"[O]ur ways are utterly remote from these rules . . . "

In his sixth essay, Montaigne reiterates his point that the ancient rules of honor on the battlefield have long given way to experience: combatants are always untrustworthy, even, or perhaps especially, when parleying. His view of war would be more modern if the modern view didn't, superficially, hearken back to a medieval one. Our international conventions on war are based on a theory of justice that goes back at least to Aquinas' Summa Theologiae. But as W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction reminds us, such conventions were abandoned in a state of total war, in which, for example, the allies purposefully and systematically sought to demolish Hamburg's civilian population in what was called Operation Gomorrah.

Some years ago I led a task force of researchers from our local university in an effort to convince Congress to authorize a comprehensive study of the long-term health effects of exposure to depleted uranium (DU) on our own veterans. We succeeded in getting the legislative passed, which resulted in the Department of Defense turning the matter over to the Institute of Medicine (IOM). The IOM spent two years on a feasibility study, which concluded that there weren't enough data or a large enough sample size to conduct an epidemiologic study of veterans exposed to DU. In short, if we want to conduct such studies in the future, we will need to expose more of our soldiers to DU and then begin collecting data right away. In order to ban DU in munitions, we will first have to harm a larger sample of soldiers to demonstrate scientifically the danger of their collateral effects.

That, too, is utter remote from ancient rules. War is always remaking itself, and it is surely not done with its changes.