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Yeah, it sounds like our moral intuitions are really greatly different. I don't know what was the trigger for that, but I felt visceral disdain for the whole notion of innocent civilians in a democracy for as long as I can remember - the whole thing just seemed like some sort of pickpocket's attention trick with moral responsibility where a large swath of people elects politicians to enact their will and serve their interest, but the voters refuse to take responsibility for their government's actions because they're just civilians and politicians refuse to take responsibility because they are just following the voters' will. As I see it, conscripted military in a democratic country are the ones who it is least just for someone attacked by that country to retaliate against, because they are coerced into doing what they do and often are not even allowed to leave before completing their service. The civilians who vote and their elected representatives, and to a lesser degree even those who don't vote but freely choose to stay and benefit, should be fair game.
Is it really that bizarre? As an intuition pump, what does the total morality thing say about obligatory meat consumption? Does the wrongness of the Inuit hunter who tries to kill the walrus to feed his family and the walrus that gores the hunter trying to kill it sum up to >=1? I would consider dodging this question by saying that the walrus can not be a moral subject to be a copout.
Well, draft dodging is a thing in most democratic countries, as few countries provide the kind of coercion which would get people to assist a serial killer.
In my mind, there is a kind of pyramid of responsibility.
On the lowest rug is the taxpayer. Most democratic countries do not wage total wars most of the time, so it is likely that only a small fraction of their productivity goes towards sustaining the war. Intentionally targeting these civilians is generally considered a war crime, but they may become collateral damage.
The next rug are people working full time for the war effort in low end jobs. This includes the conscript but also the person who works in a munitions factory or writes software documentation for killer drones. Killing them during their work seems a legitimate tactic to me.
Then you have the specialists, like fighter pilots, star programmers of smart munitions and so on. I think these might be legitimate subjects of targeted elimination.
Then you have the leadership, like generals and politicians. Legitimate targets.
(Note: I am not a lawyer or ethics expert, please consult with your lawyer and spiritual guidance provider before killing anyone.)
Ideally, you would want to achieve your tactical and strategic goals with minimum loss of life. Practically, the easiest way to neutralize enemy infantry is to shoot them, which is why every army in the world has weapon systems for that purpose. Sometimes (e.g. WWI), the best strategy is to to feed your men into the meat grinder and hope the enemy runs out of people first. Sometimes, it is mostly about taking out high tech materiel or leaders and any grunts killed are only collateral. Sometimes people decide to go for the tax base of their enemy, but we have thankfully agreed that the military benefits are too low to justify the costs in human lives and call these people "war criminals".
I will grant you that if Hamas had killed a thousand IDF conscripts on Oct 7 instead of civilians, that would not have achieved any strategic or tactical goals either. Still, I think the distinction of "unarmed civilians" and "soldiers" forms a very useful Schelling fence.
I think in that case I might be okay with the outcome of the struggle for life.
If I were a follower of Odin who thinks that battle is good, I might say the warriors of tribes A and B are both totally justified in trying to murder each other, because I like the resulting outcome (war).
Instead, I am a normalish modern Westerner who thinks that modern war is terrible, an inadequate equilibrium to be avoided almost all of the time. There are a small number of cases where war may be justified to remove vast amounts of negative utility, e.g. by liberating Auschwitz. But if the argument for side A being justified hinges on "if they win the war, this will create a better world than if they lose it", then the argument can not be true for both sides at once.
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The feeling of visceral disdain debaters have and targets of their disdain hardly are evidence whether the argument is worthy.
I think there exists plenty of theoretical literature on whys and hows why our laws of war are such as they are, if one would search for it. My personal intuition is that it comes down to cold raw game theory calculus from Clausewitz and has only a little to do with fairness. The purpose of the war is to achieve goals, and such goals are political in nature, like everything else in the affairs of states. If you attack the enemy's military forces (name that is latched to their primary war capabilities) and win, you render your enemy less capable to achieve their political goals, including their ability to resist your ability achieve your own goals. After a decisive battle or a series of them and utter destruction of enemy's capability to fight, you have control over territory and the population. You may redraw borders, force a change of government, force evacuation of population or property, all because you have territorial control and thus can install an occupying force to enforce your will. It makes the attacks against military targets appear neutral: what you do after victory depends on what you will. The aim and goals of victr may be just, unjust, or in between, they are are up to decision makers of respective belligerent. The method of war itself is much more constrained by the technological capabilities.
A terror attack against soft civilian targets alone, at the usual levels of seriousness and scale, won't itself affect the enemy's primary capability fight a war, which makes it capricious. You will not achieve territorial control with a regular terror attack against civilians, because by definition, the civilians have not military capability to oppose you and the enemy's hardened military capability has not lost a battle, thus it is still present. You are essentially no longer fighting the enemy but blackmailing the enemy, betting that they won't stomach the slaughter and cede the political goal out of their own volition from their moral considerations. Thus terror attacks against civilians appear ethically distasteful by the method alone. (Specifying "usual level" as weapons of mass destruction or conventional means taken to extreme level, to destruction of whole economic base or genocidal destruction of population, can have military effect, but such effects are difficult to achieve without involving military forces. And if you start including military targets, logistics and industries in your terror attack, then it is properly called a guerilla campaign, and it is considered more acceptable in laws of war, though the line is murky and propagandists' brush wide.)
The laws of war offered one thing missing from all previous wars: a means for a loser to have a just peace. Adversaries who win justly allow a faction in the losing party to sell peace to their populace. Vae victus and all, but woe turns to bitterness morphing into revanchism instead of acceptance when the war is prosecuted 'unfairly'. Russians didnt give that much of a shit about Afghans that ground down soldiers, Americans seem fine with Vietnam and even Iraqis despite COIN being a fucking shitfest, even Jordan and Egypt are cool with Israel now. That is because the 'winning' entities did not (at large scale) engage in indiscriminate and militarily dubious acts we term 'war crimes'. However if we were to go to parties with long standing grudges, the things that always stand out are 'unjust' massacres against civilians. Palestinians now against Israelis, Ukrainians against Russians, everyone in Eastern Europe against Russians, like 40% of Arab tribes against the goatfuckers in the next valley.... thats a grudgin.
Oh, as for direct military value: ambushes are fine, ambushes from within civilian areas are bad because the ambusher gets civs killed by removing the nominal protection otherwise offered. Chem and bio warfare are mutually destructive. Only one that needs a major update is dazzlers, but I can assure members of this board that dazzler tech has reached levels WP level of fuckery. Next big ones gonna be a doozy.
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"Answering the question is a copout."
You can't just declare something to be a copout and thus make it so.
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