-set the Napoleonic Wars in space" series? Aside from the "Space Is an Ocean" assumption implicit in the idea, and how they're always from the English (or equivalent) point of view, and therefore have a villain protagonist.
  
  The Napoleonic Wars are a lousy basis for that kind of thing, because the naval component was small and only marginally relevant. The English didn't win those wars, Russia did. And not "the Russians", I mean Russia, the country—Mother Russia, sending her snows to defeat the invader, just as she would later do to Hitler (not that Hitler is morally or intellectually worthy of being compared to Napoleon).
  
  Here's an idea: come up with your own damn basis for a war. I guarantee it, if your setup is remotely realistic, all the politics will mirror some real-life war. As for the mechanical aspect, well, the whole point of SF is that you figure out how things like "war" will work if they occur between, e.g., two civilizations with fusion rockets.