The rules of war

Rule No 1: Ain’t none.

People who think there are rules in a contest like war amuse people who know there aren’t.

If Gandhi had tried non-violence as a tactic against the Nazi occupation, Stalin, Mao, or Tojo, instead of the upper-crust pinkie-extended British Empire, they would have made short work of him, and slaughtered millions if necessary, and still gotten their way.

You pick your tactics, certainly.

But imagining that war - any war, anywhere - is governed by rules is among the quickest ways to lose one.

There are certainly tactics that will be more successful, and ones that will be less successful.

The same is true for strategies.

History is replete with examples of either type, for both strategies and tactics.

But it contains exactly zero "Rules Of War", as such.

Rules are for games.

War isn't a game.

If you told Vince Lombardi to get the football into the end zone of the other team, he'd have used both ground and air attacks, within the rules of football, and accomplished that mission. Touchdown.

If you told George Patton the same thing, in a war, he'd have also used ground and air attacks, and gotten the football into the end zone as well. After killing or capturing the entire enemy team. If they'd lined up against him like it was a football game, they'd all have been killed in the first burst of machinegun fire. There would have only been one side left afterwards.

We tried to aid wounded enemy soldiers after the battle. Even in the Solomon Campaign in 1942. Until enemy wounded kept trying to kill our troops unto their dying breath. For them, the battle was never over. Okay, noted.

We didn't take a helluva lot of Japanese prisoners after that, and no one questioned that behavior, nor cited it as a violation of the imaginary Rules Of War. Not because the rules had changed, but because that tactic was foolish, self-injurious, and suicidal.

This leaves people who insist rules exist dumbfounded, and attempting gymnastics to explain the obvious reality:

You use the tactics that work.

When they don't work, you don't use them any more.

That's why nobody court-martialed Dudley "Mush" Morton for machinegunning Japanese survivors in the Pacific. Because the little bastards hadn't surrendered, and never would, even if captured. That hand got played out long before. The Japanese played by bushido, which prohibited surrender, and demanded fighting to the death, even if captured, on penalty of ultimate dishonor.

They lost the war, for a host of reasons, but not because of that tactic. (In fact, we think of that level of total commitment as pretty bad-ass when we discuss Leonidas and the Spartans, or the folks at the Alamo, don't we? We could cite further examples as late as Vietnam or even more modern times. So much for "rules”.)

Victory neither proves nor disproves one side's self-imposed rules as superior. One may fight "honorably" as their own side sees it, and still lose. Armies may fight "dishonorably", and be ultimately victorious.

Santa Anna didn't lose because he was dishonorable; he gave the occupants of the Alamo every chance to surrender and depart. He didn't ultimately lose because he killed them without quarter when they refused, no matter what Texans then or now think. He lost because he wasn't as good a general as he needed to be, and because Texas wanted independence more than Mexico wanted to keep it. Imaginary "Rules of War" had Jack and Shit to do with that.

In fact, seeing that Mexico could be bested in Texas led directly to peeling off most of the Southwest a couple of years later, because we could take it. We stole California, and most of Arizona and New Mexico in 1848, fair and square because we could. Not because of manifest destiny, the divine right of kings, or the designated hitter rule. It sure as hell wasn't because we followed a better code of conduct in war. We simply killed enough of them to induce them to concede the point.

That's Curtis LeMay's Theorem, not St. Augustine's, in action.

So yet again, I remind people cluelessly lost in delusion, there are no "rules" in war.

There are things you won't do. You decide that.

There may be some things a given enemy won't do.

And then again, there may not be.

When you don't get this, you wake up Sunday morning, and half your battleships are sitting on the bottom in the mud of their harbor, without warning.

Your tallest buildings may lie in a heap of rubble, intermingled with the molecules of the bodies of the former occupants.

Hundreds of your citizens may have been raped, slaughtered, mutilated, and kidnapped by an enemy that doesn't see you, and reality, the way you see it, concerning the proper conduct of warfare.

True on the American frontier any number of times from 1600-1900; true on Israel's border with Gaza last October.

This is as brilliantly insightful and at the same time bedrock-fundamental an essay on the workings of war as I can remember reading, and I’ve been a most avid student of military history since I was about twelve or thirteen years of age. Lots, lots more to it, the closing ‘graphs focused tightly on the Coming Unpleasantness and the relevance of the No Rules maxim to same, notably including a painfully apt stanza from the incomparable Rudyard Kipling, poet laureate of all professional soldiers.

So simple a child could understand it; so inflexible numerous otherwise talented and skillful generals throughout history have found themselves undone by it; so deathlessly relevant politicians are forever trying to evade, manipulate, or insist it must not, CANNOT be so, to their own personal gain and glory…and forever failing, to the immense cost of their long-suffering subjects.