Yesterday I read Children at War, by P.W. Singer, a study of the children who serve as soldiers, spys, and "wives" in conflicts all over the world. Although the book itself is a bit repetitive, the topic is fascinating and horrifying in equal measure.

Singer attributes the prevalence of child soliders to three factors. First, the large number of children who are orphaned, literally or figuratively, by poverty and illness (especially AIDS). This creates a pool of vulnerable children who can be abducted and manipulated without adults interfering on their behalf, at least not effectively. Second, the existence of conflicts in which the "rules of war" are ignored or flouted, creating a pool of adults who are willing to exploit the children. Third, the ready (and, in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, cheap) supply of deadly weapons that are light and simple enough to be operated by a child. Whereas premodern weapons depended on the brute strength of the operator, "a handful of children can now have the equivalent firepower of an entire regiment of Napoleonic infantry."

The larger part of the book is a chilling description of how the child soldiers and recruited and used. Children are abducted from orphanages and schools, or they are taken from their families during raids on villages. The abductors often force the children to commit atrocities, so that they won't be accepted back, and later may scar or brand them to achieve the same purpose. The children are indoctrinated and trained in the use of weapons. In battle, they are often used to clear mines (by blowing them up) or as sheer cannon fodder in attacks on forts and towns. In some cases, they are forcibly drugged to overcome their natural reluctance to proceed under fire. Some want only to escape, but others grow to accept their captors' beliefs.

Later, the author describes the effect that the use of child soldiers can have on a conflict. Because they are cheap to recruit and arm, adults can use them to wreak destruction out of proportion with their own numbers or the popularity of their opinions. He suggests that in some failing nations, a figure on the par of David Koresh can terrorize a population for years, raising funds through looting and using them to arm his charges. Children are more easily persuaded to perform illegal acts of war, so conflicts in which child soldiers are involved can be more brutal than traditional warfare. Child soldiers usually have no home to return to, so their involvement tends to prolong wars; when a cease-fire is actually achieved, they might seep into surrounding territories, inflaming conflicts there. Members of professional, Western armies are traumatized by encounters with child regiments, because their natural instinct is not to shoot them. Because so many of the children are simply looking for a chance to escape, Singer advocates targeting their adult leaders, which may cause the children to disperse.

Singer addresses an obvious question: is the current use of child soldiers unique in history? He believes it is. While youths of fourteen to eighteen may have been used as musicians or support staff in wars like the American Revolution, and as pages in medieval times, and while the Hitlerjugend was forced into service during the desperate last hours of World War II, the use of younger children, ages ten to fourteen, and the wholesale use of children under eighteen as infantry, seems to be unique to our own time. It's not surprising though, that Singer has no clear prescription for ending the practice, other than to address the underlying causes of war and poverty. The research here is better than the book itself, but the topic makes the writing more or less irrelevant.