Pistols, SMGs, Shotguns and the Military

[Anthony]

As far as I can tell, a dragon's breath round fires 'shot' which is actually lumps of white phosphorus. Which will do a dandy job of burning through any non-fire-resistant armor, and will create nasty burns, but won't get through any significant barriers, won't do anything to metal or ceramic inserts, and will suck for actual stopping power (people have a rather high probability of continuing to move even after quite severe burns). In general, if it will stop an assault rifle bullet, it will stop dragon's breath rounds.

Dragon's breath rounds would be fairly good at setting buildings on fire, but if that's your goal incindiary grenades work even better.

 

[TheBrain]

Originally posted by Uncle Bob:
[QB] I forget that not all police body armor is kevlar. Specta, and especially Zylon, come apart with a pistols muzzle blast, so Dragon's Breath would destroy it,

Dang after seeing the link you posted there Uncle Bob I wouldn't trust Zylon to stand up a blowdryer and a bbgun!!

 

[Uncle Bob]

A lotbof cops who paid extra for kight vests like "Goldflex" agree with you, and they are pissed. At least one armor maker is going bankrupt and trying to avoid giving refunds.

Mlitary vests use kevlar 29 and boron carbide inserts(IIRC), so at lwast we won't hear a scandle from Iraq.

 

[kaladorn]

The military interceptor armours will stop dragonsbreath and lots of other projectiles. Even the plate insert in the armour I saw tested stopped the 'solid' part of the shot. It just had a big deformation and that may have as much come from having hot phosphorus or thermite or whatever is in the round hit it as anything. But the outer fabric material was destroyed. And it may not have been kevlar, though I thought at the time that it was. <shrug>

 

[Uncle Bob]

The outer cover, of even a kevlar vest, is usually nylon, and burns like nylon.

 

[Whipsnade]

Ranger mused:

How significant is the Solomani tradition towards war felt in the 57th Century? Are the "Genieva Convention" rules still valid or are they viewed as a quaint and romanitic anachronisim like the "Code of Chivalry"?

Ranger,

Is the Geneva Convention still even known? In the 57th Century? And after 36 centuries? Score a laugh point. Tell me, how much of the city legal code of Ur is still known or used only 25 centuries later?

Terra is one world among 11,000, the Solomani are not Earthmen as we know them, and the Imperium has literally dozens of human military traditions on which to draw. Do you seriously think that one 'feel good' attempt to humanize hell, as Sherman put it, that was ignored from the very beginning by the nations that wrote it will really be of any interest to anyone in the 57th Century beyond antiquarians and academics?

As to the modern Law of War issues with shotguns, I would respectfully submit that they are very important, at least to modern Euro-American militaries.

And I would respectfully submit you're talkng through your hat while wearing rose-colored glasses. The various Hague and Geneva protocols and treaties outlawed dropped explosives from balloons and other aircraft. That, of course prevented modern Euro-American militaries from bombing Guernica, Dresden, Tokyo, Hanoi, and Baghdad among others. The various Hague and Geneva protocols and treaties outlawed the use of poison and chemcial weapons. That, of course, prevented modern Euro-American militaries from using mustard gas, lewisite, napalm, and Agent Orange. The various Hague and Geneva protocols and treaties outlawed sinking merchant ships without first warning the crews and allowing them to escape. That, of course, prevented modern Euro-American militaries from sinking the Lusitania, conducting two Battles of the Atlantic in two World Wars, and the hour-long machine gunning of IJA soldiers in the water after their transport sank by Mush Morton aboard USS Wahoo. The various Hague and Geneva protocols and treaties outlawed harming or robbing enemy prisoners or corpses. That, of course, prevented modern Euro-American militaries from talking medals, wallets, wristwatches, and whatnot from every prisoner they bothered to capture (remember the D-Day "No POWs for 48 hours" order?) and also meant that we didn't have to 'sanitize' US marines returing from the Pacific by separating them from their Japanese ear, teeth, and genitalia collections. Oh, and FDR didn't actually recieve a letter opener made from the forearm bone of a Japanese corpse.

Yessiree, the Hague Treaties and Geneva Convention sure made sure only legal stuff got done during wartime.

As I said, the US Army has shotguns and only uses them in very limited situations specifically because of LoW concerns. All but one of the situations that have been cited here fall under the catagory of what we used to call OOTWA (Operations Other Than WAr) where the line between combat and police operations is hard to define so you can use shotguns without running afoul of the LoW issues.

In other words, your LoW have enough built-in loopholes that the victor can claim they followed the law no matter what they actually did.

That's some law you got there, bucko.

The one example that is specifically combat related that has been mentioned is carfully constrained to legitimize the use of the shotgun as an engineering tool to demolish doors.

Oh sure. Let's see, I blow open a door with a shotgun, find several armed insurgents inside who are aiming firearms at me, and then ask them politely to hold their fire until I can drop the shotgun and draw the gun that I can legally kill them with. Yup, happens all the time. Tell me, what color is the sky in your world?

I'm pretty sure that is because US Army lawyers have made it clear that unless the use is specified as other than combat, you can't take a shotgun into the situation.

Lawyers don't walk point.

All the stuff you mention is there for public consumption. It's nothing but window dressing, PR bumf, and outright lies told to gloss over the awful truth. War is hell and legal niceties hardly ever enter into the pciture.

There is one Imperial LoW; Do Not Get Caught. Other than that, everything is fair game.


Bill

 

[kaladorn]

Bill,

I hate to disagree with you. Really. But I have to take up a few of your points:

1. Illegal stuff happens. No argument. But quite a bit of it (especially on the losing side) gets prosecuted. In some places, they even go after the winning side (themselves). So it isn't that the LoW don't matter. They just aren't a 100% shield against 'attrocities' or 'illegalities'.

2. The modern armies are influenced by political pressures. They don't exist in a vaccuum. That is one of the reasons they work so hard on non-lethal weapons and on visibly satisfying certain criteria. I know that the military up here now does not use landmines, DESPITE their military benefits, because the military is the servant of the government, and the government is the servant of the people, and the people have spoken. Now, if we were in an all out fight for survival, I think the people would change their tune. But as of now, we aren't. I think the Empire isn't for most of its time. So I suspect the same pressures will limit the Imperial Military as limit modern G20 militaries.

3. A law that is broken is not necessarily a bad law, as at least one of your statements would suggest. If that was the case, we'd toss them all away. Is that what you are suggesting? I think not. We have laws because they express what we wish to be the case, what we wish to prevent, and what we'll do about it when that doesn't happen. And thus the LoW have a value. I am quite sure that countless prisoners have been abused. I am also quite sure that the conventions covering the treatment of PoWs and international humanitarian law have made a difference in the treatment of prisoners.

War is hell. It will always be hell. But war without any attempt at boundaries is a worse hell, especially for non-combatants. Yes, of course, if one believed the LoW really worked and were uniformly applied, Bomber Harris and some other folks would have things to answer for, as would numerous Canadian units for their tacit policies of now POWs (they slow you down) in the two major upheavals of the last century.

At the same time, we did prosecute the Nazis and probably should have prosecuted a lot more Japanese. And I don't find it problematic that they went after the Canadians who engaged in torture and whatnot in Somalia - that kind of stuff needs to be rooted out. When you say these kinds of things are okay, that opens the door to further abuses - this is how stuff like ethnic cleansing comes to be sanctioned, as well as systematic rape and murder.

I wore the uniform in Canada and we were entirely cognizant of conventions and accords and how those restricted us operationally. Sometimes it made your job harder. Oh well, that's what being a soldier was about - you don't make the rules. Especially in a fight that isn't one for the survival of your nation.

We're all barbarians on some level. But the veneer of civilization speaks to the desire to curb that basic nature of its worst excesses.

 

[Whipsnade]

Originally posted by kaladorn:

I hate to disagree with you. Really. But I have to take up a few of your points: (big snip)

Tom,

Disagree away. At least I know your points will have some thought behind them.

FWIW, I agree with each every point you make. I also realize that the thrust of my argument was lost/barely present in my last post.

What I was railing against was the utter lack of imagination and the blatent cultural tunnel vision implicit in the baldfaced assertion that the Geneva Convention will somehow resonate 36 centuries from now. The Geneva Convention is only paid lip service now, why in Gehanna should it mean anything thirty six hundred years from now?

Just because a few nations on a backwater, low tech, balkanized, planet decided to 'outlaw' certain shotgun rounds occasionally and when it didn't discomfort their militaries, why should the Third Imperium do the same?

People complain about Traveller being little but 'Yanks in Space' and then go right ahead and plunk down Pawtucket, Podunk, and Peoria in their campaign. Can they really be that intellectually lazy? I had one fellow tell me in all sincerity that the Imperium 'must' have engaged in 'hearts & minds' campaigns aimed at the masses during it's early expansion otherwise it would have been brought down be revolt after revolt. Here's a fellow dragging 21st Century, liberal Western democratic, mass media, power of the people, global infonet assumptions into a setting where FTL comms travel at the speed of shipping and completely ignoring the total of human history that occurred before 1900. Good Sweet Strephon!

While straining at the seams to rule 11,000 worlds and 11,000 cultures, the Imperium will not be wasting precious time and resources checking to see if your shotgun ammo meets some mythical standard set down in the 'Laws of War'. If some Imperial official decides your shotgun ammo is illegal and can make it stick with his superiors, your ammo is illegal. End of story. There won't be some scrap of paper your lawyer can wave about to get you out of trouble. He may be able to argue precedents, he may be able to have some other official overturn the orignal decision, but he won't be arguing the case on statutes(1). It's a government of men and not laws, remember?


Sincerely,
Bill

1 - Welcome to the judicial system that most of humanity lives under now and the judicical system that the vast majority of humans lived under in the past. Do you seriously think the future will be different? Or do you secretly prefer 'Yanks/21st Liberal Western Democracries in Space'?

 

[kaladorn]

Though I see what you are getting at:

Whenever I hear 'government of men and not laws' I can't help but think this is someone's PR spin control machine in action.

Every government is a government of laws. Every government is also more importantly a government of bureaucracy.

The Imperium has large concerns, like fighting wars, maintaining Empire, etc. But personification of the Imperium is a mistake. The Imperium is a large bureaucracy with many heads.

I am quite sure that although Strephon and his Archdukes don't dwell much on illegal shotgun rounds, Jaanrii Akalugaan in the Office of Imperial Standards has quite a variety of data on the subject and somewhere there is some regulation that covers it, explicitly or vaguely, that was lobbyed for by X, lobbyed against by Y, supported and passed into law eventually by noble Q and his supporters or by some equivalent source. Or possibly it is just a homogenization of the rules of 100 member worlds, rolled into one common standard, as often happens.

I think the mistake here is in saying "The Imperium doesn't care about X". The Imperium doesn't care about anything. Individuals in the Imperium care about the things they care about.

The same pressures that brought the Geneva Accords into force may well see to it that Imperium has a set of similar laws. Who knows, maybe the Imperium's denizens are even MORE concerned about this - we're really not in the know about what John Q Public in 5400 worries about. At any rate, you can be sure there are some groups that care about these things.

Now, maybe Imperial law covers:
A) None of it, leaving it to local areas
B) An Imperial Standard, leaving additions to local areas
C) A Common Standard agreed upon by many areas, adopted by the Imperium
D) 1000 different standards, depending on where you are

Or some option I can't think of. Any, all, or combinations are possible.

Also, one thing rarely discussed. RCMP officers here to general duty policing in many places. They are Federal officers trained by the RCMP at Depot. ALSO, when on such contracts, they are municipal officers. They have 3 masters (RCMP HQ, their RCMP divisional (provincial) HQ, and their local municipality that pays their contracts via paying the RCMP for service). They serve them all. What does this have to do with it? Well, even in places where the Imperium itself has no law, they may well agree to have their customs folk or Marine boarding parties enforce local law as part of reciprocal agreements.

Anyway, this is all just grist for the thought mill.

Does the Imperium have Laws of War? Yes. Are they extensive? I'd suggest so since we know from canon that have at least 99 articles. What do they cover? Hmmm. Who knows!?! We can draw inferences. We can guess that they don't map (of necessity) to modern laws. But we can't necesarily conclude that they aren't driven by the same underpinnings of feeling and process that drive the modern ones. So it is quite possible that they resemble or are even more involved and restrictive than modern ones. Or not. But really, we're just making educated guesses, and not really all that educated given limited data.

You and I live at one point in history. We can look back at a lot of history and see how it differs from today and we can treat today as anomalous. It may be. Or maybe it is how things will always be in the future. Or we'll go further down modern paths even yet. We can't know. People living in a time can never really see their own time accurately - to my mind, that requires about 200 years of separation. Seeing the future is even more problematic. Making conclusions based on what went before is problematic.

I guess what I'm getting at is any and all answers are possible, with the right inputs. If you can tie together a theory of Empire that results in X, then it is workable for your game. I would be a little restrained in assuming that modern values doesn't apply (just as I would be restrained in assumign they do).

The real question, as I think that issue is utterly subjective given my prior stated thoughts, is what makes for the most fun an interesting game and how can we stretch the minds and imaginations of the players and GMs? What sorts of frameworks could exist? What sorts of logic underpins them? How can we make things interesting or fun? These are the real questions for those playing in a TU, rather than just with it (and honestly, most of us do more of the later than the former... and that's just natural given the pace of modern life and the fact many of us actually have to work to pay the bills... *grin*).

Anyway, I agree that the Geneva or Hague conventions may not apply, that there is no reason to assume they apply, but I also point out that similar conventions may apply (or even more restrictive ones), and that the things that drove these ones may similarly drive ones in the 3I. And lastly, that the 3I is a big place and probably encompasses almost every scenario for institutional and legal organization somewhere within its borders....

Tom

 

[Piper]

Originally posted by Larsen E. Whipsnade:
Is the Geneva Convention still even known? In the 57th Century? And after 36 centuries? Score a laugh point. Tell me, how much of the city legal code of Ur is still known or used only 25 centuries later?

<big snip>
Maybe more than we realize.
It's not the specific laws, but rather the concept of law that should apply here.
Law has grown like any other human endeavour; in fits and starts, two steps forward, one step back since the first laws were written down.
We don't have it right yet, and we probably never will.
But the Imperium does have the Imperial Rules of War and at least models their laws governing robot construction on the Shudusham Concords (dated -112, from LBB 8 "Robots").
This points to a system of laws and given the Rule of Man, it's not impossible that at least some laws were built on Terran foundations.
Laws governing armed conflict typically grow out of experiences, bad ones.
The Roman Catholic Church attempted to regulate warfare in the middle ages, European powers generally tended toward smaller professional armies after the wars of the reformation, partly in response to some of the atrocities commited, the League of Nations, Geneva Accords, U.N., etal.
You are absolutely correct in that many of these are ignored, bypassed, or applied only to the loser. But they still exist, even if only to validate the accusations of the winning side.
Still, it's perfectly reasonable to assume that the Imperium could have some equivalent of the Geneva Accords. Why not? They can choose to apply them when and where they wish and they make a useful tool for removing undesireable governments.

Sorry for the brutal snipping. I'm not trying to discount your arguments; I agree with most of them. I focused on that one point for emphasis.

 

[Ranger]

Originally posted by Larsen E. Whipsnade:
Ranger mused: </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />How significant is the Solomani tradition towards war felt in the 57th Century? Are the "Genieva Convention" rules still valid or are they viewed as a quaint and romanitic anachronisim like the "Code of Chivalry"?

Ranger,

Is the Geneva Convention still even known? In the 57th Century? And after 36 centuries? Score a laugh point. Tell me, how much of the city legal code of Ur is still known or used only 25 centuries later?

Terra is one world among 11,000, the Solomani are not Earthmen as we know them, and the Imperium has literally dozens of human military traditions on which to draw. Do you seriously think that one 'feel good' attempt to humanize hell, as Sherman put it, that was ignored from the very beginning by the nations that wrote it will really be of any interest to anyone in the 57th Century beyond antiquarians and academics?

As to the modern Law of War issues with shotguns, I would respectfully submit that they are very important, at least to modern Euro-American militaries.

And I would respectfully submit you're talkng through your hat while wearing rose-colored glasses. The various Hague and Geneva protocols and treaties outlawed dropped explosives from balloons and other aircraft. That, of course prevented modern Euro-American militaries from bombing Guernica, Dresden, Tokyo, Hanoi, and Baghdad among others. The various Hague and Geneva protocols and treaties outlawed the use of poison and chemcial weapons. That, of course, prevented modern Euro-American militaries from using mustard gas, lewisite, napalm, and Agent Orange. The various Hague and Geneva protocols and treaties outlawed sinking merchant ships without first warning the crews and allowing them to escape. That, of course, prevented modern Euro-American militaries from sinking the Lusitania, conducting two Battles of the Atlantic in two World Wars, and the hour-long machine gunning of IJA soldiers in the water after their transport sank by Mush Morton aboard USS Wahoo. The various Hague and Geneva protocols and treaties outlawed harming or robbing enemy prisoners or corpses. That, of course, prevented modern Euro-American militaries from talking medals, wallets, wristwatches, and whatnot from every prisoner they bothered to capture (remember the D-Day "No POWs for 48 hours" order?) and also meant that we didn't have to 'sanitize' US marines returing from the Pacific by separating them from their Japanese ear, teeth, and genitalia collections. Oh, and FDR didn't actually recieve a letter opener made from the forearm bone of a Japanese corpse.

Yessiree, the Hague Treaties and Geneva Convention sure made sure only legal stuff got done during wartime.

As I said, the US Army has shotguns and only uses them in very limited situations specifically because of LoW concerns. All but one of the situations that have been cited here fall under the catagory of what we used to call OOTWA (Operations Other Than WAr) where the line between combat and police operations is hard to define so you can use shotguns without running afoul of the LoW issues.

In other words, your LoW have enough built-in loopholes that the victor can claim they followed the law no matter what they actually did.

That's some law you got there, bucko.

The one example that is specifically combat related that has been mentioned is carfully constrained to legitimize the use of the shotgun as an engineering tool to demolish doors.

Oh sure. Let's see, I blow open a door with a shotgun, find several armed insurgents inside who are aiming firearms at me, and then ask them politely to hold their fire until I can drop the shotgun and draw the gun that I can legally kill them with. Yup, happens all the time. Tell me, what color is the sky in your world?

I'm pretty sure that is because US Army lawyers have made it clear that unless the use is specified as other than combat, you can't take a shotgun into the situation.

Lawyers don't walk point.

All the stuff you mention is there for public consumption. It's nothing but window dressing, PR bumf, and outright lies told to gloss over the awful truth. War is hell and legal niceties hardly ever enter into the pciture.

There is one Imperial LoW; Do Not Get Caught. Other than that, everything is fair game.


Bill </font>[/QUOTE]Well, first I would point out that the Law of War is an evolving thing, and always has been. The shotguns I mentioned initially are an example of this. Every rifle company in the 82nd Airborne had 6 shotguns. They were a Remington military design; they even had bayonet lugs and a specially designed 18 inch bayonet for each one. At some point the division lawyers had decided that because of the ammunition question, we couldn't use them in combat. That's obviously an interpretation that was focused on a very specific issue and a change since the time that the shotguns were initially purchased by the Army. The Army used shotguns in WWI, WWII and in Vietnam that I know of. For all I know, the thinking may have changed again, but that is the nature of law, it is something that is applied to a changing set of circumstances and prevailing attitudes over time.


It Law of War also somewhat counter intuitive and perverse in many ways. For example, you can't use a tazer in combat but you can use a flame thrower. Why? Because I tazer is not designed to be fatal and a flame thrower is. But there are some fundamental principles that are (relatively) constant:

1) No soldier (sailor, airman, marine) ever gives up the right of self defense. They may take actions to deal with any perceived threat they are facing.

2) No deliberate/intentional infliction of unnecessary suffering.

3) Only force that is both proportional to the threat and sufficient to achieve military objectives is legitimate.

Those are the basics on which modern Law of War is built.

Many of the examples you cited aren't technical violations of the LoW. For example, chemical weapons weren't banned until after WWI. Since then, very few nations have chosen to use them. Even Nazi Germany (a government that had no respect for human life) never used chemical weapons in combat. Napalm and Agent Orange aren't technically chemical weapons because they don't use a chemical interaction with the body to work. Napalm burns and Agent Orange is a defoliant. Even the US in Vietnam rejected the request of field commanders to use CS (riot control agent) to assist in clearing tunnel complexes because it is a chemical agent, and even though not fatal, using it in combat is a violation of the LoW.

No, lawyers don't walk point, but they do work at every tactical brigade HQ in the US Army. In Bosnia we had to pass every operation through legal review. We had to have permission from a 3 Star General to use a CS grenade (but we were free to fire our personal weapons if we felt the need to defend ourselves). The LoW is much more integrated at every level of military operations today in the US and UK militaries than it ever has been, and it only seems to be moving more, not less in that direction. Of course there has been backsliding as well, but the overall trend is towards more rather than less.

The trend has been for the last 300 years or so for LoW to become more restrictive and more elaborate. That is a short time period when looking at the timeframes in Traveller, but it is not something that I think we should just dismiss either.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

One very good reason for laws of war, which I don't think anyone has mentioned yet, is simple self interest: if we agree not to do it to them, they'll agree not to do it to us. There will almost certainly be rules prohibiting unneccesary suffering and ensuring the decent treatment of POWs.

There will also be laws prohibiting excessive collateral damage and desruption of trade, because that's expensive, and the one thing the Imperium cares about above all is money.

 

[Uncle Bob]

Ranger, I don't doubt that happened. Lawyers at CENTCOM refused permision to use a Hellfire on the fleeing Taliban chief, which gave Rummy a fit. By any chance was this during the 1990s? JAG said shotguns were OK before and since.

In any case, I can't see rules restricting hollowpoint ammo and other small arms. The Imperium is to pragmatic for that.

Andrew, that is the whole idea behind LoW, but it doesn't work very well. The London Blitz, the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo, and the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were all attempts to maximize civilian suffering in contravention of the Rules of War.

It has been sixty years since American POWs were treated according to the Geneva Convention (you know the world is going to Hell when your last "honorable" enemies were the Nazis). Largely, I think, because those enemies didn't care what we did to their POW anyway.

There have been a couple of cases where that principle worked. The Germans had nerve gas in WWII, but never used it becausse they thought we did too. And the MAD stand-off kept nuclear annihilation off for forty yesrs.

I concur with you on the Imperial Laws of War. They will prohibit deliberate targeting of civilian targets and look very dimly on CBR, especially with persistant agents. Nuclear weapons will be common for space-to-space, so I doubt they can be outlawed. 1-5 KT tac nukes are probably acceptable, depending om targeting.

OTOH, I can't see blockades and sanctions being very common, except for Red Zones with no economic benefit. They rarely work, and can cause dislocation and suffering. Kim II Soong's people have been starving for years and it hasn't slowed their nuclear program. And it can be argued that the Iraqi people suffered far more during ten years of UN sanctions then from ten weeks of war.

 

[kaladorn]

Two points:

I think the chemical weapons situation in WW2 was as much an acknowledgement of the difficulties of successful employment as any 'mutual destruction' issue. Everyone who studied WW1 learned a lot about the difficulty in successfully employing airborne chemical weapons. Even today, we have thermobaric weapons, but they only really work well under a fairly specific set of atmospheric conditions.

Second, when was the last time America was at war with a country that signed the Geneva or Hague Accords? (I don't actually know if Iraq or Vietnam ever did) If I recall correctly, the accords mainly apply between signatories. Many of the asymetric enemies engaged today are not signatories so we should not expect appropriate treatment from them (nor they from us).

Third, let me show another concern: Because these standards exist and are applied between civilized nations and because the public believes in them, this has impact. I have heard tell of a number of militant rebel groups the world over (in Rim Pac countries, in other areas of South America, etc) who have actually had to moderate the way they fight their guerilla wars against the aggressors. Why? Because press coverage and international attention means they would lose outside support (critical to their efforts) if they were scene to be in widespread violations of publicly percieved human right conventions. So they've had to really tone down how they handle gov't POWs, who they attack, how they attack. Why? Because *the outside support is more important to them*. Now, in conflicts that aren't heavily supported from the outside (the Chechens, I think, might be one example), they can be as nasty as they can imagine because they don't have any outside paymaster to answer too. They also have little hope. Hence the conflict spawns things like Beslan. But for the places where there is outside aid and it does matter, public perceptions of how a revolutionary movement carries itself really do matter.

And I'm also sure that once some of the truth of the vietnam situation started coming out, that hurt the administrations of the day with voters.

So, in any system that is accountable, there is a fundamental thought - if your public believes the standards should be adhered to, then *they* are the ones the government has to answer to (or hide things from, but that only works for so long).

I think the LoW will be extensive IMTU. Their enforcement will vary, as will they depending on the nature of the conflict. They won't *be* the Geneva or Hague conventions, but they will have some of the same roots.

And local laws and regulations may also be applied. After all, it won't do for the Imperium to seem more barbaric than the locals, not if they're trying to win a peace and reconstruction type effort. In fact, they'll have to make every effort to look like the white hats in OotW.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

"The Germans had nerve gas in WWII, but never used it becausse they thought we did too."

Churchill intended to use CW if Britain was invaded. There were also plans for the US to use them if they had to invade Japan.

"Many of the asymetric enemies engaged today are not signatories so we should not expect appropriate treatment from them (nor they from us). "

That's not an excuse for us to sink to their level. We're supposed to be the good guys.

 

[flykiller]

That's not an excuse for us to sink to their level.

one is left wondering precisely what that level is. our recent blockade of iraq that left the country so impoverished that the childhood death rate increased, by all accounts significantly. meanwhile the ruler himself was left largely untouched. perhaps the phrase "weapon of mass destruction" should be viewed a little more generally than simply meaning a specific deliverable device.

 

[kaladorn]

Originally posted by Andrew Boulton:
Churchill intended to use CW if Britain was invaded. There were also plans for the US to use them if they had to invade Japan.

Really, once you've went nuclear, chemical weapons don't seem much of a stretch.

That's not an excuse for us to sink to their level. We're supposed to be the good guys.

We're also not supposed to be the stupid guys. Don't get me wrong, I don't advocate just any old kind of treatment, by any means. But let us just say I knew a terrorist attack was planned in a city and had one of the key planners but he wasn't talking. If I don't compel him to talk, possibly hundreds of people die. If I do compel him to talk, maybe they do not. That's the kind of situation where the decision is a tough one - if you grant him the human rights he won't grant others, all of a sudden you are effectively complicit in the deaths that he causes.

Anyway, my point was, if you aren't a signatory, you aren't legally protected, that was all. What should or should not befall unprotected persons is a whole other matter ('detainees' aren't my favorite situation either....). Just that the legal framework is there to protect those that agree to follow it from others who follow it. You follow it because it is a *reciprocal* document.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

flykiller, it wasn't the sanctions that hurt the Iraqis, but what was done with the funds/things that WERE allowed into the country.

Ranger, Bosnia (Aug 96-Feb 97) was a legal nightmare. And, sometimes mistakes get made by the good guys: the day I noticed the vehicle being used to block the gate/be a bomb barrier to camp was a medical transport is one example. It took us most of the day to elevate the situation to the battalion commander and get it replaced. (They could have just covered the red cross on the side.)

I see there being a very formal set of rules at the Imperial level, which are honored more in the breach beyond Capital. Then, each Admiral is going to fight according to his code of ethics, as long as that doesn't violate 3I rules enough to bring it to the attention of the wrong person. And, each world/conflict will get treated differently, as well, according to the situation.

 

[veltyen]

But let us just say I knew a terrorist attack was planned in a city and had one of the key planners but he wasn't talking. If I don't compel him to talk, possibly hundreds of people die.

The imminent threat doctrine that excuses torture. The next step is of course torturing everyone you capture just in case they may have useful information. It does really come down to "know" versus "suspect" an imminent attack. Of course if your superiors are telling you that they "know" you will have a certain amount of pressure to confirm this.

It becomes far worse once you label a section of humanity "terrorists". This gives you carte blanche to torture the lot of them.

Of course Libertarians and militia groups have commited crimes before. Even killed people (cf. Oklahoma City). That of course means that torturing US citizens should also be fine. You might need to call it a "police action" so you can avoid the Law of War, an executive order is enough for that.

Gang members kill people. Therefore torturnig suspected gang members (suspected because they are the right race, or look close enough) should also be fine, it might stop a drive by shooting sometime.

I always giggle a bit about anyone preaching regime change through the use of force. This is the definition of terrorism. Does this mean that american troops should be tortured under the same guidelines?

In some ways this comes back to the complete change in what a war crime was in WW2. Not changing it would have required executing all of the french resistance heroes at the end of the war. By glorifying resistance to occupation is why we have ended up with much of the situation we are in.

By the way, being a signatory does NOT mean that you can use these weapons against non-signatories. The state in question has agreed not to use these weapons in this manner. Whether their opposition has signed is immaterial.

 

[kaladorn]

What was a war crime didn't really change, veltyen. I think the definition of War Crime has always been 'that which the winning side can make stick'. I say so because we notice that the people who ordered Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki never faced War Crimes trials, nor did Hirohito and there was scarcely a sufficient accounting for the affairs in Hong Kong and subsequently.

As to your final paragraph, let us take a read back through the conventions. I think you will find things are not anywhere near as clear on this point as you think. I've read them. I disagree with your assessment. Whether the opposition has signed is *very* material. (Note, this may depend on the particular convention as not all read the same).

Furthermore, this is a mucky issue. You live in Australia and have the kind of attitude I might expect from reasonably secure Westerner. (That's not a shot, btw). I contrast this with the attitude I've seen out of Russians - they don't care (much) if their police are 'nice' or 'gentle' as long as they are 'effective' and 'not corrupt'. They are having so much trouble with domestic organized crime (who are basically doing the same types of killings as terrorists, though with a bit more focus on economic motivations) that they have the perspective that gentle or kind or even compassionate isn't a requirement, just effective and honest. You and I probably would be abhorred by their methods, but we don't live in that kind of situation.

Anyway, this is divergent into the real world. That begins to mark this as political pulpit stuff if we keep that up.

Save to say that the third Imperium can be whatever you want it to be. If you want it to be a more Westernized 'white hat' kind of state in your TU, feel free. More power to you.

In my TU, they are focused on keeping the Empire together, protecting their territory and the system of government which they believe is the best available option (true or not). As a consequence, sometimes they'll play hardball. They might give the Zhodani some amount of respect when they take them prisoner (and expect the same), but when Sylean Rangers go after the Ine Givar militant cells, it is no holds barred on both sides. Prisoners strictly optional. To quote (I believe) an SAS-inspired book title "Big boy games, big boy rules."

In short, the Empire has a public image that says it wears a white hat. Where it has that luxury, it does so. Where things get tight, it can sometimes get it's hands a bit dirty.

Fritz, I mostly agree with you except that I think the Imperial LoW are likely obeyed in large part in most of the secure regions of the Imperium and in conflicts with other similar powers (the Zhos and Swordies for instance) from whom reciprocity is expected/demanded. But versus those who show they are barbarians, sometimes (quietly) the veneer slips and the steel underneath the velvet glove shows through. Where the rubber meets the road, if the enemy plays dirty and the Imperium starts losing because of it, they get down in the dirt too. Ultimately, they generally aren't willing to stick to the LoW to such an extent as to handcuff themselves and to lose wars.