Word of the Week: Denying the enemy ‘quarter’ may sound like tough talk, but it would be a war crime

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — At a March 13 news briefing about the US-Israeli war with Iran, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proclaimed: “We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”

Of the Oxford English Dictionary’s few dozen definitions for “quarter” — covering units of measurement, physical locations and particular parts of things — several are linked to militaries. “Quarter” is slang for the rank of quartermaster. It can mean lodging for soldiers or the act of housing troops, as in the Third Amendment’s proscription “in time of peace” on allowing troops to “be quartered in any house” without the owner’s permission. “Close quarters” can refer to fighting at short distances; a “quarter of assembly” was once a point of rendezvous for troops.

Since the early 1600s, “quarter” has also meant the act of showing mercy and sparing the life of an adversary who surrenders in battle. In this context, it’s more common to see “quarter” used in the negative, in the phrase “no quarter,” as in Hegseth’s comment. The phrase is widely understood to mean taking no prisoners, or rejecting an opponent’s surrender and killing them instead.

The principle of surrender, of a vanquished foe laying down their weapons and a victor allowing them to survive, wasn’t always a given. For much of history, combat went on until one of the warring parties was killed. In the classical era, for example, the defeated were either slaughtered on the spot or enslaved, says Holger Afflerbach, a historian of modern European history and co-editor of “How Fighting Ends: A History of Surrender.”

The concept of “quarter” arose during the Middle Ages, under a ransom system in which nobles and knights who were captured on the battlefield might be kept prisoner until their families paid for their freedom, says Afflerbach. Common soldiers weren’t granted this option for survival until the early modern period, when states assumed responsibility for paying ransoms.

As for the term’s linguistic origins, the Oxford English Dictionary suggests it came from French. In the book “Common Phrases: And Where They Come From,” Myron Korach and John Mordock wrote that the phrase “give no quarter” arose out of a 17th century agreement between the Spanish and the Dutch, which stipulated that officers and soldiers who had been taken prisoner could be held ransom for one-quarter of their pay. As a result, the authors wrote, “give quarter” came to denote mercy, while “give no quarter” came to mean mercilessness — though the OED casts some doubt on this explanation.

Over time, “no quarter” came to be seen as needlessly cruel, and the practice was eventually prohibited under military and international law, Afflerbach says. The 1863 Lieber Code, which laid out rules for the Union Army during the American Civil War and is considered the first modern codification of the laws of war, specifically prohibited the practice (though it makes an exception for a commander to give the order “in great straits, when his own salvation makes it impossible to cumber himself with prisoners”). The Hague Conventions also forbid militaries from declaring “no quarter,” and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court classifies the declaration as a war crime.

Threatening or ordering “no quarter” may be illegal, but whether modern militaries have followed that convention has depended on circumstances, cultural norms and the nature of the enemy, says John Lynn, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. For example, Lynn says while British and US soldiers generally gave “quarter” to German prisoners during World War II, fighting between US and Japanese forces was often marked by “no quarter” on either side.

“We require our soldiers to operate according to international law, but whether that happens all the time, there’s a whole ’nother ball of wax,” he says.

In addition to its specific meaning in armed conflict, “no quarter” also functions as an idiom for a ruthless, unsparing approach. Former Vice President Kamala Harris used it in metaphorical terms in a speech on the anniversary of the January 6, 2021 insurrection: “The strength of democracy is the principle that everyone should be treated equally, that elections should be free and fair, that corruption should be given no quarter.”

“When you say ‘no quarter’ in an American context, I think what you’re really implying is an all-out fight,” Lynn adds.

With literal armed forces involved, though, it’s ambiguous what “no quarter” may mean. GOP Sen. Tom Cotton was criticized for endangering the public by invoking the phrase in 2020 when he called for domestic deployment of the armed forces against what he portrayed as violent protests, tweeting “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.” In January 2021, after the assault on the Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters, Cotton referred back to his earlier argument in a statement, writing “the principle remains the same: no quarter for insurrectionists. Those who attacked the Capitol today should face the full extent of federal law.”

Uttered by Hegseth, who is at the helm of the military, “no quarter” is even harder to dismiss as a mere rhetorical flourish. Hegseth has spent his tenure as defense secretary disparaging laws and rules and reveling in the rhetoric of violence. In the past year, he has vowed that US forces would engage in “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” He has repeatedly declared that the US doesn’t fight with “stupid rules of engagement.”

And under Hegseth’s command, the armed forces have serially attacked unarmed boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, including instances where American attackers were reported to have returned to kill the survivors. On March 4, the US Navy torpedoed an Iranian warship in international waters off Sri Lanka, 2,000 miles from the active war zone, as the vessel was returning from a multinational training exercise, and made no effort to rescue survivors.

Not only is it illegal for armed forces in combat to give no quarter, even to command or to threaten “no quarter” is a war crime, says Dan Maurer, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and judge advocate and an associate professor at Ohio Northern University’s College of Law.

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.

As Maurer understands it, there are three ways one might interpret Hegseth’s use of “no quarter.” The most generous reading is that he merely meant the phrase colloquially, to suggest that US troops will take a fiercely aggressive tack to fighting in Iran. “If he meant that that way, then it’s careless and foolish of him to say the words ‘no quarter, no mercy,’ but it wouldn’t be criminal,” Maurer says.

Another interpretation is that Hegseth knew the legal definition of “no quarter” but didn’t intend to follow through with the threat — that he merely meant to frighten Iranian troops. Maurer says that still could be considered a war crime.

A third interpretation is that Hegseth knew the legal implications and meant it as a command, which Maurer says “would absolutely be the textbook definition of a war crime.” Given Hegseth’s well-established disdain for the laws of war, Maurer says it’s plausible that the defense secretary simply doesn’t care whether vowing “no quarter” is legal or not.

Whatever Hegseth meant, whether the US military follows the laws of war is now up to the troops, Maurer says: “We’re left to trust that they’re not going to interpret what he said as a command. And if they do think of it as a command, then we have to trust them to disobey it.”

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