act for a second the laws of war actualy matter, and you care about PR.would it be lawfull to have a spiderweb attack like ukraine did but directly go after the pilots and mainteinance personel that takes more time to train than a plane?there are also some bases that house the family of pilots on site, would it be a warcrime to launch a EARTH SCHORCHER 3000 missile on the base or can you warn them before hand and tell them to surrender somehow
You can kill enemy combatants it's not the problem.Finding them is the problem.Mechanics aren't that valuable, you can train any car mechanic to service a jet fighter in a month.
>>65202891>would it be lawfull to have a spiderweb attack like ukraine did but directly go after the pilots and mainteinance personel that takes more time to train than a plane?Uh, yes? Russia went to war against Ukraine, their country isn't some "can't tag me no hit backs" schoolyard safe space. Going after direct military personnel is perfectly legal whether they're actively operating attacks or resting in a barracks or out for a walk or whatever. Some civilian collateral damage is ok too, though this gets into unironically trickier arguments about "proportionality" and so on. Ultimately the "laws of war" are fundamentally about national interests and state geopolitics, obviously there is no World Police here to enforce anything. A lot of them are pure Game Theory good sense, because there's a lot of asymmetric ratchets in war where basically if just one side does it they gain a little advantage at cost, but if both sides do it neither gains any comparative advantage but both are much worse off. Like to take the classic chemical weapons example, if two sides are fighting over a city, and they dowse the entire area in toxins, it doesn't even help much because each side gets hurt and then puts on NBC gear/vehicles (or nowadays just uses more robots) and now the area is shit for whoever wins. So it makes total self-interest sense for both to agree not to do that and just fight it out normally. Morality barely even enters the picture.Other ones though are fuzzier, so it'd come down somewhat to whether everyone thought it was reasonable or not. If your attack specifically nails only soldiers that's easy. If it hits a big group of soldiers but also has some civvies who were invited to a party, that's still pretty clear though there might be more whining. If you drop a thermobaric bomb in the middle of a theme park to take out one maintenance guy you may get judged.
>>65202919also>there are also some bases that house the family of pilots on site, would it be a warcrime to launch a EARTH SCHORCHER 3000 missile on the baseWTF? No, of course not. You can use any conventional weapon you've got on a fucking military base you fucking retard. If this was some autismospeak for "nuke" then that has it's own set of massive complications but nuking a military base would be about the most legit target one could do short of nuking nukes.
>>65202891>some bases that house the family of pilotsAttacking civilians never goes well for the attackers until 3 generations later.
>>65202924Would it be a war crime to launch a TACTOM Block V at a barracks converted into an elementary school but still located on the premises of a military base?
>>65202924Napalm/white phospor/thermobatic/cluster.
>>65202963Russia recently claimed that a strike on a military training center was a war crime, and rolled with it so hard that they submitted a UN complaint and had Putin himself cry about it on TV. So by the russian definition yeah it's a war crime
>>65202963Oh I see this is some sort of roundabout iran war faggotry thread. Sure whatever. That said:>Would it be a war crime to launch a TACTOM Block V at a barracks converted into an elementary school but still located on the premises of a military base?Depends on if they knew or should have reasonably known with reasonable due care that it was an elementary school. If yes then certainly 100% warcrime. It's a civilian use structure housing children, duh of course you can't "legally" hit that (remember, you set the conditions that we're taking as given the laws mattering and "PR" mattering).If they legitimately thought, having done legit target selection and surveillance within their capabilities, that it was an active use military structure, then that they were wrong wouldn't make it a war crime. But it'd have to actually be real, and not mere "wink wink oh yeah we totally asked some guy" or "the AI said so guiz".
>>65202993Im OP, and i did not ask about that.Dont turn evet single thread in a pol shitter please>>65202963
>>65202968>Napalm/white phospor/thermobatic/cluster.What of it? If the country has domestic laws against use of those weapons, or has signed any treaties about it, then it's a crime to do so whether it's against civilians or military (against civilians would layer on more crimes on top of course). Like, here's the signatories of that cluster munitions treaty thing. Notice how zero of the major military powers, or any of the direct combatants here, signed it. So it has nothing to do with them.Some weapons might be covered under more generic statutes, but you'll find the devil is in the details on those. Like, there are pretty old rules (1980s) that almost everyone agreed to around stuff like UXOs, which fucking suck for all involved and by that point it was getting really obvious how much a lingering problem that was. So you're supposed to>"Take generic preventive measures aimed at minimizing the occurrence of explosive remnants of war."But that's not very prescriptive, and can be approached in multiple ways. Like, you could spend money just to try to make sure all your submunitions explode. That's militarily valuable anyway, you're trying to destroy shit on the ground of course you want your weapon to fucking work. But you can also argue that is in-line with the treaty, because it's about explosive REMNANTS, ie UXOs, not explosive USE. Obviously, if you don't use it it can't leave remnants, but if you use it and it doesn't leave remnants that's fine too.
>>65202998>public sector>not even directly with the empireWhat? How is being a government worker not working directly with the government?
>>65203148Do you have any idea how many jobs at your average military base are filled by civilian contractors
>>65202998>i did not ask about thatYes you did.
>>65203156Do you have any idea what public sector means?
>>65202891>personel that takes more time to train than a planeThe planes hit during Spiderweb were effectively archeotech with no way to replace at all, though.
>>65203165i fucking didnt
I'd say it depends on who your enemy is. Turdie pilots barely get up in the air so their planes are more valuable. But if you can kill like 25+ western pilots the cost of their training may exceed the material loss of airframes. And they'd be more sensitive to the personnel losses. Whether that's a good thing or not.
>>65203287Part of the equation is that if the families are still on base, there's not an active international hot war going on. So that earth scorcher 3000 is going to be a surprise attack from the shadows, the kind that absolutely pisses off a nation enough to send them into a frenzy. Early war attacks on civilians tend to incur a lot of wrath: the best example would probably be the one already mentioned in this thread, the Brits getting bombed indiscriminately in WW2 and having zero hesitation to burn germany to the ground as a result. A more recent example would be the Bucha massacre in Ukraine in early 2022, which turned a lot of neutral/fence-sitter ukrainians into TZD fanatics.
>>65203323The families will always be on base if they allow it. There won't be enough time for an evacuation order against a first strike missile attack. It would be fucking stupid to announce you're going to go to war with someone then letting them fortify their air defenses instead of just blowing them up immediately before they can deploy or react.
>>65203458And in what way does any of that change what I said in my post? I didn't describe it as a war crime because it's probably not. But it's the kind of attack that just isn't worth it in the long run because of the political consequences.
>>65203531Blowing up an entire air force on the ground has a shitload of military benefit. You're referencing saturation bombing which hasn't been a real thing since the 60s.A lot of this shit happens every single war, but you only hear propaganda blowback when someone fails opsec.
>>65203016You know, this makes me wonder how military bases in population centers square with the convention on certain conventional weapons's incendiaries section.I'm guessing unless you badly miss and hit a lot of shit well outside the base it's probably fine.Also, iirc thermoberics aren't covered under it. Maybe it matters if it's the full on gas cloud kind or the some powdered metal shit added to the HE kind
>>65202891There's a point where "targeting civilians" and "using human shields" intersects. I think if you're at the point where you're using preschools to spoof for military targets its fair game to just hit the preschools
>>65203798Ahh, the Timothy McVeigh approach. Doesn't quite work as an individual, but as a country you bet.
>>65202891IHL mainly cares about "distinction" and "proportionality." Distinction means only striking military targets. Proportionality means the force used is not excessive relative to the military value of the target.The real problem is there are massive gray areas. Obviously, countries are going to have their own definitions of what constitutes a military target and what is a proportional response. There are some international law cases that delve into this, but they aren't binding precedent, and essentially impossible to enforce.For your example, deliberating droning the pilots and mechanics directly supporting war machines attacking your country almost certainly satisfies both the distinction and proportionality prongs. You're going after military combatants and an FPV drone is probably the most targeted means of hitting them.For your second hypo, it might be okay or might not. You're probably fine on distinction, it's a military base and therefore fair game. What's less clear is proportionality. You'd want to think about the military value of the base and the available means to degrade its effectiveness. If you could achieve the same military effect by using PGMS on particular facilities, but instead elect to use a bomb that's also going to incinerate all the family barracks, that's probably not okay. But that's nearly impossible to prove ex ante. Unless there was some kind of smoking gun saying "we can 100% take care of this threat with lesser means" a commander is going to have a lot of leeway, especially if the base is extremely valuable. Flattening a strategic bomber with the FIGGER NUCKER 1488 is more proportional than using it against a random border guard training facility.
