Lesson Overview
Earlier lessons set out why the law exists, the framework it sits in, the four principles, and who and what it protects. This lesson brings all of that to the moment of action: how a soldier fights and stays within the law. It is the most practical lesson in the course, because most of it is decided not at a desk but in seconds, by the member with the weapon. It covers who and what you may lawfully engage and the certainty you must reach first; the protection of those who are out of the fight; the duty to give quarter; the line between forbidden treachery and permitted cunning; the tactics that are never allowed; the treatment of the dead; the standing duty to care for the wounded of any side; and a soldier's plain rules on weapons.
This is a humanitarian, home-defence force, small and lightly armed. Most of what follows is a rule you carry into the moment ready-made, so that when fear, anger, or grief press hardest you do the lawful thing because you have already decided to.
By the end you will be able to identify a lawful target and explain the need for positive identification, recognise the ways a person becomes hors de combat and state the duty owed to them, explain why quarter must be given, distinguish forbidden perfidy from lawful ruses of war, name the tactics the law prohibits, state the treatment owed to the dead and the standing duty to care for the wounded, and state a soldier's plain rules on the use of weapons.
Key Terms
- Lawful target: a person or object that may lawfully be made the object of attack, that is, a combatant, a civilian for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities, or a military objective.
- Positive identification (PID): reasonable certainty, on the information available, that the person or object you are about to engage is in fact a lawful target.
- Hors de combat: "out of the fight"; a person who has surrendered, been captured, or is wounded, sick, unconscious, or shipwrecked and no longer resisting, and who may not be attacked.
- Quarter: the sparing of an enemy who is in your power or who surrenders; to "give quarter" is to take the enemy prisoner rather than kill them.
- Denial of quarter: ordering or threatening that there shall be no survivors, conducting hostilities on that basis, or refusing a genuine surrender. It is forbidden absolutely.
- Perfidy: killing, injuring, or capturing an enemy by inviting their confidence that they are entitled to, or obliged to give, protection under the law, and then betraying that confidence; for example feigning surrender, feigning death or wounds, feigning protected civilian status, or misusing the red cross or white flag. It is forbidden.
- Ruse of war: a lawful act of deception, such as camouflage, decoys, mock operations, feints, or misinformation, that misleads the enemy without abusing a protected status or inviting their trust in the law.
Engaging only lawful targets
The first rule of conduct in operations follows directly from distinction: you direct your fire only at lawful targets. A lawful target is a combatant of the enemy, a civilian for the time that they take a direct part in the fighting, or a military objective, an object that by its nature, location, purpose, or use makes a real contribution to the enemy's military action and whose destruction or capture offers a definite military advantage. Everyone and everything else, the civilian population, civilian property, the wounded, the surrendered, is not a target, and your fire must not be directed at it.
What this lesson adds is the discipline that turns the principle into a habit under stress: before you engage, you must be reasonably sure that what you are engaging is in fact a lawful target. This is positive identification. You do not fire at a shape, a sound, or a guess. You identify, so far as the situation allows, that the person is an armed enemy and not a frightened civilian, that the vehicle is a military one and not an ambulance, that the building holds fighters and not a family. Certainty is rarely perfect in war, and the law does not demand the impossible; it demands that you take the care a reasonable soldier would take with the information you have, and that you do not engage when you are in genuine doubt about whether your target is lawful. In case of doubt, a person is presumed to be a civilian. Positive identification keeps distinction alive at the point of the rifle, and it is the single most important discipline this lesson teaches.
Positive identification is a short sequence the trained soldier runs almost without thinking. You observe, gathering what the situation gives: a weapon in the hands, a hostile act in progress, the markings on a vehicle, who else is present. You assess what you have seen against the question that matters, is this a lawful target now. Where doubt remains, you hold, because the law resolves doubt in favour of the civilian and against the shot. A useful test is whether you could afterwards explain, in a plain sentence, why you believed the target was lawful: "an armed man firing from the upper window" is an articulable reason; "movement near the treeline" is not. If you cannot say why, you have not identified; you have guessed, and you do not fire on a guess.
Two cautions sharpen the habit. First, do not treat a place as a target. A house, a village, or a vehicle does not become lawful to attack because armed enemy are somewhere among the people in it; the enemy fighters are the target, and only for so long as they meet the test, while the civilians and civilian property around them keep their protection. Second, the law settles the in-between case for you: a person whose status you genuinely cannot make out is presumed a civilian, and a combatant whose surrender or wounds you can see has already left the class of lawful targets, as the next section explains. Distinction is not a judgement you make once at the start of an action; you remake it for each target, each time.
Before you engage, in one picture:
+-----------------------+
| A POSSIBLE TARGET |
+-----------+-----------+
|
v
+-----------------------------------+
| Positively identified as a |
| LAWFUL TARGET? |
| (a combatant, a civilian taking a |
| direct part, or a military object) |
+------+----------------------+------+
| no, or in doubt | yes
v v
+----------------------+ +---------------------------+
| Do NOT engage. | | OUT OF THE FIGHT? |
| In doubt, presume | | surrendered, captured, or |
| the person civilian. | | wounded and not resisting |
+----------------------+ +-----+---------------+-----+
| yes | no
v v
+------------------------+ +----------------------+
| Do NOT engage. Take | | May engage, still |
| into your power and | | applying proportion- |
| protect; collect and | | ality and precautions |
| care for by need. | | (see Lesson 03). |
+------------------------+ +----------------------+
Those who are out of the fight
A combatant is a lawful target only while they are fighting. The moment an enemy is out of the fight, hors de combat, they pass into the protection of the law and may not be attacked. This is one of the oldest and most absolute rules of war, and one of the most often tested by anger in the moment. A person who is out of the fight is no longer your enemy in any sense the law recognises as a target; they are a person in your power, or about to be, and your task toward them changes from fighting to safekeeping.
A person becomes hors de combat in three plain ways, and a soldier must be able to recognise each.
- They are in your power as a captive. A person who has been taken, who is under your control and no longer free to fight, may not be attacked. Capture ends the fight for that person whatever they did a moment before.
- They clearly express an intention to surrender. A person who lays down their arms, raises their hands, comes forward with empty hands shown, or otherwise makes plain they have given up is surrendering, and may not be attacked. The expression must be clear, but it need not be in words or in any set form; what matters is that a reasonable soldier would understand that this person has stopped fighting and is giving themselves up.
- They are wounded, sick, unconscious, or shipwrecked, and so are defenceless. A person who, through wounds, sickness, or unconsciousness, can no longer defend themselves, or who is shipwrecked from a sunk or downed vessel or aircraft and is not still fighting, is out of the fight by their condition, even if they have made no gesture at all. You do not finish a wounded enemy who has stopped fighting.
In every case the protection carries one condition: the person must abstain from any hostile act and must not attempt to escape. A man who raises one hand while reaching for a weapon with the other has not surrendered; a captive who breaks free and takes up arms has rejoined the fight. The condition is not a loophole to be hunted for in the heat of the moment; it is the simple line that protection covers the person who has genuinely stopped, and only such a person. Where the surrender or the helplessness is clear and the person does nothing hostile, the protection is absolute, and the duty is the same in each case: such a person must not be made the object of attack, and must be taken into your power, protected, and cared for by their need. You do not fire on a man who has thrown down his weapon and raised his hands. You take that enemy into your power and handle them by the sequence the next lesson sets out.
Recognising hors de combat, at a glance:
OUT OF THE FIGHT (do not attack; STILL IN THE FIGHT (a lawful
take into your power and protect) target until they stop)
-------------------------------------- --------------------------------------
* hands raised, weapon thrown down * weapon in the hands, being used
* coming forward, empty hands shown * firing, throwing, or manoeuvring
* a clear call or signal to surrender to attack
* captured and under your control * a feigned surrender used to attack
* wounded / sick and no longer resisting (this is perfidy, see below)
* unconscious, or shipwrecked and and means the person is fighting
not fighting * a captive who breaks free and
takes up arms again
The test: a reasonable soldier would The test: the person is using, or
understand this person has stopped about to use, force; they have not
and is defenceless or giving up, and genuinely given up or been put out
does nothing hostile. of action.
The same protection covers aircrew parachuting from a disabled aircraft. A person bailing out of a crippled aircraft is escaping death, not entering the fight, and must not be attacked while descending. On reaching the ground in territory held by the enemy they must be given the chance to surrender before being made a target, unless it is plain they are engaging in a hostile act. A paratrooper dropping into battle as part of an attack is a different matter and remains a lawful target; the rule protects the survivor of a downed aircraft, not the assaulting force. The law protects the person who has been put out of the fight, not the person who is using a descent, a fall, or a gesture to go on fighting.
Quarter, and the prohibition on denying it
To give quarter is to spare the enemy who is in your power or who surrenders, taking them prisoner rather than killing them. The law not only permits this; it requires it. An enemy must always be given the opportunity to surrender and to be taken prisoner, and a genuine surrender, once made, must be accepted. The duty to give quarter is the active side of the protection of those who are out of the fight: it is not enough to refrain from a deliberate shot at a man with his hands up; you must also receive him, secure him, and keep him safe.
Closely tied to this is the prohibition on denial of quarter. It is forbidden to order that there shall be no survivors, to threaten an enemy with it, to conduct operations on that basis, or to refuse a surrender that is genuinely offered. "Give no quarter" means "take no prisoners, leave no one alive," and the law forbids it without exception. No commander may lawfully give such an order, and no soldier is bound to obey one; an order to deny quarter is a manifestly unlawful order, and carrying it out is a grave crime, a subject the responsibility lesson takes up in full. The ban reaches the threat as well as the act: announcing that no quarter will be given is itself prohibited, because the announcement is meant to terrify and because it invites the enemy to fight to the death rather than yield.
The rule protects your own as much as the enemy's, and a soldier in a small force should feel this directly. An army that announces, or shows by its conduct, that it spares no one invites the same treatment of its own people who fall into enemy hands, and it removes from the enemy any reason to stop fighting; men who know that surrender means death sell their lives as dearly as they can and take others with them. To give quarter is therefore not softness. It is the discipline that keeps surrender a real option for the enemy, shortens fights, and keeps faith that will be needed when it is your own who have their hands up.
Perfidy and ruses of war
War permits cunning but forbids treachery, and a soldier must know the line between them. The forbidden kind is perfidy: inviting the enemy to trust that you are protected by the law, or that they must extend protection to you, and then betraying that trust in order to kill, injure, or capture them. Feigning surrender and then opening fire, faking death or wounds to draw the enemy close and then attacking, pretending to be a protected civilian, or misusing the red cross, red crescent, or the white flag of truce to mount an attack, these are perfidy, and they are forbidden.
Perfidy is banned because it destroys the very signals the law depends on. The protections in this course work only because they are believed: a raised hand stops a shot only if soldiers trust that a raised hand means surrender, and a red cross stops a shot only if soldiers trust that a red cross means the wounded. Each act of perfidy spends that trust. If a false surrender has once been used as a trap, soldiers stop trusting real surrenders, and men who genuinely give up are shot; if the red cross has once flown over an ambush, the next real ambulance is fired upon and the wounded inside it die. The treachery of a few poisons the protection of all, which is why misuse of the protective emblems to kill is among the gravest violations a soldier can commit, treated in full in the protected-persons lesson.
What the law permits is the ruse of war: deception that misleads the enemy about the military situation without abusing a protected status or inviting their trust in the law. Camouflage and concealment, decoys and dummy positions, feints and mock operations, ambushes, false radio traffic, and misinformation are all lawful. An ambush is not perfidy: it deceives the enemy about where your force is, not about whether you are protected, and the enemy who walks into it was never invited to lower their guard by a promise the law guarantees. The difference is simple. A ruse deceives the enemy about the military picture, where you are, how strong you are, what you intend; perfidy deceives the enemy into lowering their guard by inviting them to trust a protection the law guarantees, surrender, the wounded, the civilian, the emblem, and then betrays that trust to kill.
Perfidy and lawful ruses, side by side:
PERFIDY (forbidden) RUSE OF WAR (lawful)
abuses a protection to kill, injure, deceives about the military picture;
or capture; betrays trust the law no protected status is abused, no
guarantees trust in the law is invited
-------------------------------------- --------------------------------------
* feigning surrender, then firing * camouflage and concealment
* feigning death or wounds to attack * decoys and dummy positions
* feigning protected civilian status * feints and mock attacks
* misusing the red cross / crescent * ambush from a hidden position
to mount an attack * false radio traffic, misinformation
* misusing the white flag of truce * displaying false unit signs to
to attack mislead about strength or location
Test: did you invite the enemy's trust Test: did you mislead the enemy about
in a protection the law promises, then the military situation only, without
betray it to harm them? abusing any protection?
Carry the line whole into operations. Outwit the enemy as cleverly as you can; deception is a lawful and necessary part of war. But never invite the enemy's trust in the law, in a surrender, in the wounded, in a civilian, in the emblem, and then use that trust to kill them.
Tactics the law forbids
Several methods are prohibited outright, whatever the military temptation, and a soldier must know them by name so as never to be drawn into them by an order, by example, or by anger.
- Human shields. You may not use the presence of civilians, or move them, to shield a military objective, a position, or your own movement from attack. Placing prisoners or civilians where they will be hit first, or keeping them near a position to deter the enemy from firing, is forbidden. Civilians and those in your power are never to be used as cover.
- Hostage-taking. You may not seize or hold a person in order to compel another party to do or not do something, on a threat of harm to the person held. Taking hostages is forbidden absolutely; a person in your power is held only on lawful grounds and is owed humane treatment, not used as a bargaining piece.
- Pillage. The taking of property by force for private gain, looting, in plain terms, is forbidden, in occupied places, on the battlefield, and at all times. The property of the population, and of the dead, is not yours to take. This is treated again in the next lesson, because the temptation often comes at the moment of capture.
- Collective punishment. You may not punish a person, a family, or a community for an act they did not personally commit. No civilian may be penalised for the conduct of another, and no community may be made to suffer for the acts of fighters among or near them. Punishment in law follows personal responsibility, never association.
- Acts of terror against the population. Acts or threats of violence whose primary purpose is to spread terror among the civilian population are forbidden. Frightening civilians is not a lawful aim of force; the law allows force directed at lawful targets, never violence designed to terrify the people.
- Starvation of civilians. Starving the civilian population as a method of warfare is forbidden, as is attacking, destroying, or removing objects indispensable to their survival, such as foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water, and the works that supply them.
These prohibitions share a single root. Each turns force away from a lawful military purpose and onto people who are not, at that moment, a lawful target: the population, the held, the helpless. That is precisely the thing the whole law forbids. A soldier who keeps distinction at the front of the mind will recognise every one of these tactics for what it is, an attack on the protected dressed up as a method of war, and will refuse it whatever the pressure.
The treatment of the dead
The law's care does not stop at the living. The dead must be treated with dignity, and this duty too is owed to the dead of every side, by the simple fact of their being human, and not by which side they fell on. A soldier does not strip, mutilate, or despoil the dead, does not pose them, does not photograph them for trophies, and does not pillage their belongings. The body of a fallen enemy is not loot and is not a thing to be degraded; it is the remains of a person, owed respect, and owed return to those who mourn them.
The duty has practical parts. So far as circumstances allow, the dead are to be searched for and collected along with the wounded, protected from despoliation, and not left where they have fallen if they can decently be recovered. The personal effects and any means of identification found on the dead, a tag, papers, a token of a name, are to be collected and safeguarded, not kept or taken, because they are how a family will one day learn what became of someone who did not come home. Where it can be done, the dead are to be identified and decently disposed of, and a record of who they were and where they lie kept and passed on, so that graves can be found and the missing accounted for. This is the law's answer to one of the cruelest wounds of war, the family left forever not knowing; and it is, like the care of the wounded, a duty a small home-defence force takes up as a matter of honour.
Collecting and caring for the wounded
Running beneath this whole lesson is a duty that is not a restraint at all but a positive obligation to act: the standing duty to collect and care for the wounded, of any side, friend and enemy alike, by their need and by nothing else. The protected-persons lesson set this out as the oldest duty in the law; here it belongs at the point of action, because it is part of conduct in operations and not a separate, gentler activity that happens once the shooting stops.
The duty has two halves, and the second asks a soldier to do something rather than merely refrain. First, the wounded and sick must be respected and protected: not attacked, not abused, shielded from further harm and from pillage. Second, as soon as the situation allows, they must be searched for, collected, and cared for, your own and the enemy's together, and treated by their need alone, by how badly each is hurt and what can be done, never by which side they were on. To give your wounded enemy water and a dressing while he can no longer fight is not weakness and not a favour; it is the law, and it is the exact principle the Combat First Aid course teaches, that care is owed by need and survivability and never by who a person is. To withhold care from a wounded enemy who is out of the fight, or to ration it by allegiance, is not triage but misconduct.
For a soldier this duty connects directly to the moment an enemy goes hors de combat. The man who throws down his weapon and is then found to be bleeding is, in the same instant, a person you must not attack, a person you must take into your power, and a person you must care for by his need. The three duties are one continuous act: stop, secure, and treat. Where you cannot yet treat because the area is not safe or your hands are full with the fight, you protect the wounded from further harm and bring them care as soon as you are able, and you do not pass a wounded person by, of either side, when you can help them and the situation allows it.
A soldier's rules on weapons
The law also limits the means you fight with, but for the ordinary soldier the practical rules are few and plain. Use only the weapons and ammunition you have been issued, and use them as they were designed to be used. Never alter or modify a weapon or its ammunition to make it cause greater suffering, by tampering with rounds to make them expand or fragment in the body, or by adding anything intended to poison or to inflame a wound. Do not use a weapon in a way it was never meant to be used in order to inflict cruelty.
Behind these plain rules lie two ideas you have already met. Some weapons are banned because they cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering, harm to the fighter beyond what is needed to put them out of the fight: poison, biological and chemical weapons, weapons whose primary effect is to wound by fragments that cannot be found in the body, and lasers designed to blind. Others are banned or restricted because they cannot distinguish between fighters and civilians, striking blindly in place and time, anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions among them. A soldier need not memorise the treaties to keep faith with them. Carry your issued weapon, use it as intended against lawful targets, never modify it to increase suffering, and you will stay on the right side of this law. And remember that the law on weapons does not stand apart from the rest of this lesson: the issued weapon, used as designed, is still only ever to be turned on a lawful target, never on the surrendered, the wounded, or the people, and always within the Rules for the Use of Force that govern when force may be used at all.
In Practice: The Surrender in the Doorway
On a peace-support deployment a section of the Royal Kaharagian Army comes under fire from a building on the edge of a town and returns it. The shooting stops, and a man steps into the doorway with his hands raised and a weapon dropped at his feet. A soldier in the section lost a friend to fire from that same building an hour before, and the temptation, white hot, is to fire anyway. This is the exact moment the law is made for. Walk the section's response through, step by step.
First, recognise. The man has thrown down his weapon, raised his hands, and come into the open with empty hands shown; a reasonable soldier would understand that he has stopped fighting and is giving himself up, and he does nothing hostile. He is now out of the fight. That recognition settles the legal question instantly: he is no longer a lawful target, whatever he did a moment before, and he may not be attacked. The grief of the soldier who lost a friend is real, but it changes nothing the law allows.
Second, give quarter and take him into your power. The section commander calls the ceasefire and the section receives the surrender rather than refusing it; to fire now would be to deny quarter to a man who has plainly surrendered, a manifestly unlawful act. The section covers and searches the man, secures him with the trained restraint they carry and no more force than is needed, and treats him from the first moment as a person in their power, by the handling sequence the next lesson sets out in full. Had he turned out to be wounded, they would have cared for him by his need, alongside their own, exactly as the first-aid training requires.
Third, understand why discipline here is also sound. Had a soldier shot him, it would have been not a hard call gone wrong but a grave crime, and it would have told every enemy watching that surrender to this unit means death, so that the next enemy fights to the last and takes others with him, perhaps the friends of the very soldier whose grief prompted the shot. Discipline in that doorway is both the lawful course and the operationally sound one, and the reason the section keeps it is that they decided, in training, what they would do long before they stood in the doorway.
Check Your Understanding
- What is positive identification, and why is it the soldier's most important discipline at the point of engagement? Describe the short sequence a soldier runs to reach it, and say what you do when you are in genuine doubt about a target.
- Name the three ways a person becomes hors de combat, and state the single duty owed in every case. Why does the protection carry the condition that the person abstain from hostile acts, and how does that condition differ from a feigned surrender?
- Explain the difference between perfidy and a ruse of war, and give an example of each. Why is perfidy forbidden when cunning is allowed, and what does an act of perfidy do to the protections that every soldier, including your own, depends on?
Reflection (write a short paragraph): This lesson turns on the moments when fear, anger, or grief press hardest, the surrender after a comrade has fallen, the figure half-seen in poor light, the wounded enemy you must now treat. Pick one such moment and think it through beforehand. What rule applies, and what will you have already decided so that you keep it when the pressure comes? What does that tell you about the value of training a response until it is instinct, and about the kind of force the Royal Kaharagian Army means to be?
Summary
- Direct fire only at lawful targets, and reach positive identification first: reasonable certainty that the target is lawful, reached by observing, assessing, and holding where doubt remains. You must be able to say why the target was lawful; in genuine doubt, do not engage, and a person in doubt is presumed a civilian.
- A person becomes out of the fight in three ways, by capture, by clearly surrendering, or by being wounded, sick, unconscious, or shipwrecked and so defenceless. In every case, so long as they do nothing hostile, they must not be attacked and must be taken into your power, protected, and cared for by their need. The same protects aircrew descending from a disabled aircraft.
- Quarter must be given: the enemy must always be allowed to surrender, and a genuine surrender must be accepted. Denying quarter, ordering, threatening, or operating on the basis that no one will be spared, or refusing a real surrender, is forbidden absolutely and is a manifestly unlawful order that need not be obeyed.
- Perfidy, abusing a protected status or the trust the law guarantees in order to kill or capture, is forbidden because it destroys the protections all rely on; ruses of war, camouflage, decoys, feints, ambush, and misinformation, are lawful. Outwit the enemy; never betray their trust in the law.
- Human shields, hostage-taking, pillage, collective punishment, acts of terror against the population, and starvation of civilians are prohibited tactics, each one an attack on the protected dressed as a method of war. The dead are treated with dignity and their effects safeguarded for return; the wounded of any side are searched for, collected, and cared for by need alone, as the Combat First Aid course teaches.
- On weapons, use only issued arms as designed, never modify them to increase suffering, remember why cruel and indiscriminate weapons are banned, and turn the weapon only on lawful targets and only within the Rules for the Use of Force.
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