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The problem with chemicals is pain, and the fact that it kills civilians unnecessarily. Gas bombs are great at killing, but when you drop 1000 of them over a city and you are trying to kill 100,000 civilians in a horrendously painful way, it should be disallowed.

This is what precisely happened in World War II, and, becuase of that... they are now illegal. Besides, most of our gases are not fast acting or quick to kill, making them useless for squad on squad engagements.

Now a muscle relaxer or tear gas, that's where it's at. You spray an enemy with a muscle relaxer/smokescreen or tear gas/smokescreen the enemy can't see, is disoriented, and obviously can't shoot back. True, these chemicals wouldn't kill your enemy, directly. But if you used a team of people with thermal/night/infrared vision and gas masks, they could fire into this cloud and kill all the people inside.

Or if the enemy surrenders. Or you kill the enemies leader or capture them; or their base.

Also, enemy encampments don't really occur any more. We don't do trench warfare. The kind of warfare we engage in usually involves our units dispersed, geographically, in relatively the same area as the enemy. Dropping gas would be suicidal- and even if all of our units wore gas masks, which would have to be electric operated (which have a short life span- or require a ton of batteries) the enemy could easily do the same thing, destroying our reason for doing it and making it harder to fight without any actual gain.

We don't use flamethrowers in modern warfare not becuase they are illegal, but becuase they aren't effective. We can shoot a canister filled full of less painful more lethal 'napalm' at our enemy and have that explode on the target- without burning 90% of our fuel into the air. The same general concept goes for chemical warfare- it's not really effective, just scary and a nuisance. Indirectly dropping hundreds of gas canisters on the enemy only has the effect of potentially hurting our troops, making it useless. A dumb bomb hits the ground and goes boom- now our people move in, no problem.



Besides, if we disregard the Geneva convention, who gives a s**t about GAS BOMBS. We could use small pox, or EMP's, or nuclear bombs that are much more destructive and do way more damage than gas bombs would. The only reason we bombed cities with normal bombs back in the day was becuase we lacked nuclear ones. If we wanted to, we could blow up any city with a nuclear bomb- but we don't do this, becuase where's the fun in that?

Maybe. 3nodding

Yes you can. Well not necessarily.

But a coma in the middle of a battlefield operation would severely lower the enemies battle abilities. They'd have to wear special headphones and be 'deaf' the whole time.