Conventional weapons and the normalisation of mass violence

Conventional weapons are generally presented as controllable, proportionate and morally acceptable, unlike weapons of mass destruction. It is this assumption that is challenged by a research conducted by Julien Pomarède at the Centre for the Study of War and Violence at the University of Liège, based on American and French military archives. The findings demonstrate that the massive levels of devastation observed throughout the 20th century, and still today, did not occur in spite of the rationality that defines the use of these weapons, but because of it.

The study begins with an observation that existing literature had not fully theorised. The usual explanations for mass violence in 20th-century wars invoke ideologies, industrial capabilities or technological innovation. In doing so, they perpetuate a form of fatalism: atrocities are deemed inevitable once war becomes industrialised. In this research, Julien Pomarède, a lecturer in international politics and founding director of the Centre for the Study of War and Violence, sought to offer a different perspective by shifting the question from ‘why’ to ‘how’... how did armies transform mass devastation into a manageable and morally acceptable activity?

The answer lies in what the author calls the ‘economy of force’, “the idea that effective military use consists of maximising destructive effects at minimal cost. Far from acting as a safeguard, this principle has generated the opposite logic. By evaluating destruction in terms of efficiency and optimisation, military institutions have gradually detached violence from its political ends and from any moral restraint. Devastation has ceased to be a means and has become a procedural, self-perpetuating objective... rational in appearance, yet unlimited in its effects.”

To demonstrate this thesis, the author has reconstructed the practices of firing, calculating and measuring destructive effects across three conflict scenarios: positional warfare during the First World War, manoeuvre warfare during the Second World War, and counter-insurgency during the two Indochina wars. "This journey through a century reveals a structural continuity that doctrinal and technological changes have not broken. It is this persistence that leads the author to speak of brutalisation: not an accidental aberration, but the product of an institutionalised, morally neutralised mode of thought and technical optimisation which, contrary to what one might believe, is by no means limiting, but causes violence to proliferate on a vast scale, including in our own time. And one of the interesting points that also emerges is that a close examination of this ‘economy of force’ partly blurs the distinction between conventional and non-conventional weapons, insofar as munitions such as chemical and incendiary shells and bombs were also used in the name of this same rationality.

The article’s conclusions extend beyond the historical context. Conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran, as well as debates surrounding the militarisation of artificial intelligence (its effect of accelerating strikes) and autonomous weapon systems, illustrate, according to the author, the persistence of these same logics of optimisation and calculability. "This study highlights the need to maintain and strengthen the legal and ethical mechanisms that regulate the use of force and ensure the protection of civilians, bucking current trends to weaken them," concludes Julien Pomarède.