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The Laws of War really aren’t that detrimental to the effectiveness of modern armies in waging a conventional war. Like, at all. The Laws of War don't stop armies from rolling over their enemies with ruthless efficiency. They don't stop you from launching a surprise attack on sleeping solders, blowing their food and water supplies to kingdom come and letting them die of exposure, nor gunning them down as they flee. They didn’t stop Schwarzkopf from massacring retreating Iraqi columns with impunity, nor Thatcher from sinking an Argentine cruiser outside of the 'exclusion zone', and then leaving the surviving sailors to fend for themselves, just because she thought it was looking a bit sus. The Americans basically wrote the Laws of War, you can be sure they didn’t write them in such a way that they would intentionally hamstring themselves.
On the counter side, Japanese war crimes against both civilian population and enemy soldiers did nothing to aid them in the war. The Japanese were unable to break the morale of their enemies, their vicious tactics won them no strategic advantage, the Americans simply returned inhumanity for inhumanity, and hundreds of thousands of Allied and Japanese and Chinese soldiers and civillians died hideously and unnecessarily and to no net benefit. Meanwhile the treatment that they inflicted upon the Chinese (among others) has created an enmity that is still going strong one hundred years later. Hardly a strategic win.
Terror bombing simply doesn’t work, and that includes bombing of civilian infrastructure that the military typically doesn't need anyway. We didn't really know that in 1940 but we do now. In WW2 neither the British, nor the Japanese, nor the Germans rose up against their masters as the proponents of such bombing hoped. When bombed, civilians become outraged at their enemies. When bombed terribly, they become deeply despondent. Attacks on factories, rail hubs etc are at least somewhat effective, but of course those are all legitimate targets anyway. The only exception I can think of is the atomic bomb, and that was less about the number of people killed and more about being a demonstration of an unbeatable weapon.
You could argue that modern legal norms have made occupations more difficult, and while that is a far more defensible position (though one I would still argue), it really has nothing to do with the Laws of War. Occupations are not wars. But anyway, the enmity that the rapes of Nanking and Belgium created were not at all worth whatever trifling military advantage they bestowed, even before taking into account the propaganda wins they gave their enemies, and inevitable reactions they invoked from other nations.
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