No one makes tougher choices than a commander in battle. Do I send this platoon here, or there? How do I rescue these men? If I send these men to assault the enemy on the ridge, they’ll almost certainly die; but if I don’t, the platoon on the road will be captured. These type of choices are certainly enough, but from now on, a British commander has one more thing to worry about. Will I get sued?

Britain’s Supreme Court ruled on June 20 that British soldiers and their families could sue the Ministry of Defense for breaches in their human rights that take place on the field of battle. The families of three soldiers who died in roadside bomb attacks, and another who died in a friendly fire incident, now have the right to seek compensation.

The court based its decision on the soldiers’ “right to life” under the Human Rights Act—a piece of legislation designed to make UK law compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.

The ruling isn’t quite as senseless as it sounds at first. The judges made clear that officers still cannot be sued for decisions made on the battlefield. Rather, they ruled that soldiers can sue based on a failure to equip or train them properly.

But, as the dissenting judges, Lord Mance and Lord Wilson, pointed out, there is no clear dividing line to show what is “sueable” and what isn’t. Lord Mance wrote that the ruling meant it was “highly likely” that a future court would try to rule on the behavior of a soldier or sailor in combat. He warned that the ruling “is likely to lead to the judicialization of war.”

“Whatever caveats and judicial hedging there are in the Supreme Court judgment, there is no getting around the fact that this decision and cases like it will affect the way combat commanders assess problems,” wrote barrister Frank Ledwidge, who served as a reserve military intelligence officer in Iraq. Ledwidge outlined one possible scenario in the Times:

Suppose I have one of my men lying injured in a field under fire from snipers. I can wait for a well-designed armored vehicle to come out to us from our base. This will do the job; we can pick up our man and it is likely that no one on our side will be hurt. Except my wounded soldier is bleeding to death.So I can send a small section of soldiers to pick him up. In this case some of them may be injured or killed. So which for a commander is the right course of action? Which is the negligent thing to do? What would a court say? No commander in any situation like that should even have to consider the last two of those questions, yet they now may well have to.

Would the Supreme Court rule that this commander’s judgment is exempt from scrutiny because he is in the field of battle? Or would it decide that because his decision involved a choice of equipment, he was subject to legal scrutiny? Probably the former. But probably is not good enough. As Ledwidge pointed out, this isn’t something a commander should even have to worry about.

Conservative M.P. Dominic Raab even raised the prospect of the courts ruling that a military operation is too risky and stopping it in advance. “If such opaque standards had applied at the time, would judges have intervened to halt the rescue of hostages during the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege, or the mission to recapture the Falkland Islands?” he asks.

This is an emotional issue for many. The Ministry of Defense is accused of sending men to the death in vehicles that were not fit for the purpose, and there is a lot of anger out there. Mr. Ledwidge also points out that the compensation offered by the Ministry of Defense to severely wounded soldiers doesn’t come close to covering the cost of a lifetime of care.

But extending human rights to the battlefield is not the way to fix the problem.

War is all about risking men’s (and more recently, women’s) lives. Commanders should not have to worry about their analysis of the risks being second-guessed by judges back home.

Even if this ruling is strictly prevented from interfering with commanders in battle, it could still hurt Britain’s military power. Those in charge of developing and deploying weapons should also be free of this second-guessing. One of the first times tanks were used in large numbers was at the Third Battle of Ypres, in 1916. It was a disaster. The tanks stuck in the mud. What if commanders, worried about being sued for sending their soldiers out in what had proven to be a death trap, had given up on the whole idea of tanks?

What about airplanes? At one point in World War i, the average life expectancy of a new pilot in the Royal Fly Corps was 11 days. Was the Ministry of Defense negligent in sending men to near-certain death?

Or how about Winston Churchill’s plan to strike right at the heart of the Ottoman Empire through the Dardanelles? It went disastrously wrong, but historians still argue about whether it was doomed from the start or a brilliant move that, had it worked, would have ended the war early. What if that debate had played out in the courtroom? How willing would future commanders be to take risks? In fact, if the naval commander at the Dardanelles had been willing to take more risk, the operation may have succeeded.

World War i is a good example of how problematic the Supreme Court’s ruling is. That war was full of examples of commanders risking men’s lives unnecessarily—the adage “lions led by donkeys” has at least some truth. But would a judge, acting without the benefit of 100 years of hindsight, have been able to sort the necessary risks from the unnecessary? Would you want to bet the fate of the world on his ability to get that right?

The British military had some big problems back then. Extending human rights legislation to the trenches would not have fixed them. The same is true of the problems in the British military today.

Taking risks in war can sometimes save lives as well as lose them. It should be up to the military, not judges, to decide which is which.

This is yet another foolish decision based on the same European-inspired human rights law that prevents Britain from expelling terrorists and is challenging the supremacy of Britain’s Parliament.

It marks another sad step in Britain’s descent from being a major military power, one that will seriously hamper the nation’s ability to wage war.