War is inherently violent. It is also no secret that atrocities happen in most armed conflicts. The laws of war are designed to prevent them, and to limit the impact of fighting on the civilian population. But what of “strategic violence”, military measures ordered at the highest level to achieve political objectives? Over the past three years of Russia’s war, we have seen the widespread use of aerial bombardment, for example in the coastal city of Mariupol, to demoralise Ukrainians. We have seen the continuing targeting of civilians in Sudan. We have seen Hamas’s brutal attack on Israeli towns and villages on 7 October, which was intended to spread terror, and we have seen Israel’s devastating response in Gaza which has been punitive as well as purely coercive.
Despite its capacity to inflict overwhelming force against most potential adversaries, the United Kingdom has not been engaged in these sorts of operations for a very long time. The deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq saw some isolated abuses, but in general all three services have shown considerable restraint towards non-combatants, neutrals, and captive enemy servicemen. During the Kosovo and Libyan air campaigns in 1999 and 2011, for instance, the targeting officers always had legal advisers on hand who would try to ensure that risk to civilians was minimised. The constraints these posed were vividly dramatised in a different context by Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman in the 2015 movie Eye in the Sky.
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