Massacring Civilians Doesn't Win Wars
Waging war against civilians is the recourse of cowards and is self-defeating. And then come the war crimes indictments
We continue to be stunned by daily reports and images of Russian troops indiscriminately massacring Ukrainian civilians, obliterating cities, shelling schools and hospitals, raping, pillaging and starving the population. It’s as though, failing utterly in warfare, the Russians are going on an uncontrolled rampage of vengeance against the Ukrainian people. Just this week, the authorities uncovered another thousand civilian corpses north of Kyiv. The civilian death toll in the destroyed city of Mariupol is estimated at at least 20,000, according to the mayor.
Military strategists conclude that Moscow’s aim in carrying out such wanton destruction is to break the spirit of the Ukrainian people, crush their will to resist. But, if Russian leaders studied their history, they would see that such tactics rarely work, except occasionally in constrained geographical areas such as Grozny and Aleppo. When applied against nations of tens of millions, the results are mixed at best.
To win a war, military commanders need to know their Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, not their Attila the Hun and Vlad the Impaler.
Communities of people tend to be surprisingly resilient. During the three Roman-Jewish Wars of the first millennium AD, the Romans massacred 6,000 Jews in a single campaign, turned the Second Temple into a pagan site, changed the names of Judea and Jerusalem to Syria Palestina and Aelia Capitolina, respectively, banned the Torah, slaughtered religious scholars and scattered the Jewish population to the corners of the Mediterranean and beyond. Fast forward to today. Who else cares to take on Israel?
Third Reich planners called for “the complete destruction of all Poles” in 1939. The Nazi occupiers killed 3 million Polish Jews and over 2 million ethnic Poles, including up to 100,000 members of the intelligentsia, during World War II. Some 150,000 Polish civilians, moreover, were killed by the Soviets during their occupation of eastern Poland; and another 100,000 Poles were murdered by the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army during the war. About 90 percent of Polish deaths were non-military in nature. Poland survived genocide and today is a frontline defender against Russian aggression.
While he did not outright advocate attacking civilians, Prussian military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz did maintain that the civilian population of an enemy country should be made to feel a war’s effects, and be coerced into exerting pressure on their government to surrender.
U.S. General William Tecumseh Sherman, who may have studied Clausewitz at West Point, echoed the master strategist’s views in relation to the Civil War: “We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war go terrible . . . [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.” While Sherman ordered his commanders not to directly attack civilians, most else was fair game, notably the South’s economic means.
As World War II raged on, the British made the German civilian population a fair bombing target, with RAF chief Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris stating a goal was to destroy “the morale of the enemy civil population.” Though the Americans strove to limit their bombing missions to military and economic targets, this, too, shifted late in the war with devastating fire bombing of Japan. General Curtis LeMay, aware he was responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths, later stated, “I suppose if [we] had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.”
The Allied “strategic bombing” of civilians helped to gradually undermine the will of the German and Japanese to prosecute the war. But for a long time, the bombing of civilians only stiffened their resolve to fight on. They surrendered only after their countries lay in ruins, hundreds of thousands had lost their lives, and hope of victory vanished. As for the British themselves, the German Blitz on cities, killing 30,000 civilians, only stiffened British resolve.
There is a whole body of law devoted to the rules of armed conflict called International Humanitarian Law, centered in the Geneva Conventions of 1949. They specifically protect people who are not taking part in the hostilities, notably civilians, health and aid workers and specify that civilian hospitals “may in no circumstances be the object of attack . . . .” Russian forces in Ukraine have deliberately destroyed over two dozen hospitals, including maternity facilities. Russia is a signatory of the Geneva Conventions.
The Ukrainian government has announced it is opening its first war crimes trial, in the case of a Russian soldier accused of killing a civilian. Russian sergeant Vadim Shysimarin, 21, a tank commander, shot dead a 62-year old unarmed man, who was on a bicycle and talking on his phone. He faces 10 years to life in prison if found guilty. Two other cases reportedly will be heard in court soon, including an in absentia trial of a Russian soldier accused of rape and murder. Ideally, there will be constituted in the future an international tribunal to try those accused of war crimes, as has been done for Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda and other cases.
History has proven two things: 1) wars are won based on, as Clausewitz asserts, “the destruction of [the enemy’s] forces,” not on “blind aggressiveness,” which will “destroy the attack itself, not the defense;” and 2) committing atrocities only feeds the zeal of an enemy’s will to resist. Russian tactics and strategy in Ukraine — such as they are — reflect stupidity and ultimate self-defeat. The evidence includes a dozen Russian generals killed in action, the sinking of the prize ship of Moscow’s Black Sea fleet, the chaos in logistics, the massive losses of men, tanks and armored vehicles and the simple failure to achieve intended territorial gains much less regime change.
Waging war against civilians is the recourse of cowards.
Pursuing a victory based on breaking the will of the adversary, as opposed to undermining their military capacity to resist, is destined for failure. And then come the war crimes indictments.