[Ultra Tech] Non-lethal warfare at TL9

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

And the problem with everyone following the rules is that war assumes someone is not following rules; if they were there would be no war in the first place, just diplomacy.

War in such a society might be akin to a spectator sport, where some fatalities do occur (more commonly there are persistent health issues that follow the athletes for the rest of their lives) and are considered acceptable. Alternatively (or additionally), such tightly-controlled wars might be a method of resolving disputes between the two sides when diplomacy fails, while keeping things more palatable than would be the case in an all-out war.

And, yeah, you need pretty extreme punishments - and both the will and means to execute them - for those who opt to break the rules, because basically all warfare rules can be violated to give an advantage (putting an FOB at a school/hospital/residential area and/or disguising your fighters as civilians so OpFor can't target you without getting raked over the coals in the media for killing civilians, using chemical gas attacks so OpFor has to struggle with gas masks and MOPP suits, terrorizing OpFor's civilian populace to intimidate them into backing down, etc).