It always seems so absurd to me that there are rules around wartime killing. Once you acknowledge that it is acceptable to take another person's life for profit you really have little credibility for laying out rules of fairness.
Well, most of the rules aren't about killing per se, but rather wounding. And most of the rules are in place so that the stakes of fighting never gets high enough that we would all have to stop fighting. For example, the Geneva Protocol that bans chemical and biological weapons pretty much because aside from killing, those who were wounded were an enormous burden, and terrible for morale (aside from any ethical reasons).
In that case, losing the ability to use those weapons was deemed to be outweighed by the consequences of having to deal with them being used on you. Also, since they could be potentially huge and unpredictable force multipliers, it made war all the more predictable, which is good from their perspective.
Long story short, nearly all rules of war exist because they are beneficial to abilities of the parties to conduct war. The rules do no exist to make killing fair. They exist so that parties may conduct war in a way they agree with.
"Long story short, nearly all rules of war exist because they are beneficial to abilities of the parties to conduct war. The rules do no exist to make killing fair."
That actually makes perfect sense. Although I find it rather disturbing.
War without rules would be a greater horror. Even the ancients had them (Julius Caesar himself was charged with war crimes). How could closure and peace be negotiated, for example, without protection for emissaries.
You were on your way to an interesting point until you made the implicit claim that war is always about profit. For pretty much every war, that isn't true for at least one side, and often for both.
Obviously one side isn't necessarily in it for profit, they could simply be defending the other side's actions. But the instigator is usually in it for profit.
