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Search: battlefield robots

11 Aug

...as they are for local, tactical, battlefield use to shred opposing infantry) at villages with large concentrations of the wrong ethnicity, in order to drive them out. On the Abkhaz side, the Russians had supplied plenty of clandestine fighters. We met some of them staying in the Abhaz capital – they described themselves as ex-KGB, which is to say, they had gone out of formal government service and were being paid as private contractors, in dollars into foreign bank accounts. They called themselves defenders of the ethnic-Russian villages in Abkhazia,...
11.08.08 | |

25 Feb

...the use of a missile fired from a drone in battle significantly different from a missile fired from a manned aircraft, or a helicopter, or some other place. Critics who call the practice extrajudicial execution, however, are frequently focused upon another scenario. The version of it analytically furthest from the hot battlefield scenario is a CIA directed drone missile strike upon a target in a compound far away from any theatre of active fighting, such as AfPak — someone in Yemen or Somalia, to take the obvious examples. From the...
25.02.10 | |

07 Mar

...the legal basis for the use of force, rules of engagement, capitulation, parole and local cease fire agreements, civilians on the battlefield, war crimes investigation, negotiations with armed groups, the wearing of non-standard uniforms, and child soldiers on the battlefield. Judge advocates are critical and much relied upon members of the military commander’s staff, and move when and where their units move…. The enforcement of the Solomon Amendment is essential to supporting and maintaining the military, especially considering the “increasingly challenging recruiting environment” brought about by the Global War on...
07.03.06 | |

11 Dec

...“Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots,” the same weekend that the Defense Department issued a DOD Directive, “Autonomy in Weapons Systems.” We’ve talked about the HRW report here at OJ some – it is both a report and a set of recommendations calling for a multilateral treaty that would prohibit the “development, production, and use” of autonomous weapons systems. To judge by its reception in the international NGO community, it seems to be a call for the landmines ban campaign of the 1990s, redux. The DOD Directive, for its...
11.12.12 | |

16 Sep

...right to kill an American citizen allegedly associated with Al-Qaeda who is living in Phoenix? 2. Standing aside, if word leaked out that the Obama administration intended to kill that American citizen living in Phoenix, should the judiciary should invoke the political-question doctrine to avoid litigating a challenge to the planned attack? I have been waiting a long time for someone who defends the targeted killing of Americans away from the battlefield (i.e., in a situation that is not covered by IHL) to answer the “inside America” hypothetical. It is...
16.09.10 | |

20 Jan

...Law of Naval Operations provides that incidental injury or collateral damage must not be “excessive in light of the military advantage anticipated by the attack.” The concept of proportionality appears in somewhat different terms in Articles 51(5)(b) and 57(2)(a)(iii) of Additional Protocol I. Proportionality is at issue not only in battlefield applications, but in the strategic context as well, as reflected in Daniel Webster’s letter to Mr. Fox concerning the Caroline incident (noting that Her Majesty’s Government would have to show that the Canadian authorities did nothing “unreasonable or excessive”?)...
20.01.07 | |

22 Nov

Former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and a number of other former U.S. Department of Justice officials filed an amicus brief yesterday in Al-Marri v. Wright, a case currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (see the WPost article here). As a legal argument, the amicus brief offers little that is new or surprising. It argues that the “enemy combatant” designation cannot be used against civilians capture outside the battlefield – this is quite likely to be the next front in the legal war over “enemy...
22.11.06 | |

26 Jan

...security and counterterrorism, articulated the notion of a global NIAC when he stated “[t]here is nothing in international law that…prohibits us from using lethal force against our enemies outside of an active battlefield, at least when the country involved consents or is unable or unwilling to take action against the threat.” When we look at this statement from the perspective of the consenting State rather than from the perspective of the attacking State, two things become obvious. The first is that the attacking State’s claims to IHL targeting authorities are...
26.01.16 | |

14 May

...administration. But as we’ve noted, the domestic and international law relevant here is immensely complicated and hardly clear cut. I agree that U.S. citizenship doesn’t give you carte blanche to wage war. But, as one critic quoted in the article points out, it does protect you from being wiretapped without a warrant or interrogated without your Miranda rights. So isn’t it weird that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t give you due process before you die in a drone attack, away from any conventional battlefield that is launched by an non-privileged combatant?...
14.05.10 | |

30 Jul

...the United Nations, evidence enough that protecting civilians is not the primary purpose of warnings? International law here asks us to make assumptions about the motivations of a belligerent, which is difficult enough in a court room. On a battlefield what we are left to do is look to a belligerent’s general concern for human life and commitment to international law. We tend to grant those to Israel and deny them to Hamas. When Hamas advises civilians to ignore warnings the IDF asks us to believe that the motivation is...
30.07.14 | |

07 Aug

...it is an entirely legal one. Rather, it reflects the political tension inherent in achieving “just peace.” I agree, as a principle, that the international community cannot condone agression to aggrandize territory. Yet the allocation of geographic territory under permanent ceasefires or peace agreements has frequently “rewarded” — or recognized the reality of — gains on the battlefield. The international community should be concerned with the voluntariness of the agreement, the practicability of enforcement of ceasefires, and whether maintenance of the agreement conforms in all respects with principles of international...
07.08.06 | |

02 May

...detention of combatants seized on the battlefield, she warned that "if the practical circumstances of a given conflict are entirely unlike those of the conflicts that informed the development of the law of war, that understanding may unravel." The threat posed to states by international terrorism is of a nature entirely unlike the traditional state-on-state war (or even intra-state wars like civil wars and rebellions) that the laws of war developed to regulate, and thus the laws of war need to adapt to adequately account for the new type of...
02.05.08 | |