Search: self-defense
24 Aug ‘Makers of Military Drones Take Off’:
So says the headline of a WSJ news article today (Monday, August 24, 2009, B1, by August Cole), noting that unmanned aircraft – drones such as the Predator to us civilians, although the Pentagon seems to prefer UMV – are transforming not just the military, strategic as well as tactical considerations, but defense contracting. (PopSci ran a story a little while ago on the training of UMV pilots as well.) The WSJ article notes that the administration’s fiscal 2010 defense budget request “includes approximately $3.5 billion for unmanned aerial vehicles.”...
23 Aug There is no Palestinian Private Property That Stands Before the Will
on the agenda, and therefore the “proprietary” mechanism that allows the taking (without compensation) of private Palestinian land for Israeli settlements was recognized, as requested by the Minister of Defense and Israel’s Attorney General (AG). The Rehearing of the Saliha Case Following the original decision, the Minister of Defense and the AG requested special permission for a rehearing before an extended panel of justices of the Supreme Court. They were troubled with the bottom line of the judgment – the need to vacate the outpost. The AG believed that the...
30 Mar The Iranian School Strike: Excusable? A Violation? A War Crime?
...out. Second, there are indications that artificial intelligence (AI) played a role in the designation of the school as a military objective. If so, what does that tell us about the wisdom of outsourcing life and death decisions to a machine? That issue is at the heart of the Trump administration’s present dispute with Anthropic and its AI chatbot, Claude. It may be argued that machines are less fallible than humans. There is evidence, for example, that humans cause more accidents, per capita, than do self-driving cars. This analogy is,...02 Mar YJIL Online Symposium: Response to Matthew Waxman
...to substantive IHL norms. My intuition follows the domestic criminal law framework of recognizing some defenses to criminal liability, which may apply to all or some specific offenses, but are kept separately from the definition of these offenses. This separation operates to safeguard the integrity of the law, leaving room for forgiveness in the particular exceptional instance in which an otherwise-condemnable act may be warranted. Of course, from a realist perspective, the ex post necessity defense functions much like an ex ante authorization. I was especially intrigued by Professor Waxman’s...02 Nov The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and Contemporary International Criminal Law
...Mental Element of the Crime of Aggression and Mistake of Law One of the striking features of the Rome Statute is its criminal law “general part”, by far the most comprehensive of its kind ever found in a treaty. This includes, in Article 30, a default rule as to the “mental element” applicable to the “material elements” of the crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court. “Unless otherwise provided” (and the Statute is, itself, thin on “otherwise providing”), there must be “intent and knowledge” in respect of the material elements....07 Jul Ryan Goodman to Work at DoD for One Year
Ryan — friend of Opinio Juris and friend of Kevin — has been appointed Special Counsel to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense. Here is a snippet from NYU’s press release: In his new role at the Department of Defense Goodman will focus primarily on national security law and law of armed conflict. “I am very humbled to have this opportunity to work with the General Counsel and the outstanding people of the Defense Department,” said Goodman. “I look forward to the hard work and challenges ahead in...11 Jun Gates on the Dimming Future of NATO
capable partners in their own defense,” Mr. Gates said. Mr. Gates complained of what he called a “two-tiered” membership structure, “between those willing and able to pay the price and bear the burdens of commitments, and those who enjoy the benefits of NATO membership but don’t want to share the risks and the costs.” He added that some NATO partners are “apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.” The broader issue is that nations commit major resources...06 Jan Lessons from America’s Longest Held Prisoner of War
began their operations without a formal determination of the legal status of the conflict, but instead resorted to the Department of Defense policy of applying the law of war to any armed conflict no matter how characterized. For the hundreds of Panamanian Defense Force personnel captured by U.S. forces, this resulted in treatment “consistent with” the Third Geneva Convention. The U.S. never formally classified these captured personnel as prisoners of war, because subsequent to initiation of combat operations, the government determined that the conflict in Panama was not an international...