--- title: "Scorched-Earth Policy: The Art of Total Destruction in Warfare" description: "All wars are not created equal. From the size and manpower of the two-or-more factions who have chosen to settle their disagreements violently, to the technologies and equipment available to each side at the time of battle, to the economic and human resources that each side counts on to win, every war is shaped by the conditions of conflict. But there is another critical question that must be answered when attempting to understand a war, another dimension that simply must be accounted for: just how far is each side willing to go? Atop the pyramid of wartime escalation, there are few destructive measures that can even come remotely close to the scorched-earth policy, an approach to warfare so devastating, so utterly ruinous, that the entire point is to ensure that when the war ends, nothing is left behind. Kept in the forbidden reaches of a strategist's toolkit, alongside such despicable acts as mass torture, ethnic cleansing, and the use of nuclear weapons, a scorched-earth policy is one that wages war not just on enemy combatants, but civilians, nature, and the land itself.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n- The Geneva Conventions have explicitly prohibited scorched-earth tactics since 1977, defining them as attacks on objects indispensable to civilian survival including foodstuffs, crops, livestock, and water installations.\n- Ancient Rome perfected scorched-earth warfare, dismantling the entire city of Carthage after the Third Punic War and burning surrounding fields to deny any future use of the territory.\n- Retreating Tsarist forces burned the Russian countryside during Napoleon's invasion, denying his army the ability to live off the land and contributing decisively to the French campaign's collapse.\n- Major General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea destroyed Atlanta and ravaged the Carolinas to break the Confederacy's will to fight during the American Civil War.\n- Russia's destruction of the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River in mid-2023 flooded hundreds of communities and deprived Ukrainian agriculture of irrigation, displacing tens of thousands of civilians.\n- Myanmar's military junta has directed scorched-earth warfare against its own citizens, targeting ethnic minorities including the Rohingya and displacing civilians through airstrikes and systematic destruction.\n\n## The Method: Defining Scorched-Earth Warfare Under International Law\n\nSince 1977, the use of scorched-earth tactics has been prohibited outright by the Geneva Conventions. For a brief encapsulation of what exactly scorched-earth tactics entail, the Geneva Conventions state: \"It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.\" A scorched-earth policy is, in essence, an umbrella term, and it encapsulates a wide range of wartime acts that range from unsavory to downright despicable. But the thing that ties all scorched-earth tactics together is one of intent: to deny the myriad benefits of a stretch of territory to one's enemy. If the land can produce food to sustain an enemy army, then a scorched-earth policy dictates that the land must be made to stop producing food. If the land is replete with rivers and aquifers for the enemy to enjoy, then they must be ruined so thoroughly that the enemy dare not trust them. But there is one key issue to consider when it comes to scorched-earth warfare: that an enemy military will almost never be the only people reliant on the land where a given war is fought. Instead, that land is tilled and maintained by civilians, innocents who raise families, build homes, and hope to live out their lives there. A stretch of land might belong to the enemy today, but it belongs to those people for generations; a crop field or a herd of wildlife might sustain the army today, but the people of the region are the ones expecting to live off of it. And if a river or a spring can provide clean drinking water to the enemy, then it is almost certainly doing the same for people who could not harm you if they tried. Herein lies the issue with a policy of scorched-earth warfare: in order to ruin the land, the water, the ecosystems, the infrastructure, and the communities that allow an enemy to survive, one must innately accept responsibility for the wholesale destruction of the lives of thousands or even millions of noncombatants. Best-case scenario, that might look like mass displacement or forced relocation. At other times, it amounts to slaughter, either by trapping said noncombatants into an area where no resources exist to sustain them, or killing them outright as part of the destruction of a given area.\n\n## Tactics in Practice: From Burning Fields to Destroying Dams\n\nThe simple existence of a precise prohibition against scorched-earth warfare should be enough to indicate that it does happen, and it happens a lot. In some cases, a military elects to adopt a scorched-earth policy because its strategic value outweighs the importance of protecting civilians. In other cases, it is because that military's ideology or its doctrine directly calls for the treatment of even noncombatants as an enemy. Scorched-earth policies are a mainstay in wars of genocide and annihilation, and in wars where partisan resistance amongst ordinary peoples is so commonplace that the attacking military sees no use in distinguishing between the enemy and the locals. In practice, the tactics of scorched-earth warfare are wide-ranging. When it comes to agriculture, a military might burn down crop fields or release hostile insects and parasites, knowing that vegetation will be wiped out. At other times, the land itself might come under attack, with fields or potentially productive plots of land being salted or otherwise ruined so that crops cannot grow there in the future. When it comes to water, a military might see to it that rivers and streams are deliberately poisoned, or that battles take place upstream of a besieged city, so that the waters there will run red with blood and gore. They might poison reservoirs or drain them, destroy dams with the intent to deprive an area of its water supply, or to rush floodwaters downstream and destroy what lies in the path of the flood. They might even divert bodies of flowing water away from enemy positions, with no care or consideration for the people who will need that water a year or a decade or a century from now. When it comes to civilian infrastructure, the treatment is no less gentle. Hospitals that can treat enemy soldiers will be destroyed, no matter how many civilians need their cancer treatments and dialysis; schools where the enemy can take shelter will be destroyed, regardless of whether children will ever learn to read; and roads, bridges, tunnels, and canals will be destroyed, no matter how vital they might be for the community or the region. It is critical to emphasize that scorched-earth tactics are not only offensive in nature. Throughout history, many defending armies have employed scorched-earth policies as they retreat, destroying the land they are pushed off of so that nothing remains for the attacker. In some cases, this might have the effect of denying resources that were the subject of an enemy invasion in the first place; in others, it might cause the enemy to deplete their supplies and reserves more quickly than they otherwise would. In the best-case scenario for a retreating defender, an attacker might be forced to travel deeper and deeper into a wasteland until their supply lines simply cannot hold up, halting their advance indefinitely. Either way, when a scorched-earth policy is adopted by a defender, the message is always the same: if we cannot have our homeland, then nobody can.\n\n## Geographic Vulnerability and the Evolution of Destruction\n\nAll territories are not created equal in terms of their vulnerability to scorched-earth tactics. Those that are protected by sea, or by desert, or by hills and mountain ranges, may insulate their heartland well enough that it is unlikely to be threatened. The United States, for example, has its agricultural belt shielded by two oceans, two mountain ranges, a desert, a swampland, and a thick northern forest. Conversely, smaller nations, or ones that feature low-lying, flat land are particularly vulnerable to having their territory overrun and ruined for generations; take Israel, where an enemy tank column could travel from the Golan Heights to Tel Aviv in the span of just a few hours. Those with a greater abundance of natural resources across their territory are, by and large, less likely to suffer from enemy scorched-earth tactics; after all, what is the point in ruining one region's farmlands, if ten surrounding regions can pitch in with surplus grain to spare? Instead, it is those territories with established agriculturally productive regions, those that rely on coastlines and oases, and those where cities are directly fed and supported by their surrounding territory, where scorched-earth policies are most likely to benefit the enemy. The tactics employed in the name of scorched-earth policies have both evolved with time and, in some cases, stayed the same. On the technologically advanced side, tactics like carpet-bombing and the use of napalm are new and particularly destructive mechanisms of destruction. On the other hand, salting a field is no more complicated in 2023 than it was millennia ago, and while water wells might today be poisoned with more deadly substances, a poisoned well is a poisoned well, no matter which spigot you drink from.\n\n## Ancient Origins: From Egypt and Scythia to the Fall of Carthage\n\nScorched-earth tactics are one of those ways of warfighting that have existed for as long as people have been at war. As far back as Egypt and Mesopotamia, the historical record indicates the deliberate destruction of agriculturally productive fields and orchards, used as leverage to force a retreating or beleaguered enemy to surrender and stop the carnage rather than starve. In Egyptian campaigns against Syro-Palestine, Egyptian forces were described as having burned towns and settlements down, and destroyed plantations and forests surrounding enemy forts. In the sixth century BCE, the Scythians used scorched-earth tactics against enemies within the Achaemenid Empire, poisoning their wells and using asymmetric attacks to whittle down their food supplies. In his account of the expedition of the Ten Thousand, in the fourth century BCE, the Greek general Xenophon described his enemy's use of scorched-earth tactics, burning grasses and creating a wasteland in the territories where Xenophon's mercenary army was expected to travel. Elsewhere in ancient Greece, the Spartans would do the same, laying waste to the countryside around Athens in an attempt to force starvation and surrender. But the first ancient power to really perfect the use of scorched-earth tactics was, probably unsurprisingly, ancient Rome, whose approach to the practice was the stuff of nightmares for many enemies the Romans faced. Under Roman assault, the large-scale slaughter of enemy-held livestock, the building of dams, and the poisoning of water stores were all to be expected, and at times that Rome was forced into retreats, it used the same tactics to deny resources to the armies that followed after them. At the conclusion of the Third Punic War, the Roman Senate elected to employ an extreme version of scorched-earth tactics, dismantling the entire city of Carthage and burning the surrounding fields—although the common belief that Rome salted the earth in the area appears to only be an element of mythology around the event. In retaliation against Rome, its enemies would also employ scorched-earth tactics, including the Gauls under a chieftain called Vercingetorix, who took it upon themselves to obliterate a series of villages and farms that he believed the Romans were counting on, in order to press an attack against him.\n\n## Medieval and Early Modern Campaigns: From the Umayyads to Colonial Conquests\n\nA few centuries later, the Islamic world got its first major taste of scorched-earth tactics, when in the seventh century CE, an Umayyad army marched on modern western Saudi Arabia and Yemen in order to ravage the lands of a rival caliph. In this attack, the Umayyads killed tens of thousands of civilians under their rival's protection, and they went a step further, burning crops and homes in order to make the sections of the caliphate they had touched all but uninhabitable for the future. During the many centuries of medieval European warfare, scorched-earth tactics made plenty of appearances on one side or another, both in the wars fought between European powers in a given area, and in wars of expansion outward. During these years, many societies that relied on feudal structures of land cultivation would find not just their land, but their poor serf civilians to be a target of scorched-earth warfare; after all, killing serfs meant destroying the means of production for a given area's food resources. In France and the Iberian peninsula, tactics called a chevauchée in French, or a cabalgada in Spanish, arose during the Hundred Years' War, with the general idea being that small groups of mounted soldiers would take hostages, capture goods, and destroy infrastructure in the countryside in order to back the enemy into a corner without engaging in large-scale military engagements. In the sixteenth century, scorched-earth warfare would make a comeback in the British Isles, as a tool of conquest used by English invaders of Ireland. And during the Thirty Years War, the same tactics were used by the Holy Roman Empire in order to deny land and villages to an advancing Swedish enemy force. Around this same time, scorched-earth tactics were well-employed in the Maratha Empire, on what is now modern-day India, when ruler Shivaji I coined the phrase \"ganimi kava\" to represent these same policies of warfare. In this case, it was leveraged against the Mughal Empire, destroying the Mughals' commercial interests and civilian population centers. Shivaji I's son would later be sentenced to death by the Mughals as punishment for his having employed scorched-earth tactics, including in sustained offensives that ravaged the Mughal territories. In the New World, scorched-earth tactics would be deployed en masse a century later, when an American campaign in 1779 laid waste to some forty or more villages belonging to the native Iroquois, and destroyed the essential supplies those communities had stockpiled to survive the winter.\n\n## Napoleon, Sherman, and the Nineteenth-Century Escalation\n\nScorched-earth tactics were not a favored mechanism to secure control over enemy populations by Napoleon himself, but instead they were a tactic used against him by more than one adversary. During his 1810 invasion of Portugal, Portuguese defenders destroyed their own food stores across large portions of the country, in order not to allow those supplies into French hands. And in Napoleon's march on Russia, retreating Tsarist forces burned the countryside they left behind, rendering Napoleon's army incapable of living off the land as they had expected they could do. With their sustenance nowhere to be found, Napoleon's forces were in dire straits, and before long, Russian winter arrived to finish the job. In the American Civil War, Union forces pursued a scorched-earth policy on more than one occasion, but they did so most notably during Major General William Tecumseh Sherman's so-called March to the Sea, an offensive that was meant to break the rival Confederacy's will to fight. First, Sherman's armies set upon the city of Atlanta, turning it to ruins and destroying anything that could aid the Confederate military apparatus. Then, the Carolinas got the same treatment, with infrastructure like railroads and tunnels destroyed, and crops and livestock annihilated wherever they were found. The strategy, uncompromising despite it being levied against communities that the United States hoped to reintegrate after the war, would eventually have its intended effect. Scorched-earth tactics have also been used across history as a weapon of colonial powers, in order to break the will of insurgencies that seek to fight against them. In the Philippine-American War at the turn of the 20th century, American forces destroyed entire villages and poisoned many water wells during their rampage across the islands. They would also use scorched-earth tactics against the Navajo in the mid-1860s, destroying just about everything the Navajo tribe had previously had to its name. Britain would do the same to the Boers in what would become modern-day South Africa, targeting farms and homes in order to prevent Boer forces from fighting a guerrilla war whilst living off the land, and placing Boer women and children into concentration camps.\n\n## World Wars, Defoliants, and the Industrial Scale of Devastation\n\nThe First World War saw its fair share of scorched-earth tactics, from Imperial Russian use of the policy that saw huge swathes of earth, including entire cities, defiled during a retreat along a 600-mile front, to British tactics in Romania, where oil fields were burned rather than being left for potential recapture by the Central Powers. However, the mostly inert trench warfare of the time left less opportunity for these tactics than might have otherwise existed. In World War II, the tactic was used far more widely, with Finland in particular giving the Soviet Red Army hell during the 1939 Winter War, destroying their own homes rather than let them fall into enemy hands. The Soviets and the Germans would use the same tactics against each other, with Germany imposing a scorched-earth policy onto the city of Novgorod, and the Soviets doing it to their own territory a few years prior in order to thwart the Nazi advances of mid-1941. At the end of World War II, Adolf Hitler unsuccessfully attempted to order his forces to destroy German infrastructure in order to prevent its use by the Allies, although Hitler's top lieutenants refused to carry those orders out. The conflict also saw the first widespread use of carpet-bombing in places like Dresden, Berlin, and Tokyo, where schools, religious sites, homes, and hospitals were subject to the same campaign of annihilation as everything else. After the advent of carpet-bombing, another mechanism of scorched-earth campaigns emerged: the use of defoliants, and in particular, Agent Orange. Britain would use the substance in its Malayan Emergency to destroy rice fields and patches of trees that could be used as cover for ambushes, while in Vietnam, the United States would use it for similar purposes at a far greater volume. Scorched-earth tactics also saw use in the Persian Gulf War, perpetrated by Iraq when the retreating nation made the decision to set Kuwaiti oil wells afire, and in the Yugoslav Wars, when they were a tool of all sides to target each other's civilians. The Soviets would use scorched-earth tactics in Afghanistan, and its descendant, modern-day Russia, would keep the same cycle going during the First and Second Chechen Wars.\n\n## Myanmar, Ukraine, and Scorched Earth in the Modern Era\n\nIn the modern day, scorched-earth tactics are something of a forbidden fruit where military conduct is concerned. They are employed nearly exclusively by regimes and militaries that do not particularly care about international backlash and condemnation, or otherwise see such a response as part of the price of doing business. One such entity is the ruling regime of Myanmar, where a military junta has engaged in scorched-earth warfare for years. Rather than being targeted at an outside enemy, Myanmar's scorched-earth policy is directed at the country's own citizens. Scaling up from military-led massacres of Myanmar's ethnic minorities, particularly the Rohingya peoples, Myanmar's junta now operates a campaign against anyone and everyone in the nation seen as standing contrary to the junta's authority. Not only civilians, but their homes, their communities, the fields they tend, and the animals they support are in the crosshairs of Myanmar's military, with the intentional displacement of civilians from their homes appearing to be one of the military's major objectives. In Ukraine, Russia's ongoing invasion into sovereign Ukrainian lands has turned very dark. Since the start of the conflict, Russia has been accused of using scorched-earth tactics, but those accusations have grown far louder after its ongoing assault on the small city of Bakhmut, which was transformed into a meat grinder over the course of several horrific months of warfare. According to the area's Ukrainian defenders, Russian forces have pursued a deliberate policy of razing Bakhmut's homes, municipal buildings, and businesses to the ground, in order to eliminate those buildings as potentially defensible locations for Ukrainian soldiers. Elsewhere in the war, Russia has targeted civilian power infrastructure, hospitals, kindergartens, and locations where civilians have attempted to hide out from missile strikes and artillery shelling. But nowhere in Russia's offensive has its preference for scorched-earth tactics been clearer than its destruction of the Kakhovka Dam. Until mid-2023, the dam held back a giant reservoir on the Dnipro River, but it is believed to have been mined by Russian forces in advance of an attack in which the dam was expected to fall back into Ukrainian control. Rather than allow that to happen, Russia is widely believed to have been responsible for the explosions that blew the dam, causing a massive flood downriver that brought ruin to hundreds of communities that had relied on the Dnipro to support their way of life. Agriculture and fisheries within the Dnipro's watershed have been either flooded out or deprived of irrigation in the Ukrainian south. With that destruction comes the forced relocation of tens of thousands of people who previously lived on that land—but according to a range of international experts, that is precisely the effect Russian President Vladimir Putin and his advisors sought to achieve with the dam's destruction. As time goes on, it appears likely that scorched-earth policies will become more and more a tactic of pariah states and loners on the international stage, a small collection of military powers that seem to care more about total destruction of the enemy than they do about preservation of life or even preservation of the territory they are trying to win. The pool of nations willing to adopt scorched-earth policies seems to be getting smaller, but how long it might be until scorched-earth warfare is a thing of the past remains impossible to say.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What is a scorched-earth policy and why is it prohibited under international law?\n\nA scorched-earth policy is an umbrella term for wartime tactics designed to deny the enemy the benefits of a stretch of territory by destroying foodstuffs, crops, livestock, water supplies, and civilian infrastructure. The Geneva Conventions have explicitly prohibited such tactics since 1977, defining them as attacks on objects indispensable to civilian survival carried out for the purpose of denying sustenance to the civilian population or the opposing party.\n\n### Why did retreating forces historically use scorched-earth tactics against their own territory?\n\nDefending armies have frequently destroyed their own land as they retreated, ensuring that an advancing enemy could not live off the territory they captured. The most famous example in the article is Napoleon's invasion of Russia, where retreating Tsarist forces burned the countryside, rendering the French army unable to sustain itself off the land. Combined with the Russian winter, this strategy contributed decisively to the collapse of Napoleon's campaign.\n\n### How did General Sherman use scorched-earth tactics during the American Civil War?\n\nMajor General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea was a deliberate scorched-earth offensive intended to break the Confederacy's will to fight. Sherman's forces first burned Atlanta and then ravaged the Carolinas, destroying railroads, tunnels, crops, and livestock wherever they were found. The strategy ultimately achieved its aim, though it was applied against communities the United States hoped to reintegrate after the war.\n\n### What role did scorched-earth warfare play in Russia's invasion of Ukraine?\n\nRussia has been widely accused of using scorched-earth tactics throughout its invasion of Ukraine. Its assault on Bakhmut involved the deliberate razing of homes and municipal buildings to eliminate defensible positions. Most starkly, Russia is widely believed to have destroyed the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River in mid-2023, flooding hundreds of downstream communities and depriving Ukrainian agriculture of irrigation, forcibly displacing tens of thousands of people.\n\n### How has Myanmar's military junta used scorched-earth warfare against its own population?\n\nMyanmar's ruling military junta has directed scorched-earth warfare not at a foreign enemy but at its own citizens. Scaling up from massacres of ethnic minorities, particularly the Rohingya, the junta now targets anyone seen as opposing its authority. Homes, communities, agricultural fields, and livestock belonging to civilians are systematically destroyed, with the intentional displacement of civilians from their homes appearing to be one of the military's primary objectives.\n\n## Related Coverage\n- [The Dark History & Future of Biological Warfare](https://warfronts.pub/defense/the-art-of-war-biological-warfare)\n- [The Art of War: Power Projection](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/the-art-of-war-power-projection)\n- [Inside Ethiopia's Growing Drone War: How UAVs Are Devastating Civilian Populations in Amhara and Oromia](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/inside-ethiopias-growing-drone-war-civilian-toll-amhara-oromia)\n- [The Art of War: Understanding Rebellion, Revolution, and Popular Uprisings Throughout History](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/the-art-of-war-understanding-rebellion-revolution-and-popular-uprisings)\n- [Why Famine is Returning as a Weapon of War](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/why-famine-is-returning-as-a-weapon-of-war)\n\n## Sources\n1. \n2. \n3. \n4. \n5. \n6. \n7. \n8. \n9. \n10. \n11. \n12. \n13. \n14. \n15. \n16. \n17. \n18. \n19. \n20. \n21. \n22. \n23. \n24. \n25. \n\n[1]: https://jordantimes.com/news/local/serbian-egyptologist-reviews-scorched-earth-policy-ancient-warfares\n[2]: https://www.worldhistory.org/Mesopotamian_Warfare/\n[3]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1170/1170-h/1170-h.htm#link2H_4_0009\n[4]: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/366973\n[5]: https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095606383#:~:text=%5BFrench%2C%20'to%20ride',generally%20conducted%20against%20civilian%20populations\n[6]: http://atrangiboyz.blogspot.com/2014/04/scorched-earth-technique-introduced-by.html\n[7]: https://books.google.com/books?id=jpXijlqeRpIC&pg=PA14#v=onepage&q&f=false\n[8]: https://books.google.com/books?id=N5mIVt_Zd-0C&pg=PA351#v=onepage&q&f=false\n[9]: https://books.google.com/books?id=15TZsW4gTY0C&q=busr+ibn+abi+artat&pg=PA26#v=snippet&q=busr%20ibn%20abi%20artat&f=false\n[10]: https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/emperors-samovars#:~:text=With%20nearly%20500%2C000%20men%2C%20Napoleon,of%20feeding%20their%20large%20army\n[11]: https://www.historynet.com/navajos-will-never-forget-1864-scorched-earth-campaign/\n[12]: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/war\n[13]: https://www.npr.org/2019/08/07/749043160/scorched-earth\n[14]: https://www.hitechcreations.com/flight-simulators/1380-the-scorched-earth-policy-of-world-war-2\n[15]: https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/03/1134092\n[16]: https://www.npr.org/2021/12/30/1069012597/the-myanmar-military-is-employing-a-familiar-strategy-of-massacres-and-burnings\n[17]: https://www.reuters.com/world/ukraine-says-russia-switching-scorched-earth-tactics-bakhmut-2023-04-10/\n[18]: https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-deep-historical-roots-of-russias-scorched-earth-policy/\n[19]: https://www.euractiv.com/section/europe-s-east/opinion/the-brief-russias-new-scorched-earth-policy/\n[20]: https://www.dw.com/en/ukraine-updates-russia-using-scorched-earth-tactics/a-65271267\n[21]: https://sofrep.com/news/scorched-earth-tactics-making-war-on-the-earth-itself/\n[22]: https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110823092610617\n[23]: https://www.history.co.uk/articles/armies-that-used-scorched-earth-tactics\n[24]: https://www.britannica.com/topic/scorched-earth-policy\n[25]: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/scorched-earth-tactics.html\n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/scorched-earth-policy-art-of-total-destruction-warfare.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/scorched-earth-policy-art-of-total-destruction-warfare datePublished: 2026-03-04 dateModified: 2026-03-04 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/zoYoD3Ejw8Q/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: 4a456098a6877407da79532df713c658da9173d2bcc8f608d1c05dea4e7fbc35 tokens: 7818 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/scorched-earth-policy-art-of-total-destruction-warfare.md.summary.md --- All wars are not created equal. From the size and manpower of the two-or-more factions who have chosen to settle their disagreements violently, to the technologies and equipment available to each side at the time of battle, to the economic and human resources that each side counts on to win, every war is shaped by the conditions of conflict. But there is another critical question that must be answered when attempting to understand a war, another dimension that simply must be accounted for: just how far is each side willing to go? Atop the pyramid of wartime escalation, there are few destructive measures that can even come remotely close to the scorched-earth policy, an approach to warfare so devastating, so utterly ruinous, that the entire point is to ensure that when the war ends, nothing is left behind. Kept in the forbidden reaches of a strategist's toolkit, alongside such despicable acts as mass torture, ethnic cleansing, and the use of nuclear weapons, a scorched-earth policy is one that wages war not just on enemy combatants, but civilians, nature, and the land itself. ## Key Takeaways - The Geneva Conventions have explicitly prohibited scorched-earth tactics since 1977, defining them as attacks on objects indispensable to civilian survival including foodstuffs, crops, livestock, and water installations. - Ancient Rome perfected scorched-earth warfare, dismantling the entire city of Carthage after the Third Punic War and burning surrounding fields to deny any future use of the territory. - Retreating Tsarist forces burned the Russian countryside during Napoleon's invasion, denying his army the ability to live off the land and contributing decisively to the French campaign's collapse. - Major General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea destroyed Atlanta and ravaged the Carolinas to break the Confederacy's will to fight during the American Civil War. - Russia's destruction of the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River in mid-2023 flooded hundreds of communities and deprived Ukrainian agriculture of irrigation, displacing tens of thousands of civilians. - Myanmar's military junta has directed scorched-earth warfare against its own citizens, targeting ethnic minorities including the Rohingya and displacing civilians through airstrikes and systematic destruction. ## The Method: Defining Scorched-Earth Warfare Under International Law Since 1977, the use of scorched-earth tactics has been prohibited outright by the Geneva Conventions. For a brief encapsulation of what exactly scorched-earth tactics entail, the Geneva Conventions state: "It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive." A scorched-earth policy is, in essence, an umbrella term, and it encapsulates a wide range of wartime acts that range from unsavory to downright despicable. But the thing that ties all scorched-earth tactics together is one of intent: to deny the myriad benefits of a stretch of territory to one's enemy. If the land can produce food to sustain an enemy army, then a scorched-earth policy dictates that the land must be made to stop producing food. If the land is replete with rivers and aquifers for the enemy to enjoy, then they must be ruined so thoroughly that the enemy dare not trust them. But there is one key issue to consider when it comes to scorched-earth warfare: that an enemy military will almost never be the only people reliant on the land where a given war is fought. Instead, that land is tilled and maintained by civilians, innocents who raise families, build homes, and hope to live out their lives there. A stretch of land might belong to the enemy today, but it belongs to those people for generations; a crop field or a herd of wildlife might sustain the army today, but the people of the region are the ones expecting to live off of it. And if a river or a spring can provide clean drinking water to the enemy, then it is almost certainly doing the same for people who could not harm you if they tried. Herein lies the issue with a policy of scorched-earth warfare: in order to ruin the land, the water, the ecosystems, the infrastructure, and the communities that allow an enemy to survive, one must innately accept responsibility for the wholesale destruction of the lives of thousands or even millions of noncombatants. Best-case scenario, that might look like mass displacement or forced relocation. At other times, it amounts to slaughter, either by trapping said noncombatants into an area where no resources exist to sustain them, or killing them outright as part of the destruction of a given area. ## Tactics in Practice: From Burning Fields to Destroying Dams The simple existence of a precise prohibition against scorched-earth warfare should be enough to indicate that it does happen, and it happens a lot. In some cases, a military elects to adopt a scorched-earth policy because its strategic value outweighs the importance of protecting civilians. In other cases, it is because that military's ideology or its doctrine directly calls for the treatment of even noncombatants as an enemy. Scorched-earth policies are a mainstay in wars of genocide and annihilation, and in wars where partisan resistance amongst ordinary peoples is so commonplace that the attacking military sees no use in distinguishing between the enemy and the locals. In practice, the tactics of scorched-earth warfare are wide-ranging. When it comes to agriculture, a military might burn down crop fields or release hostile insects and parasites, knowing that vegetation will be wiped out. At other times, the land itself might come under attack, with fields or potentially productive plots of land being salted or otherwise ruined so that crops cannot grow there in the future. When it comes to water, a military might see to it that rivers and streams are deliberately poisoned, or that battles take place upstream of a besieged city, so that the waters there will run red with blood and gore. They might poison reservoirs or drain them, destroy dams with the intent to deprive an area of its water supply, or to rush floodwaters downstream and destroy what lies in the path of the flood. They might even divert bodies of flowing water away from enemy positions, with no care or consideration for the people who will need that water a year or a decade or a century from now. When it comes to civilian infrastructure, the treatment is no less gentle. Hospitals that can treat enemy soldiers will be destroyed, no matter how many civilians need their cancer treatments and dialysis; schools where the enemy can take shelter will be destroyed, regardless of whether children will ever learn to read; and roads, bridges, tunnels, and canals will be destroyed, no matter how vital they might be for the community or the region. It is critical to emphasize that scorched-earth tactics are not only offensive in nature. Throughout history, many defending armies have employed scorched-earth policies as they retreat, destroying the land they are pushed off of so that nothing remains for the attacker. In some cases, this might have the effect of denying resources that were the subject of an enemy invasion in the first place; in others, it might cause the enemy to deplete their supplies and reserves more quickly than they otherwise would. In the best-case scenario for a retreating defender, an attacker might be forced to travel deeper and deeper into a wasteland until their supply lines simply cannot hold up, halting their advance indefinitely. Either way, when a scorched-earth policy is adopted by a defender, the message is always the same: if we cannot have our homeland, then nobody can. ## Geographic Vulnerability and the Evolution of Destruction All territories are not created equal in terms of their vulnerability to scorched-earth tactics. Those that are protected by sea, or by desert, or by hills and mountain ranges, may insulate their heartland well enough that it is unlikely to be threatened. The United States, for example, has its agricultural belt shielded by two oceans, two mountain ranges, a desert, a swampland, and a thick northern forest. Conversely, smaller nations, or ones that feature low-lying, flat land are particularly vulnerable to having their territory overrun and ruined for generations; take Israel, where an enemy tank column could travel from the Golan Heights to Tel Aviv in the span of just a few hours. Those with a greater abundance of natural resources across their territory are, by and large, less likely to suffer from enemy scorched-earth tactics; after all, what is the point in ruining one region's farmlands, if ten surrounding regions can pitch in with surplus grain to spare? Instead, it is those territories with established agriculturally productive regions, those that rely on coastlines and oases, and those where cities are directly fed and supported by their surrounding territory, where scorched-earth policies are most likely to benefit the enemy. The tactics employed in the name of scorched-earth policies have both evolved with time and, in some cases, stayed the same. On the technologically advanced side, tactics like carpet-bombing and the use of napalm are new and particularly destructive mechanisms of destruction. On the other hand, salting a field is no more complicated in 2023 than it was millennia ago, and while water wells might today be poisoned with more deadly substances, a poisoned well is a poisoned well, no matter which spigot you drink from. ## Ancient Origins: From Egypt and Scythia to the Fall of Carthage Scorched-earth tactics are one of those ways of warfighting that have existed for as long as people have been at war. As far back as Egypt and Mesopotamia, the historical record indicates the deliberate destruction of agriculturally productive fields and orchards, used as leverage to force a retreating or beleaguered enemy to surrender and stop the carnage rather than starve. In Egyptian campaigns against Syro-Palestine, Egyptian forces were described as having burned towns and settlements down, and destroyed plantations and forests surrounding enemy forts. In the sixth century BCE, the Scythians used scorched-earth tactics against enemies within the Achaemenid Empire, poisoning their wells and using asymmetric attacks to whittle down their food supplies. In his account of the expedition of the Ten Thousand, in the fourth century BCE, the Greek general Xenophon described his enemy's use of scorched-earth tactics, burning grasses and creating a wasteland in the territories where Xenophon's mercenary army was expected to travel. Elsewhere in ancient Greece, the Spartans would do the same, laying waste to the countryside around Athens in an attempt to force starvation and surrender. But the first ancient power to really perfect the use of scorched-earth tactics was, probably unsurprisingly, ancient Rome, whose approach to the practice was the stuff of nightmares for many enemies the Romans faced. Under Roman assault, the large-scale slaughter of enemy-held livestock, the building of dams, and the poisoning of water stores were all to be expected, and at times that Rome was forced into retreats, it used the same tactics to deny resources to the armies that followed after them. At the conclusion of the Third Punic War, the Roman Senate elected to employ an extreme version of scorched-earth tactics, dismantling the entire city of Carthage and burning the surrounding fields—although the common belief that Rome salted the earth in the area appears to only be an element of mythology around the event. In retaliation against Rome, its enemies would also employ scorched-earth tactics, including the Gauls under a chieftain called Vercingetorix, who took it upon themselves to obliterate a series of villages and farms that he believed the Romans were counting on, in order to press an attack against him. ## Medieval and Early Modern Campaigns: From the Umayyads to Colonial Conquests A few centuries later, the Islamic world got its first major taste of scorched-earth tactics, when in the seventh century CE, an Umayyad army marched on modern western Saudi Arabia and Yemen in order to ravage the lands of a rival caliph. In this attack, the Umayyads killed tens of thousands of civilians under their rival's protection, and they went a step further, burning crops and homes in order to make the sections of the caliphate they had touched all but uninhabitable for the future. During the many centuries of medieval European warfare, scorched-earth tactics made plenty of appearances on one side or another, both in the wars fought between European powers in a given area, and in wars of expansion outward. During these years, many societies that relied on feudal structures of land cultivation would find not just their land, but their poor serf civilians to be a target of scorched-earth warfare; after all, killing serfs meant destroying the means of production for a given area's food resources. In France and the Iberian peninsula, tactics called a chevauchée in French, or a cabalgada in Spanish, arose during the Hundred Years' War, with the general idea being that small groups of mounted soldiers would take hostages, capture goods, and destroy infrastructure in the countryside in order to back the enemy into a corner without engaging in large-scale military engagements. In the sixteenth century, scorched-earth warfare would make a comeback in the British Isles, as a tool of conquest used by English invaders of Ireland. And during the Thirty Years War, the same tactics were used by the Holy Roman Empire in order to deny land and villages to an advancing Swedish enemy force. Around this same time, scorched-earth tactics were well-employed in the Maratha Empire, on what is now modern-day India, when ruler Shivaji I coined the phrase "ganimi kava" to represent these same policies of warfare. In this case, it was leveraged against the Mughal Empire, destroying the Mughals' commercial interests and civilian population centers. Shivaji I's son would later be sentenced to death by the Mughals as punishment for his having employed scorched-earth tactics, including in sustained offensives that ravaged the Mughal territories. In the New World, scorched-earth tactics would be deployed en masse a century later, when an American campaign in 1779 laid waste to some forty or more villages belonging to the native Iroquois, and destroyed the essential supplies those communities had stockpiled to survive the winter. ## Napoleon, Sherman, and the Nineteenth-Century Escalation Scorched-earth tactics were not a favored mechanism to secure control over enemy populations by Napoleon himself, but instead they were a tactic used against him by more than one adversary. During his 1810 invasion of Portugal, Portuguese defenders destroyed their own food stores across large portions of the country, in order not to allow those supplies into French hands. And in Napoleon's march on Russia, retreating Tsarist forces burned the countryside they left behind, rendering Napoleon's army incapable of living off the land as they had expected they could do. With their sustenance nowhere to be found, Napoleon's forces were in dire straits, and before long, Russian winter arrived to finish the job. In the American Civil War, Union forces pursued a scorched-earth policy on more than one occasion, but they did so most notably during Major General William Tecumseh Sherman's so-called March to the Sea, an offensive that was meant to break the rival Confederacy's will to fight. First, Sherman's armies set upon the city of Atlanta, turning it to ruins and destroying anything that could aid the Confederate military apparatus. Then, the Carolinas got the same treatment, with infrastructure like railroads and tunnels destroyed, and crops and livestock annihilated wherever they were found. The strategy, uncompromising despite it being levied against communities that the United States hoped to reintegrate after the war, would eventually have its intended effect. Scorched-earth tactics have also been used across history as a weapon of colonial powers, in order to break the will of insurgencies that seek to fight against them. In the Philippine-American War at the turn of the 20th century, American forces destroyed entire villages and poisoned many water wells during their rampage across the islands. They would also use scorched-earth tactics against the Navajo in the mid-1860s, destroying just about everything the Navajo tribe had previously had to its name. Britain would do the same to the Boers in what would become modern-day South Africa, targeting farms and homes in order to prevent Boer forces from fighting a guerrilla war whilst living off the land, and placing Boer women and children into concentration camps. ## World Wars, Defoliants, and the Industrial Scale of Devastation The First World War saw its fair share of scorched-earth tactics, from Imperial Russian use of the policy that saw huge swathes of earth, including entire cities, defiled during a retreat along a 600-mile front, to British tactics in Romania, where oil fields were burned rather than being left for potential recapture by the Central Powers. However, the mostly inert trench warfare of the time left less opportunity for these tactics than might have otherwise existed. In World War II, the tactic was used far more widely, with Finland in particular giving the Soviet Red Army hell during the 1939 Winter War, destroying their own homes rather than let them fall into enemy hands. The Soviets and the Germans would use the same tactics against each other, with Germany imposing a scorched-earth policy onto the city of Novgorod, and the Soviets doing it to their own territory a few years prior in order to thwart the Nazi advances of mid-1941. At the end of World War II, Adolf Hitler unsuccessfully attempted to order his forces to destroy German infrastructure in order to prevent its use by the Allies, although Hitler's top lieutenants refused to carry those orders out. The conflict also saw the first widespread use of carpet-bombing in places like Dresden, Berlin, and Tokyo, where schools, religious sites, homes, and hospitals were subject to the same campaign of annihilation as everything else. After the advent of carpet-bombing, another mechanism of scorched-earth campaigns emerged: the use of defoliants, and in particular, Agent Orange. Britain would use the substance in its Malayan Emergency to destroy rice fields and patches of trees that could be used as cover for ambushes, while in Vietnam, the United States would use it for similar purposes at a far greater volume. Scorched-earth tactics also saw use in the Persian Gulf War, perpetrated by Iraq when the retreating nation made the decision to set Kuwaiti oil wells afire, and in the Yugoslav Wars, when they were a tool of all sides to target each other's civilians. The Soviets would use scorched-earth tactics in Afghanistan, and its descendant, modern-day Russia, would keep the same cycle going during the First and Second Chechen Wars. ## Myanmar, Ukraine, and Scorched Earth in the Modern Era In the modern day, scorched-earth tactics are something of a forbidden fruit where military conduct is concerned. They are employed nearly exclusively by regimes and militaries that do not particularly care about international backlash and condemnation, or otherwise see such a response as part of the price of doing business. One such entity is the ruling regime of Myanmar, where a military junta has engaged in scorched-earth warfare for years. Rather than being targeted at an outside enemy, Myanmar's scorched-earth policy is directed at the country's own citizens. Scaling up from military-led massacres of Myanmar's ethnic minorities, particularly the Rohingya peoples, Myanmar's junta now operates a campaign against anyone and everyone in the nation seen as standing contrary to the junta's authority. Not only civilians, but their homes, their communities, the fields they tend, and the animals they support are in the crosshairs of Myanmar's military, with the intentional displacement of civilians from their homes appearing to be one of the military's major objectives. In Ukraine, Russia's ongoing invasion into sovereign Ukrainian lands has turned very dark. Since the start of the conflict, Russia has been accused of using scorched-earth tactics, but those accusations have grown far louder after its ongoing assault on the small city of Bakhmut, which was transformed into a meat grinder over the course of several horrific months of warfare. According to the area's Ukrainian defenders, Russian forces have pursued a deliberate policy of razing Bakhmut's homes, municipal buildings, and businesses to the ground, in order to eliminate those buildings as potentially defensible locations for Ukrainian soldiers. Elsewhere in the war, Russia has targeted civilian power infrastructure, hospitals, kindergartens, and locations where civilians have attempted to hide out from missile strikes and artillery shelling. But nowhere in Russia's offensive has its preference for scorched-earth tactics been clearer than its destruction of the Kakhovka Dam. Until mid-2023, the dam held back a giant reservoir on the Dnipro River, but it is believed to have been mined by Russian forces in advance of an attack in which the dam was expected to fall back into Ukrainian control. Rather than allow that to happen, Russia is widely believed to have been responsible for the explosions that blew the dam, causing a massive flood downriver that brought ruin to hundreds of communities that had relied on the Dnipro to support their way of life. Agriculture and fisheries within the Dnipro's watershed have been either flooded out or deprived of irrigation in the Ukrainian south. With that destruction comes the forced relocation of tens of thousands of people who previously lived on that land—but according to a range of international experts, that is precisely the effect Russian President Vladimir Putin and his advisors sought to achieve with the dam's destruction. As time goes on, it appears likely that scorched-earth policies will become more and more a tactic of pariah states and loners on the international stage, a small collection of military powers that seem to care more about total destruction of the enemy than they do about preservation of life or even preservation of the territory they are trying to win. The pool of nations willing to adopt scorched-earth policies seems to be getting smaller, but how long it might be until scorched-earth warfare is a thing of the past remains impossible to say. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is a scorched-earth policy and why is it prohibited under international law? A scorched-earth policy is an umbrella term for wartime tactics designed to deny the enemy the benefits of a stretch of territory by destroying foodstuffs, crops, livestock, water supplies, and civilian infrastructure. The Geneva Conventions have explicitly prohibited such tactics since 1977, defining them as attacks on objects indispensable to civilian survival carried out for the purpose of denying sustenance to the civilian population or the opposing party. ### Why did retreating forces historically use scorched-earth tactics against their own territory? Defending armies have frequently destroyed their own land as they retreated, ensuring that an advancing enemy could not live off the territory they captured. The most famous example in the article is Napoleon's invasion of Russia, where retreating Tsarist forces burned the countryside, rendering the French army unable to sustain itself off the land. Combined with the Russian winter, this strategy contributed decisively to the collapse of Napoleon's campaign. ### How did General Sherman use scorched-earth tactics during the American Civil War? Major General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea was a deliberate scorched-earth offensive intended to break the Confederacy's will to fight. Sherman's forces first burned Atlanta and then ravaged the Carolinas, destroying railroads, tunnels, crops, and livestock wherever they were found. The strategy ultimately achieved its aim, though it was applied against communities the United States hoped to reintegrate after the war. ### What role did scorched-earth warfare play in Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Russia has been widely accused of using scorched-earth tactics throughout its invasion of Ukraine. Its assault on Bakhmut involved the deliberate razing of homes and municipal buildings to eliminate defensible positions. Most starkly, Russia is widely believed to have destroyed the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River in mid-2023, flooding hundreds of downstream communities and depriving Ukrainian agriculture of irrigation, forcibly displacing tens of thousands of people. ### How has Myanmar's military junta used scorched-earth warfare against its own population? Myanmar's ruling military junta has directed scorched-earth warfare not at a foreign enemy but at its own citizens. Scaling up from massacres of ethnic minorities, particularly the Rohingya, the junta now targets anyone seen as opposing its authority. Homes, communities, agricultural fields, and livestock belonging to civilians are systematically destroyed, with the intentional displacement of civilians from their homes appearing to be one of the military's primary objectives. ## Related Coverage - [The Dark History & Future of Biological Warfare](https://warfronts.pub/defense/the-art-of-war-biological-warfare) - [The Art of War: Power Projection](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/the-art-of-war-power-projection) - [Inside Ethiopia's Growing Drone War: How UAVs Are Devastating Civilian Populations in Amhara and Oromia](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/inside-ethiopias-growing-drone-war-civilian-toll-amhara-oromia) - [The Art of War: Understanding Rebellion, Revolution, and Popular Uprisings Throughout History](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/the-art-of-war-understanding-rebellion-revolution-and-popular-uprisings) - [Why Famine is Returning as a Weapon of War](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/why-famine-is-returning-as-a-weapon-of-war) ## Sources 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 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