A better answer than what you write to be the common answer is, imho an obvious candidate when thinking about it 10 sec: severe atrocities that do not actually bring you much advantage in the war at all. So it’s ‘wasteful harm’ as opposed to ‘well targetted harm’. Surely in practice, as none uses that definition very strictly, sometimes we call this or that warcrime that doesn’t fit perfectly, and the other way round. But I think the gist of a natural definition would be mostly that.
Not convinced about “wars not being early-endable anymore”—it seems like an interesting idea but neither specifically fit intuition about “warcrime” nor common usage of the term.
A better answer than what you write to be the common answer is, imho an obvious candidate when thinking about it 10 sec: severe atrocities that do not actually bring you much advantage in the war at all. So it’s ‘wasteful harm’ as opposed to ‘well targetted harm’. Surely in practice, as none uses that definition very strictly, sometimes we call this or that warcrime that doesn’t fit perfectly, and the other way round. But I think the gist of a natural definition would be mostly that.
Not convinced about “wars not being early-endable anymore”—it seems like an interesting idea but neither specifically fit intuition about “warcrime” nor common usage of the term.