In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Search: battlefield robots

06 Nov

The debate over autonomous weapons is not so visible in the United States, but the ban campaign launched by Human Rights Watch a year ago – an international NGO coalition called the “Campaign to Stop Killer Robots” – has been quite active in Europe and at the UN, where a number of countries raised the issue in their statements to the General Assembly’s First Committee (disarmament issues). Matthew Waxman and I have been writing about this issue for several years; we have a short policy paper on the topic available...
06.11.13 | |

27 Oct

...Global War of Terror, which shifted the binary of war from civilian/combatant to innocent civilian/terrorist, justifying algorithmic killing by association and proximity. In Fallout this distinction between who is deserving of immunity from attack and those subjected to collective violence through unleashing nuclear weapons to using robots or synths against enemy factions really demonstrates the slippery slope of such dilution. Though unlike some states, Fallout also humanises such monsters with storylines for ghouls (Doc Barrows), synths (Nick Valentine) and super-mutants (Strong). War and Technology Historian Ian Morris argues that throughout...
27.10.25 | |

01 May

...places. Matt and I have also seen how much interest is developing among international law and national security academics around this topic, as well as around robots and the law more generally, and we’re delighted to be part of it. We welcome substantive comments, here at OJ or as well by email.   Lethal autonomous machines will inevitably enter the future battlefield — but they will do so incrementally, one small step at a time. The combination of inevitable and incremental development raises not only complex strategic and operational questions...
01.05.12 | |

29 Nov

...AI DSS in their battlefield decision-making to defend Ukraine against Russia’s illegal full-scale invasion. Some domestically developed systems, such as Kropyva or GIS Arta, have been nicknamed ‘artillery Uber’ because they integrate data from radars, drone footage and other sources to compute and share information about Russian forces’ positions with Ukrainian artillery units in real time. Other types of AI-based decision-making software are supplied by foreign companies such as Palantir Technologies, which, according to its CEO Alex Karp, is “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine”. While the Israeli...
29.11.24 | |

29 Aug

...rounds." diane1976 What was the legal justification for violating Pakistani sovereignty? That the battlefield included the part of their country in which his house was located? This seems to be a war with a moving battlefield that follows people around wherever they may be and whatever they may be doing. Chris Diane: I think the most rational argument for the violation of Pakistani sovereignty is that Pakistan was unwilling or unable to act against al Qaeda, which organises armed attacks against the US from within Pakistan's territory. If we accept...
29.08.12 | |

04 Apr

...time constraints, humans are more likely to defer to the judgment of machines. While a human theoretically remains in the loop, there are uncertainties regarding the extent to which humans truly maintain meaningful control or exercise judgment within these military decision-making processes.   AI-DSS’s Error Rates, Accuracy Issues and Risks In addition to speed and scale, the incremental use of AI-DSS hinges on two key assumptions: decision-advantage and accuracy. Both require closer examination. One stated goal is for AI to increase decision-making speed on the battlefield in pursuit of “decision advantage”...
04.04.24 | and |

24 Jun

...Mathews v. Eldridge (a 1976 Supreme Court case assessing what process was due before the government could deprive an individual of property) as setting the test for assessing how much process is required in the targeting case as well; Mathews is the test the Hamdi Court applied in 2004 in determining that U.S. citizen Yaser Hamdi, picked up on the Afghan battlefield, was entitled to notice of the reason for his detention and an opportunity to be heard by a neutral arbiter, once the exigency surrounding his battlefield seizure had...
24.06.14 | |

03 Aug

...remarks in some years about war and law were those written three years ago in this paper [TLS] by John Keegan. “The experience of land war in two world wars”, Adam Roberts observes in The Laws of War, the book Keegan is reviewing, “‘must necessarily raise a question as to whether formal legal codification is necessarily superior to notions of custom, honour, professional standards, and natural law’ in making for battlefield decencies.” Keegan answers simply, “There is no substitute for honour as a medium for enforcing decency on the battlefield,...
03.08.12 | |

08 Jan

...world.” For you law-of-armed-conflict fans, looks like Judge Bates was particularly interested in where the petitioners were initially captured; most claim they were no where near Afghanistan much less an Afghan battlefield when taken into custody. (Petitioner Redha al-Najar, for example, has witnesses who say he was in his home in Karachi, Pakistan when taken.) While the issue looks like it arose at the 3.5-hour hearing in discussions of Kennedy’s practical-obstacles test (it’s not like the military would have to pull witnesses off the battlefield to testify since these guys...
08.01.09 | |

18 May

...it should be subject to derogation during armed conflict. There is much Supreme Court precedent supporting the abridgment of private property rights during war. Milligan suggests that certain circumstances might permit abrogation of even more than property rights. Military necessity for intelligence does not stop with battlefield interrogation. Thus, I am not sure the extent to which we can draw clear lines for the temporal (to capture) or proximal (to the battlefield) applicability of the Fifth Amendment during an armed conflict, assuming it applies at all. What if a simple...
18.05.09 | |

24 Mar

...operations people on down hanging out there exposed. The drone warfare campaign embraced most thoroughly as a strategic matter – correctly, in my view – by the senior administration officials starting with the President is not the “hot battlefield” use of drones, in which they are essentially a substitute air support weapon for a manned system. It is, instead, the use of drones in a role unique to them, as a targeted killing mechanism for use in places far off of active battlefields. There are some questions raised about military...
24.03.10 | |

26 Aug

...of armed conflict to a traditional battlefield such as Afghanistan is a far cry from asserting that the US's actions away from the battlefield e.g., Yemen should also be subject to the law of armed conflict on the basis that the US government sees it all as the same global war on terror. Kevin Jon Heller Ed, Milan offered precisely the response that I would have. It's not that the US has never implied that it believes IHL applies anywhere it might use military force against Al Qaeda, but this...
26.08.10 | |