617
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
617 points (93.9% liked)
Technology
60052 readers
3048 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There’s a lot of people who seem to have a knee-jerk reaction to this “that’s a war crime!!1!”, but it really is not. Incendiary weapons (like thermite, white phosphorus and napalm) are not illegal to use against legitimate military targets, including enemy combatants. It’s only a war crime when it’s used indiscriminately against civilians or in civilian areas.
Lot of misinformation out there on this it seems.
I looked it up and you're 100% right. Incendiary weapons are allowed as long as it doesn't hit civilians or start a forest fire
https://www.weaponslaw.org/weapons/incendiary-weapons
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Incendiary_Weapons
You can start a forest fire if said forest is used for cover or concealment by enemy military forces. All feasible precautions must be taken to limit the damage to military targets only.
I wonder why? 🤔
Honestly war crimes just have a lot of misinformation generally. Even in the military. There were people who thought we couldn't shoot someone with a .50 cal machine gun. While this spawns funny jokes like aiming for their uniform buttons, it just isn't true.
Honestly, I think it’s more that people take this info from movies and just run with it than malicious (Russian) misinformation bots (although they don’t mind giving this an extra push I imagine).