This Small Craft design seems like a smart idea but at this point I feel like we need to take a higher level view of these decisions. They all seem smart in isolation but is our procurement and industrial strategy consistent after so many different votes?
Your policies are consistent with what you vote for. But if you vote to support every cutting-edge and ridiculous research proposal put forward, who am I to stop you?
It's disappointing you guys didn't go with LAMs earlier, they'd be hilarious.
Biological and Chemical weapons are in some ways crueler and harder to control than Nuclear WMDs but the floor for them is also lower, especially for Chemical weapons. I'm not entirely sure limiting them is innately good if it means people use Nukes instead. Is it possible to define limits on the forms and impacts of Chemical and Biological weapons instead? They can't last longer than X years, they can't spread become X iterations, they can't be targeted at non-military targets etc?
Limiting attacks on civilian areas also runs into the inevitable question of dual use facilities and possibly using civilians as human shields via rules lawyering. When some Mech factory is in the middle of a suburb or a military or heavy industrial R&D lab is in the downtown of a planetary capital they will become targets. Is it better to pick a more restrictive wording like 'purely civilian areas cannot be attacked' and extend extra protection to civilians? If we go too far it feels inevitable that someone will violate the rule and the taboo will be lost. At least something like that would leave the peasantry somewhere to huddle until the fighting stops. Kind of like how the Turians operate in Mass Effect. If you're in the 'neutral noncombatant zone' you're safe...ish until the new despot is determined. An Atlas will still stomp on your irradiated home and trample your super-measles infected workplace getting to the mega-chlorine drenched steel plant but at least the Firestarters won't be coming for the refugee camp your family is starving in.
You can propose any type of compromise, yes. Whether any other power will care is a seperate issue.
Laws of War are fundamentally a diplomatic agreement. Nothing will stop a power that really hates you from doing all kinds of horrible things. The best you can do is abide by agreed on standards and hope the enemy reciprocated, otherwise things quickly go from tit-for-tat to complete barbarism
More optimistically we could convince people to separate military and civilian areas but who has the time to move their mech factories or dual-use heavy industry around right now?
There's about zero percent chance of that. Te entire concept of civilian and military areas isn't one that militaries have ever really cared about, it's only a concept as a PR move to use when convenient.
For example, the US strategic bombimg in WW2 focused on 'military targets', not out of kindness, but because they were trying to win a war. Against Germany this meant that factories were targeted, but against Japan where manufacturing was more distributed and buildings were flammable, everything burned. Morality had nothing to do with the targeting, only perceived military effectiveness.
Similarly, post WW2 the emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties is pretty much a 1:1 linked with the US developing precision weapons. Suddenly when a side has a military advantage, the moral standard says they are good because of it, and weaker opposing forces are automatically bad, funny how that works.
