[udue73uru]

Not trying to nitpick but I had trouble following some of your wording. What would the international incident be over if it happened during a fight? I get that blinding civilians by accident during a training exercise could blow up but blinding targets with a high powered laser doesn't seem that different from using flash grenades when storming a building. I was also unsure because you mentioned it happening during a fight and it seems like if you can already lock onto a target to fire a laser into their eyes it'd be more efficient to skip blinding them and just shoot or bombard them.

[bmn__]

A grenade blinds temporarily, a laser blinds permanently. FTA:

> international law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_Wea... prohibits the employment of any such system that is deliberately designed to cause permanent blindness.

[udue73uru]

I didn't know! Thanks! But is permanent blindness actually a moral hazard if you're using that blindness to create an immediate opportunity to shoot the subject? I'm not a soldier so I might be way off but I'm assuming being totally blind for even a few seconds is a massive handicap in an engagement.

[salawat]

War is complicated.

Depending on the philosopher or politician, soldier or commander you ask, it's purpose is fairly varied. Resource burn, attrition, making the other poor bastard die for his country... However, in general, the international community has tended to favor diplomacy favoring modalities of war. By diplomacy friendly, of course, it's still lethal, and loved ones are not at all guaranteed to come back home, but it should result in "a warrior's death". It's frankly stupid, but psychologically, to the political classes, and to the civilian classes there is just some grim acceptance of the necessity of conventional warfare and conflict. Conflicts constrained by laws of war seems to be considered somehow "cleaner", and overall more preferable to the industrial scale manufacture of blind, blistered, or diseased cripples out of the young men and women of both sides.

There are, of course, dissenters to this type of thinking, one of which was Lincoln's War Secretary Edwin Stanton if I recall, Douglas MacArthur and Sherman may also have been counted amongst the numbers of those that advocate the practice of no holds barred, total war, where anything and everything goes, since the only moral outcome of an armed conflict is to end it as quickly, brutally, and decisively as possible. To that end, any restraint in application of force is seen as a sin or needless cruelty in prolonging the conflict.

It was and remains a rather controversial view, especially given the destructive potential most first world nations are now sitting on has led to somewhat of a retirement of the philosophy; at least as long as MAD holds out.

[hajile]

Ask a soldier if they'd rather be dead or blind and they'll often choose blindness; however, can society handle a million corpses or a million blind dependents they feel obligated to take care of? That's a much harder question to answer, but the purely pragmatic perspective will choose the former.

It's sad to say, but many families taking care of gas attack survivors after WW1 grew to resent or even hate the victims because taking care of the victim cost the families the ability to live their lives. What is the quality of life for a victim stuck in a long-term care facility for the rest of their life to be alone and miserable for the next 50-60 years praying for an end they know is far off?

Experiencing the horror of war and seeing the sanitized depiction in Hollywood or games must be very different. After two world wars within 25 years, EVERYONE knew people crippled and ruined by war, so they set out with the idea to ensure it wouldn't happen to their children as well. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren growing up in many places today seem to not really understand.

We need to accept that they knew what they were talking about else we run the risk of bringing those monsters back to life.