Help us, Osama Bin Ladin, you're our only hope!

[Highlord Laan]

However, war is probably the most immoral activity one nation can take on another, so attempting to hold any high ground on how one force goes about killing people and breaking things over another is as hypocritical as it gets.

So killing dozens of millions of civilians, like Nazi Germany or IJA, is perfectly acceptable because you're in a war? This concept is a slippery slope.

There is no moral high ground in war.

Really? If you (1) defend your nation (2) the other nation tries to wipe you out, doesn't it give you a moral high ground?

I'm not sure you fully understand the implications of your position. It is effectively "everything is allowed in a war". Up to totally killing the civilian population of the enemy nation.

Not really. The laws, the Geneva Convention, say what is and isn't allowed. I've always seen laws as a higher authority that morals, as morals are always wildly idfferent from person to person, and eve more so nation to nation. Torture, intentionally targeting civilians, killing PoW's, all those and more are forbidden by law. The Pred strikes fall into a legal gray area, so they need to be investigated, though I really see no difference between a missile fired from a drone and a sniper on a rooftop.

A military can still be brutally effective and still strictly follow the written laws. I just think that appealing to some sense of morality, even if the law says a wartime action is legal, completely undermines those very same laws. And if we think war is a nasty business now, imagine what it'd be like if everyone involved decided their personal or national "moral sense" outweighed the rules we're all supposed to follow. Then we would have mass murder, cities leveled, and whole nations annihilated.

And sorry, Duchess. I never was very good at speaking through text. Or debating, really.

[K. A. Pital]

The laws, the Geneva Convention, say what is and isn't allowed.

These laws themselves were a result of an attempt to apply morals to war. They were a result of moral approach, not vice versa. They constantly get perfected, too.

The Pred strikes fall into a legal gray area, so they need to be investigated, though I really see no difference between a missile fired from a drone and a sniper on a rooftop.

Sniper on a rooftop, if he's assassinating civilians, should also be invesigated.

I just think that appealing to some sense of morality, even if the law says a wartime action is legal, completely undermines those very same laws.

Certainly no - it strengthens them. Example: the exclusion of clausula si omnes from the Hague convention. It was perfectly legal not to follow the law against a non-signatory. Now it's not so. I don't see that "undermining" of the Hague conventions as "undermining" - the present Geneva conventions are better.

Ergo, the move from lesser to greater civilian protection in war happens not due to laws; but due to a moral question arising there, where the law fails.