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The idea is that killing enemy is not necessary, just destroying their ability to fight. And there's incentive to be not too murderous expecting the enemy will

• _carbyau_ 2y ago
  Until you are losing. At that point the decision makers fear their lives are lost. That's when the rules go out the window. War is not a polite game of chess played by a nation. It is emotions, fears, consequences for individuals at every level. When the war goes well you may compromise, you may not. But when survival is on the line everything comes into play - no compromises. What do you have to lose?
  • aebtebeten 2y ago
    > What do you have to lose? If that were true, all wars would end in genocide rather than treaty. That they do not* is evidence that often, people —even individually— eventually decide what they have to lose is that which they have not yet lost. (War, like chess, is a negative-sum game. The same calculus applies to the "victors"; I worry that people in the Old Country often forget this aspect.) EDIT: also, the point of being either a noncombatant or a recognised combatant (who only followed lawful orders) is that you are then protected at the end of hostilities, so already your "nothing left to lose" has assumed (perhaps correctly!) a world in which the Geneva Conventions no longer have any meaning. * consider: the US was losing in the Chiến tranh Việt Nam yet left without dropping The Bomb; Great Britain was losing in the US Revolution yet failed to do whatever the XVIII equivalent of glassing the colonies might have been (yes, they were busy globally with France, so they were a tad distracted, but still...)