The Primacy of Effectiveness: The Natural Environment as a Target and Casualty of Contemporary Armed Conflicts

Abstract

Contemporary armed conflicts, evolving into wars involving the entire state machine, are becoming not only increasingly frequent but also increasingly uncompromising in the choice of goals and means by which decisions are to be achieved. While these are still not total wars, they generate the need for total defense through maximizing intensity and, above all, calibrating the invasiveness of attacked states. Total defense takes the form of causing nuisance to the adversary, weakening their morale and the ability to retaliate. Therefore, it is a fight not only against the military enemy but also, de facto, against one’s own environment. The goal becomes to cause nuisance to opponents through the destruction of the natural environment. The ecological environment is thus considered a kind of “hostage,” whose instru-mentalization in contemporary armed aggression, with its various motivations, is exploited through a pre-cisely prioritized system of inflicting losses and destruction on the opponent. Maximizing damage while simultaneously economizing the involvement of one's own resources in aggression through the harmful agency of environmental damage is a manifestation of geostrategic “Machiavellianism.” The environment is becoming a sought-after source of asymmetric advantage in symmetrical conflicts, therefore, the wide-spread adoption of this operational approach sparks debate on the need to “arm” international law with tools to prevent, and if it does occur, prosecute, and punish so-called ecocide.