Royal Army College

Lesson Overview

This last lesson brings the course down to what the Royal Kaharagian Army actually does. The full law of armed conflict is the law of war, but the RKA is far likelier to be delivering relief after a disaster, supporting a peace, or aiding the civil authority at home than fighting a high-intensity battle. Its real tasks are search, relief, public order, and presence, and in those tasks the law lives mostly through the Rules for the Use of Force. This lesson sets the law in those operations: which body of law governs when there is no armed conflict, how a soldier uses force under the Rules for the Use of Force, the humanitarian standards a force assisting civilians must respect, how a soldier decides under stress, and the hard cases of operations with the disciplined answer to each. It closes the course where the first lesson began: the law and the Army's values point the same way.

The earlier lessons gave you the law. This one is about keeping it. The law is hardest to keep exactly when it matters most, when a soldier is tired, afraid, grieving, or provoked, and no amount of classroom knowledge holds by itself in that moment. What holds is drill: conduct rehearsed in advance until it comes without thought. Treat this lesson not as more to memorise but as the bridge between knowing and doing.

By the end you will be able to name the operations the RKA is likeliest to undertake and the law that frames each, explain what governs the use of force in peace and on home soil, apply the graduated response and the soldier's Rules for the Use of Force card, describe the humanitarian standards for a force assisting civilians, make a lawful decision under stress by a settled drill, meet the hard cases of operations with a disciplined response, and apply all of this to the real settings the RKA will face.

Key Terms

Human rights law: the body of law that protects every person at all times, in peace and in war alike; where there is no armed conflict, it governs how a soldier may use force.
Rules for the Use of Force (RUF): the Army's standing rules governing when and how a member may use force in the ordinary course of duty, including in support of the civil authority.
Rules of Engagement (ROE): lawful, mission-specific orders for a particular operation, which govern that operation within the limits of the law and override the standing rules.
Graduated response: the disciplined escalation of force only as far as necessity requires, and its reduction the moment it allows.
Humanitarian principles: humanity, neutrality, and impartiality, the standards by which civilian relief is provided, by need and without taking sides.
The soldier's card: the pocket card every member carries, which puts the Rules for the Use of Force into seven plain rules to be known, carried, and followed.
Decision under stress: the deliberate practice of slowing the moment as far as it allows, applying the drill, favouring restraint where doubt remains, and accounting afterwards for what was done.

What the RKA actually does

The Principality is small, and its Army is far likelier to be sent on a few kinds of operation than into open war. It may deploy on humanitarian assistance, bringing the Army's discipline, transport, and reach to bear after a disaster at home or abroad. It may serve on peace-support and observer tasks, helping to keep a peace others have made, monitoring a ceasefire, or protecting civilians under threat. And it will, from time to time, be called to aid the civil authority at home, supporting the lawful institutions of the Principality in an emergency the civil services cannot meet alone. Each is a serious operation, demanding the same discipline as battle, and each is framed by law, though not always by the same law.

The deciding question is whether there is an armed conflict. The full law of armed conflict applies only in armed conflict, and most of what the RKA does will not be that. In peace, on a relief task, on home soil in aid to the civil authority, the law that governs is human rights law, the law that protects every person at all times, together with the law of the Principality and the Army's own Rules for the Use of Force. The difference is real. In armed conflict a soldier may, within the rules, target an enemy combatant because of who they are. In peacetime there are no combatants to target; there are only people, every one of whom is protected, and force may be used against a person only when it is necessary to meet a threat, and only as far as that threat requires. A soldier who carries the conduct of war into a peacetime operation has broken the law, not kept it.

On home soil one principle governs above the rest: the civil police hold primacy. The Army aids the civil authority; it does not replace it. The police lead, the Army supports, and a soldier in aid to the civil authority acts under that authority and within its limits, never as a law unto themselves. This is the constitutional position of the Army, an instrument of the lawful civil power and subordinate to it, and it shapes everything a soldier does on a home operation. It is taught in full in the Aid to the Civil Power and Public Order course; here it stands as the frame within which all the worked cases of this lesson sit.

The use of force: the graduated response

Because most RKA operations are not war, the everyday question is not "who may I target" but "when, and how much, may I use force at all." The Army answers through its Rules for the Use of Force, and every member should know their governing principles by heart. Force is used only under lawful authority, only where it is necessary to a lawful aim and lesser means have failed or plainly would, only in the minimum degree and for the minimum time, only in proportion to the threat, directed only at those who present it with care for everyone else, never to punish or humiliate, and always accountable afterwards through honest reporting. Nothing in these rules removes a member's inherent right to defend themselves and others against an imminent threat of death or serious injury; but even that defence must be necessary and use no more force than is reasonable in the circumstances as the member honestly believed them to be.

Hold those seven principles as a single test, because under pressure a soldier will not work down a list. Necessity asks whether force is needed at all; minimum and proportionality ask how much; distinction asks at whom; humanity sets the line that nothing crosses, no cruelty and no humiliation, whatever the provocation; lawful authority and accountability bound the whole act before and after. As one question, the test is plain: is this the least force that a lawful aim genuinely requires, against the person who presents the threat, and could I account for it honestly afterwards? If the answer is no on any part, the force is wrong.

Where the situation allows, force follows a graduated response, rising only as far as necessity requires and falling again as soon as it allows. The steps are these. Presence, the visible, disciplined presence of the Army, which often settles a situation by itself. Verbal, clear instruction, warning, and de-escalation. Control, proportionate and trained physical restraint. Defensive force, to meet an assault. Less-lethal means, where these are issued and authorised. And, last of all, lethal force, only as a last resort, only against an imminent threat of death or serious injury, and only when nothing less will serve. A member is not required to attempt a lower step where doing so would be unsafe or plainly futile against an immediate, grave threat, but the principles hold throughout.

The graduated response is best pictured as a ladder a soldier climbs only as far as forced, and comes down the instant it is safe to:

   RISE only as far as necessity demands    |    each step needs its own justification
                                            |
   ^  6  LETHAL FORCE      last resort only; imminent threat of death or
   |                       serious injury; nothing less will serve
   |  5  LESS-LETHAL       only where issued AND authorised
   |  4  DEFENSIVE FORCE   to stop an actual assault
   |  3  CONTROL           trained, proportionate physical restraint
   |  2  VERBAL            challenge, clear instruction, warning, de-escalation
   |  1  PRESENCE          the calm, disciplined presence of the Army
                                            |
   FALL the moment the threat eases    -->   step back down, report what you did

Two things about the ladder matter more than the steps themselves. First, every step up is a fresh decision that must meet the whole test of the principles, and so is every step down: you do not stay high because you went high. Second, the great majority of RKA tasks are settled at steps one and two and go no higher, because presence and a calm word do most of the work, and the disciplined soldier is the one who can hold there under pressure rather than the one quickest to climb.

Every member carries the soldier's Rules for the Use of Force card, which puts the whole of this into seven plain rules. They are worth setting out as they are carried:

   ROYAL KAHARAGIAN ARMY: RULES FOR THE USE OF FORCE

   1. Use force only when NECESSARY, and only the MINIMUM needed.
   2. You always have the right to DEFEND yourself and others against an
      imminent threat of death or serious injury.
   3. CHALLENGE and WARN before using force, whenever it is safe and possible.
   4. Use force PROPORTIONATE to the threat. STOP as soon as the threat stops.
   5. If you must fire, fire AIMED, CONTROLLED shots at the threat only.
      Mind what is beyond your target.
   6. PROTECT the wounded and anyone who has stopped resisting. Give first aid.
      Never mistreat anyone.
   7. REPORT every use of force, honestly and fully, as soon as you can.

   These standing rules are overridden only by lawful mission-specific
   Rules of Engagement issued to you as orders.

The card is the soldier's law in the hand, to be known, carried, and followed. Read it the way the Weapon Handling and Safety course teaches you to read the cardinal rules of the weapon: not as a passage to recite once, but as a drill so settled that the right thing happens before deliberate thought catches up. Rule six is central to this course: the protection of those who have ceased to resist, the same protection the law of armed conflict gives to those out of the fight, carried into every operation the Army undertakes.

One thing alone overrides these standing rules: lawful, mission-specific Rules of Engagement, issued to a member as orders for a particular operation. Where such Rules are issued, they govern that operation within the limits of the law. Standing Rules for the Use of Force are the soldier's default; lawful Rules of Engagement are the exception, and nothing else displaces either.

Helping civilians: the humanitarian standards

When the Army assists civilians, in a disaster or in support of a relief effort, it enters a world with standards of its own, and a disciplined soldier respects them. Two sources frame this work: the Sphere minimum standards, which set out what people affected by crisis are owed, and the Oslo Guidelines, which govern the use of military assets in disaster relief.

The first principle is that the soldier supports and does not supplant the civilian effort. Relief is led by the lawful civil authorities and by the humanitarian organisations whose work it is; the affected state holds the primary responsibility for its own people, and a military force comes in to fill a gap those efforts cannot close, not to take the work over. Military help is best kept to the things a military does well, transport, engineering, logistics, the infrastructure of relief, with direct hands-on assistance to civilians treated as a last resort, used only where there is no civilian alternative and the need is urgent. The relief operation as a whole stays under civilian humanitarian direction even where soldiers carry it out. The soldier is the supporting hand, not the master, of the effort.

The second principle is that relief is given by need and impartially, in accordance with humanity (human suffering is relieved wherever it is found, with care for the most vulnerable, the children, the women, the old, the sick), impartiality (aid goes solely by need and in proportion to need, without discrimination by ethnicity, religion, politics, or any other status), and neutrality (the soldier on a relief task does not take sides in the quarrels around it). The aim is the plain one the Sphere standards name: that people in crisis can live with dignity, with the water, food, shelter, and care that dignity requires. A soldier delivering relief gives it to the family in greatest need, not to the family on the right side, and in a way that does no further harm. This is the same care, owed to everyone by need alone, that the Combat First Aid course teaches at the point of a wound, applied here to the relief line.

These standards are not a softening of the soldier's role. They are its discipline in this setting, exactly as the Rules for the Use of Force are its discipline in another, and a soldier keeps them for the same reason: because they are the line between a force that helps a population and one that, however well meant, does harm.

Making the decision under stress

Everything above is the easy part, because it is read in a quiet room. The hard part is that the moment a soldier must apply it is almost always the worst moment to think clearly. Stress narrows attention, fear produces tunnel vision and selective hearing, fatigue degrades judgement as surely as drink, and anger quietly suspends a soldier's normal standards toward the person in front of them. None of this is rare; all of it is the ordinary condition of operations. The professional answer is not to pretend it away but to build conduct that survives it, and to know in advance the few moves that hold when judgement is poor.

The first move is to slow the moment by the margin it allows. Most wrongs in operations are not cold decisions to do evil; they are good soldiers, frightened or grieving or unsure, who acted faster than they needed to. Few situations require an instant act, and the soldier who takes the half-second, the step back, the extra word of warning, the second look, very often finds that the situation resolves itself or that the threat was never what it seemed. Where there is genuinely no time, the right of self-defence still holds; but the habit to build is to assume there is more time than panic claims, and to spend it.

The second move is to apply the drill, not the feeling. This is why the Rules for the Use of Force, the card, the graduated response, the detainee sequence, and the reporting steps are rehearsed in calm conditions until they are instinct. A soldier who has run the drill a hundred times in slow time will produce a recognisable version of it when tired and afraid, and that trained version, not the raw impulse, is what should decide. Feeling tells a soldier what they want to do; the drill tells them what they may do.

The third move is the tie-breaker, and the most important line in this lesson: when in doubt, favour restraint and protection. In the operations the RKA undertakes, the cost of waiting half a second too long is almost always smaller, and almost always recoverable, while the cost of acting half a second too soon may be a life that cannot be given back and a crime that cannot be undone. So where the picture will not resolve, the trained default is to step down, not up: to hold fire, to use the lesser means, to treat the doubtful figure as the protected person, to ask rather than guess. This is the same rule the course has met before in another form: in case of doubt, a person is a civilian.

The fourth move comes after the act, and it is part of the decision, not separate from it: account for what you do. Every use of force is recorded and reported honestly through the chain of command as soon as it can be, factually and fully, what was done, why, and with what effect. A soldier who knows in advance that they will have to give an honest account tends to make a better decision in the moment, because the question "could I explain this truthfully afterwards" is one of the surest tests of whether an act is right. The record protects the public, the soldier, and the Army, and it is the foundation of the accountability the principles require. The Signals and Field Communication course teaches the form of the report; the duty to make it honestly is taught here.

   DECISION UNDER STRESS: the four moves, in order

   1. SLOW IT      take the time the situation allows; assume there is more
                   than panic claims. Step back, look again, warn again.
                       |
   2. DRILL IT     apply the trained drill (the card, the ladder), not the
                   raw feeling. What MAY I do, not what do I WANT to do?
                       |
   3. WHEN IN DOUBT, STEP DOWN     favour restraint and protection.
                   Treat the doubtful person as protected. Use the lesser means.
                       |
   4. ACCOUNT      report honestly and fully, as soon as you can.
                   "Could I explain this truthfully afterwards?"

These four moves are the practical heart of this lesson. They do not replace the law; they are how a frightened, tired human being actually keeps it.

Applying it: the work the RKA will meet

The law becomes real only in particular situations, so consider four that the RKA will genuinely face. Each has a lawful, restrained course, and each has an unlawful temptation that a soldier under pressure will feel. The discipline is to know both in advance, so that the right course is already chosen before the moment arrives.

A search, and a frightened civilian who behaves oddly. A section is searching homes after a disaster, or under a lawful task in aid to the civil authority, looking for the missing or for a specific hazard. At one door a person behaves strangely: they will not meet a soldier's eye, they move suddenly, they reach into a bag, they back away or shout. Fear reads this as threat, and the temptation is to treat the odd behaviour as hostile intent and escalate, to grab, to shout down, to raise a weapon. The lawful course is the opposite. Most frightened people behave oddly because they are frightened, of the disaster, of armed strangers in their home, of what is happening to them, and behaviour is not by itself a threat. The soldier slows the moment, keeps a steady distance and posture, lowers rather than raises the voice, explains plainly who they are and what the search is for, gives the person room and a clear instruction, and watches the hands without treating the person as guilty. Force, if it is ever needed, is the minimum to meet an actual threat, not an answer to strangeness or non-compliance. The search stays within its lawful purpose and keeps the dignity the Aid to the Civil Power and Public Order course requires. The unlawful temptation resisted here is to convert fear into a fight.

A relief distribution that turns disorderly. A section is handing out food, water, or supplies, the need is real, the supply is short, and the crowd presses, pushes, and begins to surge. As the line buckles, the temptation is to restore order by force, to shove the crowd back hard, to brandish a weapon, to threaten, perhaps to hand the supplies to whoever shouts loudest or to a local figure who promises to keep order in return for his people being served first. Each is wrong. Force used to manage a hungry crowd is rarely necessary and easily disproportionate, and a crowd holds the old, the young, and the frightened among the pushy; supplies given by influence rather than need break the impartiality that is the whole basis of the work. The lawful course is to manage the disorder by method, not by force: to control the flow through presence and a calm, clear voice, to slow or pause the distribution rather than fight the crowd, to call for the civilian organisers and the police whose task crowd control properly is, and above all to keep giving relief strictly by need, to the sick and the children and the most vulnerable, whoever they are and whatever any local figure demands. The soldier supports and does not supplant; a distribution kept orderly by patience and impartiality does the job, one held by force and favour does harm in the name of help. The unlawful temptation resisted here is to trade the impartiality of relief for the quickest restoration of order.

A public-order cordon, where a soldier is provoked and spat at. A platoon holds a cordon in support of the police, in a disordered crowd. A man pushes to the front and screams abuse an inch from a young soldier's face, then spits at him. Every human instinct says answer it: shove the man back, strike him, step out of the line to deal with him, say something cutting. To act on any of that is the unlawful temptation, and on a cordon it is also the gravest tactical error a soldier can make. A soldier drawn out of the line is isolated, and an isolated soldier is a gift to a hostile crowd and a worse one to a camera; a blow or an insult struck in answer to provocation is force used not from necessity but from anger, which the principles forbid absolutely, and it converts a man's bad behaviour into the Army's wrong. The lawful course is to hold the line and hold the bearing: to stay in rank, to take the provocation in disciplined silence, to say nothing that should not be said, and to let the police, whose task it is, deal with the man if he must be dealt with. Spitting and abuse are provocations designed to draw exactly the reaction the soldier must not give, and to stand under them unmoved is the harder and more professional thing, the difference, caught on a camera, between an Army the nation trusts and one accused of using force it had no business using. If the man commits an assault that must be answered, it is answered by the drill, on command, with the line covering, and by the least force that stops the harm, not by a soldier settling a personal score. The unlawful temptation resisted here is to repay provocation with force.

A detainee taken at a checkpoint. A soldier, under a lawful task and a proper basis, stops and detains a person at a checkpoint or control point, perhaps someone caught in a serious wrong, perhaps a person who must be held briefly to prevent harm until the police can take charge. The temptation, especially if the person resisted, insulted the soldier, or is suspected of something grave, is to treat custody as a licence: to handle them roughly beyond what control needs, to question them hard, to humiliate or frighten them, to keep them longer than necessary, to skip the record. All of that is unlawful. A detained person retains their protections from the first moment, whatever they are suspected of having done, and the soldier holds them as a citizen in uniform with no special power, using only the force needed to control them and no more. The lawful course follows the same sequence the Prisoners and Detainees lesson taught for a captured person, carried into the home setting: control the person with minimum force, search them safely and with dignity, protect them from harm and from a hostile crowd, give first aid and water and shelter as needed, never strike or mock or interrogate them beyond confirming who they are, open the Detainee Log at once and record the time, place, reason, lawful basis, any force used, and their condition, and hand them over to the police at the earliest safe opportunity, by signature, with the log. A well-conducted detention ends in a lawful handover and protects the soldier as much as the person held; a poorly conducted one produces a complaint, an unusable case, and a charge against the soldier. The unlawful temptation resisted here is to treat custody as a punishment rather than a brief, recorded, humane holding.

The thread through all four is the same. The unlawful course is always the one that feels, in the moment, like strength, speed, or justice: meet fear with force, meet disorder with force, meet provocation with force, meet a detainee with rough handling. The lawful course is always the harder one of slowing down, holding the line, using the least force, and keeping the record. And in every case the lawful course is also the one that actually works, that keeps the population's trust, that protects the soldier from a cell, and that lets the operation succeed.

The hard cases

The law is plainest in the classroom and hardest in the moment, and a few situations will test a soldier under real pressure. These are likelier in conflict than in the RKA's everyday tasks, but a soldier must hold the answer to each, settled in advance.

The enemy who feigns surrender is the cruellest test, because it tempts a soldier to distrust every surrender that follows. The answer is not to start shooting men with their hands up. The answer is care: a surrender is accepted, but the person is covered, approached with caution, searched, and secured, so that a false surrender is defeated by alertness, not by abandoning the rule. To shoot the next man who genuinely gives up because the last one cheated is to commit the crime, and to make every future surrender to the unit a fight to the death.

Civilians mixed among fighters are the daily reality of the operations the RKA will see, and they are why positive identification matters most. A soldier engages a lawful target, not a crowd that may contain one. Where fighters shelter among civilians, the discipline is to identify the threat, to use the least force that will meet it, and, in genuine doubt about whether a person is a fighter or a frightened civilian, to treat them as a civilian. In case of doubt, a person is a civilian, and the doubt is resolved in favour of the protected, not the trigger.

The urge to take revenge for a fallen friend is the most human pressure of all, and the most dangerous. Grief and anger are real, and they are not a licence. A soldier who answers a comrade's death by killing a prisoner, firing on civilians, or punishing the defenceless has not avenged anything; they have thrown away the comrade's honour and their own, and committed a crime that the law will answer long after the grief has dulled. The disciplined response is the hardest: to feel it, and to hold the line, because the unit that holds together under that pressure is the one that keeps its soldiers out of a cell and its name clean. This is the moment, above all others, for the four moves: slow it, drill it, step down, account for it.

And there is genuine ambiguity, the half-seen figure, the unclear order, the situation that will not resolve into a clean rule. Here the answer is the soldier's training and the chain of command: take the time the situation allows, use the least force consistent with safety, ask, report, and do not let the pressure of the moment push a guess into an irreversible act. The discipline is to slow the moment by the margin the situation allows, and to let trained judgement, not raw feeling, decide. An unclear order is clarified, not improvised upon, and a manifestly unlawful one, to fire on the surrendered, to mistreat a detainee, to punish civilians, is refused, as the Responsibility and Accountability lesson sets out, because obedience is no defence to a crime a reasonable soldier would recognise as such.

When in doubt

There is a steadying truth to take from the whole course, and it is the note to close on. A soldier sometimes fears that the law and the mission, or the law and their own instincts, will pull against each other, that doing the lawful thing will mean losing, or that the moment will force a choice between what works and what is right. In the operations the RKA actually undertakes, that fear is almost always misplaced. When in doubt, the law and the Army's values point the same way. The course that is lawful, holding fire when fire is not warranted, sparing the surrendered, protecting the civilian, giving relief by need, holding the line under provocation, handling a detainee humanely, is also the course that is disciplined, that keeps the population's trust, that protects the soldier, and that wins. They are not two masters. They are one.

This is why the Army does not leave lawful conduct to be recalled under pressure, but builds it into a soldier's character through training and values until it is instinct. A soldier who has made the values their own rarely has to choose between them and the law, because in the moment that matters the two speak with a single voice, and the soldier already knows what to do. That is the aim of this whole course, and the capstone it has been building toward: not that you carry a rulebook into the field, but that you carry, in yourself, the kind of soldier who keeps the law because it is who you are. Keeping the law under pressure, when you are tired and afraid and provoked and grieving, is the truest mark of the disciplined, humane soldier the Principality needs. Keep it, and you remain what the Principality needs you to be, a soldier and not something worse, and you come home able to live with what you did.

In Practice: The Flood Town

After a flood, a section is sent in aid to the civil authority to help a stricken town. The police lead; the Army supports. The soldiers clear a road, shore up a bridge, and ferry families and supplies, leaving the running of the relief to the civil authorities and the aid workers whose task it is. At one house a frightened resident, who has lost almost everything, backs away from the searchers and shouts; the section does not seize him or shout him down but keeps its distance, lowers its voice, explains what the search is for, and gives him room, and his fear settles. Food is short, and a local figure presses the section commander to give his people first; she gives it instead by need, to the sick and the children, whoever they are, because relief is impartial, and when the line surges she slows the distribution and calls the organisers rather than forcing the crowd back. A frightened, drunk man, who has lost his home, swings at a soldier and spits at another. The section does not strike either of them down; presence and a calm word fail, so two soldiers restrain the man who swung, the minimum to stop the harm, take the spitting in disciplined silence, hold the man only until he is calm, open a short log, hand him to the police, and report the use of force honestly that evening. No shot is fired and no one is humiliated. At every point the soldiers slowed the moment, applied the drill rather than the feeling, leaned toward restraint where they could, and accounted for what they did. Nothing in this is war, and the full law of armed conflict does not apply, but its spirit, the Rules for the Use of Force, the humanitarian principles, and the Army's values, governs every act, and the section leaves the town having helped it, which is the only victory such an operation offers.

Check Your Understanding

The RKA is likeliest to undertake humanitarian, peace-support, and home operations. Which body of law governs the use of force when there is no armed conflict, and who holds primacy on home soil? How does this differ from conduct in armed conflict?
Set out the graduated response from presence to lethal force, and state what the soldier's Rules for the Use of Force card requires for those who have ceased to resist. What alone overrides the standing Rules for the Use of Force, and what are the four moves for making a lawful decision under stress?
Choose two of the worked applications (the frightened civilian in a search, the disorderly relief distribution, the provoked cordon, the detainee at a checkpoint) and describe the lawful, restrained course for each and the unlawful temptation it resists, and say why the lawful course is also the sound one.

Reflection (write a short paragraph): This lesson argues that, in the operations the RKA actually undertakes, the law and the Army's values point the same way, so a soldier who has made the values instinct rarely has to choose between them and the law, and that keeping the law under pressure is the truest mark of the disciplined soldier. Think of one hard moment you might face on a relief, peace-support, or home operation, where you are tired, afraid, or provoked. What would the values and the law each tell you to do, how would the four moves under stress help you do it, and how does seeing that the law and the values agree change the way you will prepare for that moment?

Summary

The RKA is likeliest to undertake humanitarian assistance, peace-support and observer tasks, and aid to the civil authority at home, where the real work is search, relief, public order, and presence. The full law of armed conflict applies only in armed conflict; in peace and on home soil it is human rights law, the law of the Principality, and the Rules for the Use of Force that govern, and the civil police hold primacy at home.
Force is governed by the Army's principles (lawful authority, necessity, minimum force, proportionality, distinction, humanity, accountability) and applied through a graduated response: presence, verbal, control, defensive force, less-lethal, and lethal force only as a last resort, rising only as necessity demands and falling the moment it allows. The soldier's Rules for the Use of Force card carries this in seven plain rules, including the protection of those who have ceased to resist, and is overridden only by lawful mission-specific Rules of Engagement.
A force assisting civilians supports and does not supplant the civilian humanitarian effort (the Oslo Guidelines), keeping to infrastructure and indirect help with direct assistance a last resort, and gives relief by need and impartially, so that people in crisis can live with dignity (the Sphere standards).
The law is hardest to keep under stress, so a soldier makes a lawful decision by four settled moves: slow the moment by the margin it allows, apply the drill and not the feeling, favour restraint and protection when in doubt, and account honestly for what was done.
In the work the RKA will meet, the unlawful temptation always feels like strength or speed and the lawful course is the harder one of restraint: meet a frightened civilian with calm not force, manage a disorderly distribution by method and strict impartiality not by force or favour, hold the line and the bearing under provocation rather than repay it, and handle a detainee humanely and by record rather than as a punishment.
The hard cases each have a disciplined answer: defeat the feigned surrender by alertness, not by abandoning the rule; resolve doubt about civilians in favour of the protected; hold the line against the urge for revenge; and slow the ambiguous moment, using trained judgement and the chain of command rather than raw feeling.
When in doubt, the law and the Army's values point the same way. A soldier who has made the values instinct rarely has to choose between them and the law, which is why the Army builds lawful conduct into character. Keeping the law under pressure is the truest mark of the disciplined, humane soldier the Principality needs. Keep the law, and you remain a soldier and not something worse.

The Law in Operations and Under Pressure