Of course anyone with an informed conscience can be aware if a war is unjust granted there may be gray areas.
"A country cannot err, except at a heavenly level, because the people of no nation are never unified in their beliefs and actions (outside of Sodom and Gomorrah, apparently). Yet heaven may declare a nation to be unjust, but then it is up to heaven to do something about it."
A country being composed of men ipso facto can err. If a nation is not unified then those in good conscience cannot support a war believing it unjust. God would expect them to follow their conscience which they will be judged by.
"The *leaders* of a country may indeed lead many of their country into unjust actions. But these unjust actions are still voluntary on the part of the lower level executors."
If they realize the actions to be unjust they must not comply.
“I was only following orders”, is not a defense, but “I had to follow orders or I would be killed”, *may* be a defense."
Fear of death cannot be a defense of an evil action but it may mitigate one's moral responsibility.
Mat 10:28 And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell.
"Yet actions in battle are to a large extent based on individual action and initiative. This is the real moral choice for a soldier: “I have captured an enemy. Do I return them for disposition to my leaders, or do I summarily execute them here and walk away?”"
Actions in battle like any where else are moral acts i.e. choices which we are responsible for.
There’s that word again, “unjust”, bandied around as if it meant something. Well, actually it does. It means *many* things, in fact, almost too many to name, many in conflict with each other.
Both sides in most modern war claim that fighting by the other side is unjust, that its soldiers are war criminals, and conversely that what they do is honorable and justified.
Of course some of these are far more reasonable than others.
Muslims claim that Christian resistance to Islam is unjust.
In the Catholic realm, the IRA fought against the dominant Protestants and their English allies in Ulster. Were the actions of those Catholics “unjust”?