The inanity and insanity of humans is that we have rules for our violence, from war to fighting sports.

People often forget that "proper" wars are really just another facet of diplomacy, with certain rules to be followed.

Incidentally, no, what Russia is doing in Ukraine is not even anywhere remotely close to a "proper" war.

Thank you for your perspective, I agree on both counts. Sorry youre getting downvoted, but this is HN after all.

What you describe may have existed for parts of a few hundred years in areas of Europe, but it’s not the rule, and it’s certainly not the case today.

my current favourite are the melee rules chinese/indian army has in the mountains

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQJEiGiGc1I

Became aware of this after reading Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson! Great book. There's a small subplot involving the Line of Actual control (LAC), which is what made me first aware of these rules.

China is slowly flanking India by quietly annexing strategic territory: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/07/china-bhutan-border-vil...

It was a lot more insane in WW1, before we had these rules.

For example, they deployed gas that makes people vomit so soldiers can't keep masks on, followed by gas that dissolves the lungs so they suffocate on their own blood. Stuff that makes dying by conventional means merciful.

My point is a bit of a dual one. The fact that we both have rules and need the rules support the inanity and insanity of it all.

The defenders of a territory under attack aren't put in that position by any real choice of their own - none that is practical anyway. Being able to live with themselves after the conflict is over, being able to re-integrate them into civilized society, is an important facet of maintaining a peaceful society.

You don't plan for everything going well (no one ever goes for war). You plan for when things don't.

The Unmitigated Pedantry dude (shows up on this site a bit) makes a decent argument that chemical weapons mostly were abandoned because they don’t work against top-tier militaries, not really because we decided wars should be polite after WW1.

https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

Main reason is that lasers don't do as much damage to people as bullets. Bullets poke holes, lasers burn. This laser is for drones and small warheads.

The other reason is that lasers are big and expensive. This laser is mounted on Stryker armored vehicle and probably costs a ton. Bullets and guns are cheap. The regular Stryker carries 50cal machine gun which is overkill for shooting people.

People and bullets are fine for hitting people. Enough that there hasn't been much work in automated targeting. The laser has faster targetting and more accuracy which is good for drones.

Lasers this powerful would cause severe damage to human retinas almost instantly. Even reflected light would be incredibly dangerous.

You aren't allowed to blind people on purpose.

Lasers also don't travel through smoke as well as lead does.

Yeah, Geneva Convention, more or less. Otherwise it would be trivial to mass blind infantry or other groups of people. I suppose, unless the laser was powerful, you could just use indirect vision(i.e. cameras + display goggles) to protect the troops' vision.

You'd expect lots of smoke on a battlefield

A laser this scale would mostly be an annoyance to infantry. Drones are mostly black plastic that immediately burns. Humans are mostly water and if you got hit with this, it would suck, but it wouldn't kill you and you'd have plenty of time to find something to hide behind before it got bad enough that you'd lose a limb or something. It would be roughly equivalent to being poked with a branding iron.

Also, expect that if said infantry finds you, you're gonna have a bad time.

> Humans are mostly water and if you got hit with this, it would suck, but it wouldn't kill you and you'd have plenty of time to find something to hide behind before it got bad enough that you'd lose a limb or something.

Complication: if you got hit with this, or even saw something far away being hit with this, chances are it would be the last thing you'll ever see, making finding something to hide behind that much more difficult.

If this were a real threat, laser safety goggles would be standard issue.

They're not, because so far powerful enough lasers weren't used in the battlefield, in large part due to international ban on such use.

Anti-infantry lasers will likely continue to be banned for a while, but as anti-air and anti-armor ones get introduced, the risk of soldiers getting blinded off beam scatter will rise fast, so laser safety goggles might just become standard issue.

Or not. The problem is that laser safety goggles and screens are built to be opaque to specific frequencies. There may not be a way to have the goggles protect you from every laser frequency you're likely to encounter on the battlefield.

Typically these burning lasers are in the infrared spectrum and it's pretty easy to block the entirety of that. Visible lasers, particularly very powerful ones, tend to only fall in a handful of wavelengths due to the way they work so it's less of a problem than it sounds like it is.

I have had the same grim thought. Laser this powerful would be incredibly effective at damaging unprotected retinas. Even reflected laser light would be able to cause permanent damage.

I think that these lasers have not been used for this purpose yet is because of the inherent human psychological aversion to eye damage and the potential for escalation.

If you can see someone’s eyes long enough to hit them with a laser then you could just kill them instead with a bullet.

Imagine being outflanked because your vehicles are out of fuel because you used it all powering the generators for your lasers that can’t touch infantry inside a blacked out Landcruiser.

It happens occasionally: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Juan_de_Fuca_laser...

The first reason is that it is a war crime. The second reason is that it would be trivial to defend against with standard laser safety goggles.

Friggin lasers are a war crime and bullets are not? Says... who...? And how big is their laser?

Says the UN [1]. Yes, war crime legislation is very weird, but some countries sometimes pretend to care a little bit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_Wea...

Not to worry, these are the kind of lasers that make rockets explode and pierce through armor.

This UN thing is about the kind of lasers pranksters use to temporarily blind airline pilots.

Pretense is certainly the key concept when it comes to the UN and people who eagerly cite it. Nuts to the UN.