Our nation has a duty to protect the lives of our soldiers and call them into combat only when necessary for a just end—ideally, serving with allies with whom we have cultivated strong relations of trust. Unfortunately, over the last three decades, the United States and some of its allies have increasingly tried to spare their soldiers through the increased use of bombing and remote-directed autonomous weapons.

The United States is losing touch with the central moral principle embodied in the Hague and Geneva Conventions and their protocols—namely, that sparing civilian lives must always be prioritized over short-term military advantage. Even before those protocols, the authors of the U.S. Constitution incorporated such norms by giving Congress the power to “define and punish” offenses by the U.S. military “against the Law of Nations”—i.e., international law—and Congress used this power in writing the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the 1996 War Crimes Act.

There is a reason that the principle of sparing civilian lives became a cornerstone of international law. The long experience of humanity has taught us that if military power is guided only by considerations of strategic advantage, unrestrained by respect for innocents, it will decimate civilian populations even for slight tactical gains or for small increases in protection for their soldiers. When any nation or militia group fights this way, it communicates total disrespect for the general population of its adversaries, treating them all as legitimate targets, or even as morally irrelevant. 

That is a disastrous result. It leads to atrocities like the obliteration of 90 percent of Gaza in an effort to kill Hamas fighters, the Israeli strikes on hotels in Beirut and the accidental American bombing of a girls’ school in Tehran because of the casual use of outdated intelligence. In fact, according to a ProPublica exposé, the Trump administration even scrapped the Pentagon’s new Civilian Protection Center, “lowered the authorization level for lethal force, broadened target categories, [and] inflated threat assessments”—all in order to justify even more bombardment.

The hatred engendered by such indiscriminate abuse of noncombatants (which can include attacks on vital infrastructure such as water treatment facilities and power plants)—radically curtails prospects for long-term peace and the friendly relations between all nations called for in the Helsinki Accords. President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seem to think that safety for the United States, Israel, and our men and women in uniform is best secured by teaching more of the world to despise us—a result sure to mint more terrorists for generations.

In the United States, we have long educated the young men and women at our military academies to understand why it is vital to resist this slide toward convenient but indiscriminate tactics that lead to civilian casualties glaringly disproportionate both to tactical gains and to the soldiers’ lives that might be preserved. Our soldiers are expected to accept more risk to themselves in order to reduce the risk both to American civilians and to noncombatants in places like Iran, Gaza, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. 

That is no small thing. Shouldering such extra risk should earn any human person high honor. And it is what distinguishes our soldiers from terrorists who target defenseless civilians or use them as human shields.

But our political commanders have been betraying this solemn principle, taking us down a slippery slope. Going back to the “Black Hawk Down” spectacle in Somalia in 1993, the political cost of military casualties has caused leaders in the United States and allied nations to rely more and more on bombing as a military tactic. After U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea that there should be no American “boots on the ground” has become popular (understandably) among voters who may not grasp that the only real alternative is widespread bombardment, resulting in perhaps 10 times more civilian casualties than there would be with the careful use of ground forces.

The message of undervaluing civilian lives

There are many problems with relying on bombing as a politically easy way of making war. First, as Mr. Trump’s sickening war memes illustrate, it encourages facile political leaders to view urban carnage and destruction as a video game. As Cardinal Blase J. Cupich recently commented, treating “the suffering of Iranian people” as entertainment entails a sickening loss of humanity.

Second, overdependence on bombardment comes across to ordinary people caught in the crossfire as arrogance. It communicates a sense to victims that the attacking country is doing it “just because it can”—an impression Mr. Trump confirmed when he said the United States might strike Kharg Island in Iran again “just for fun.”

Third, it appears cowardly to wage war from remote control centers without encountering and working with people on the ground, as our soldiers had to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. All the two-way learning from such collaboration is also lost.

But by far the worst aspect of our bomb-first tactics is that they effectively rate civilian life in the target nations as worth far less than our own soldiers’ lives. This is an often-overlooked aspect of “proportionality” (as widely understood) in just war principles. According to Catholic doctrine, just war theory and international law, the damage from a miltary attack should be proportionate to the military gains (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 2309). But in addition, the costs to civilians on all sides cannot be disproportionate to the risks placed on soldiers. This norm is sometimes also called the “principle of precaution,” or “due care.” As the moral theologian Tobias Winright argues, militaries have a duty to reduce harm to noncombatants “even if doing so means taking risks on the part of combatants.”

Israel has flagrantly violated this requirement in Gaza. Its military leadership argued that the casualties from leveling Gaza’s urban centers were proportional to military gains. But it could have achieved the same or better results with ground assaults, going from building to building. Instead, Israeli forces chose, for example, to level an entire high-rise apartment for a 20 percent chance of killing one Hamas fighter, rather than risk a couple of Israeli soldiers in a search of the building.

That is the exact inverse of the moral principle at the heart of the international law of war. The requirement to distinguish between military personnel and civilians, along with the principles of proportionality and precaution, mean that democratic nations must be willing to put at least two of their soldiers in harm’s way if necessary to spare one civilian life on the enemy side. This can be hard for armed forces to accept, especially in a nation like Israel, with a military draft. But Israel’s tactics in Gaza killed have over 55,000 Palestinian civilians while losing 927 of its own personnel.

Perhaps the fact that Hamas, in effect, uses civilians in Gaza as human shields for its guerilla tactics justifies a higher civilian death count. But even so, if Israel could have cut civilian deaths to a level below 20,000, even at the cost of 1,000 to 2,000 more of its soldiers in ground operations, it ought to have taken on that additional cost. The same reasoning applies to civilian deaths from the American and Israeli bombardment of cities and infrastructure in Iran.

The European allies must be included here too. In partnership with the United States, they have fought the same way—from the air only—against ISIS in 2014-17, and they attacked Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq by blitzkreig rather than sending in their own ground forces. Most damningly, they failed to commit a single European soldier to stop Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine. The courage to place several European divisions into eastern Ukraine in January 2022 might have prevented the subsequent horrific war with incalculable costs in human lives and to prospects for the survival of democracies against rising autocracies. But Europe’s leaders refused to risk a few thousand of their soldiers even to stop the most dangerous tyranny on the planet.

This way of war—by high-altitude bombing and arming proxies to do all of the ground fighting—is a moral outrage. We have to teach our citizens to understand those hard-won principles that gave us the Geneva Conventions before we pass beyond the point of no return into “forever” wars by maximally convenient means.

[Also read: “The Trump administration treats war like a video game.”]

John Davenport is a professor of philosophy who teaches ethics, political philosophy, democratic theory and human rights at Fordham University. He is the author of The Democracy Amendments (Anthem 2023), which examines 25 proposed constitutional reforms, and A League of Democracies (Routledge, 2019).