The proven inability of the Geneva Conventions and other codifications of the laws of war to introduce accountability into Western counterterrorism policy is due, first, to inherent weaknesses in just war theory, especially the unsustainable premise that how we fight (ius in bello) and why we fight (ius ad bellum) can be kept logically distinct and, second, to the impossibility of applying a set of rules developed for wars that were expected to end and be replaced by peace to wars that can, in principle and practice, never end. The futility of insulating how we fight from why we fight becomes especially clear when we consider the tactics that political leaders and military planners are willing to countenance when faced with averting a nuclear attack by a terrorist group on a major urban center, especially on the capital city where political leaders live together with their families. The futility of insulating why we fight from how we fight is nicely illustrated by the advent of drone warfare, where low casualty rates create an incentive for mission creep and increasing involvement in remote struggles with only an anemic connection to the war-making power’s core national security interests. In addition, the classical laws of war assume that war and peace are twinned concepts and that all limits on how we fight are rooted in a two-part understanding that serving in the enemy army is no crime and that war will be followed by peaceful coexistence between former belligerents. The irrelevance of these assumptions for the war on terror helps explain the impotence of the laws of war as a regulator of that conflict. The conclusion to which this argument leads is that counterterrorism must orient itself to the extent possible toward the fundamental premise of the law-enforcement model for managing violence, and that is the individualization of culpability, a premise and a practice unknown to «war».