Mike is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog Omniorthogonal.
There are no men, only artillery, infantry, cavalry. Huge masses and the instruments of their direction. Each member of these masses remembers everything and completely forgets himself. In this there must be and is pleasure…
— Tolstoy
Warfare is about killing people. Everyone seems to acknowledge that normal rules of moral behavior go out the window during war, but also that war is not completely free of rules – there are different codes of conduct that hold, and violating those rules gets will get you in trouble, especially if your side ends up losing. Nobody is quite sure what those rules are, and even less sure how such they are to be enforced. Soldiers are trained to kill, yet expected (at least in the modern era) to keep their killing carefully circumscribed. Killing civilians is a criminal atrocity when done at ground level, but perfectly acceptable when done from above. Or maybe the distinction is not altitude but scale, or whether the killing is authorized by someone who went to college.
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