Around the french revolution was the first introduction of a rudimentary idea of national conscription - levee en masse, an evolved form of feudal levees, covering all citizens of the republic.
As you quoted Clausewitz - he is most often connected to the development of 'total war'. His participation in the Napoleonic wars and being defeated by Napoleon spurred him to write Vom Kriege, which greatly influenced late 19th and early 20th century military thinking in Prussia (and later, everyone else as well). It's not a fair accusation though I think, I've come to see total war more as an inevitability that naturally followed the reorganised political landscape and the necessity for a large scale, industrialised effort to support warmaking in that timeperiod.
These days there's a bit of a reversing trend in some sense, as manpower is becoming ever less important vs the technology we can deploy. No need for massive armies in a battlefield ruled by sensors, drones, AI and missiles.
On the topic of why civilians are killed: there's often a few main reasons:
- if the objective of war is territorial gain or annexation, the people living in the targetted area are usually expelled elsewhere, or killed.
- As war prolongs and one side starts losing, it is increasingly likely that the losing military will deliberately target civilians, out of frustration or desperation.
- In a civil war fight for power/territory, an entire peoples can be labelled mortal enemies, spurring events like the Rwandan or Bosnian genocide and other identity-based violence.
- Insurgencies, terror cells and other groups that are at a huge military disadvantage often target civilians as a deliberate tactic to provoke excessive responses & overextend their enemies. They may also use civilians as shields.
- Covert operations can target civilians. There's plenty instances of armed groups attacking civilians with the purpose of shifting blame elsewhere.
Lastly, in very intense conflicts civilian casualties are plenty because of the quick pace and brutality of the fighting. Once you are caught in a warzone, it can be hard to escape, and many people find themselves stuck between warring armies. Civilian casualties can be unintentional, but a lesser known fact is that some armies have guidelines for assessing an acceptable number of civilian casualties as collateral damage to take out a target. I'll subtly imply here that the US and Israelis have been known to use such assessment frameworks. Other countries just may kill indiscriminately. See for example the destruction of Grozny by the Russian armed forces in 1999-2000.
Overall it should be noted that civilians are of course an important part of war dynamics. It is vital to warring factions to gain implicit or explicit support of civilian populations to continue a war effort, conversely, if the purpose is to break an enemy one path to victory could be to strip their civilian support base. As such, civilians are and will remain targets in warfare as well, for various reasons.
I'm sure I may have forgotten some but the above list is reasonably comprehensive I think.
Last edited by Larssen (2020-12-21 08:44:51)
