That is more or less “war”. You raid one of my towns, I’ll raid two of yours. Ends when one side has been beaten into submission.
Actively attacking third party civilians is not.
I don’t think I agree – This is an awesome blog post you should totally read if you’re interested in history. https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-ii-foraging/
I’d say anything post train you’re going to try to capture infrastructure to make war, so saying we’re sieging cities sounds more ancient to me.
If you read that post, you’ll see ‘foraging’ really meant robbing and brutalizing local populaces for their food since anything but the smallest sized army can’t feed itself for more than a few weeks. Not to mention once we are sieging a city and starving all the people out.
What are some modern examples of ‘letting your army run wild on the populace’? I know that happens quite a bit but I can’t think of any sanctioned ones unless we go to wwii Japan maybe? and that was more than a little wild. Seems like most of the time a platoon or w/e just goes berserker.
I don’t think you can call My Lai ‘sanctioned’ or official even though it was done by a commissioned officer who was court martialed (but got off). Even then they gave the heli pilot that landed between US troops and a group of civilians about to get murdered a silver star – https://www.britannica.com/event/My-Lai-Massacre
Japan wwII definitely tactical and sanctioned but that one is weird because all of the military operated so independently.
I don’t know enough about your other examples. It makes sense though and I like the word you use ‘retaliation’
A good modern war planner isn’t going to waste energy on retaliation but when you get onto the ground and have a bunch of killers that don’t think of the enemy as all the way human (so you can convince them to do so much killing) retaliation would come up often. Also if you have some crazy strong man dictator, he may need retaliation to keep the image or drive his paranoia.
