Emerging Technologies
U.S. Support to the ICC (in AI-Generated Iambic Pentameter)
I never imagined I would submit for publication a poem from Chat-GPT about U.S. policy toward the International Criminal Court (ICC). But that is what I am doing today. The background is as follows. Each day, we hear more about uses of generative artificial...
Balloons are Not Always Joyful: The Legality of Downing the Chinese Spy Balloon
On January 28, 2023, a Chinese high-altitude balloon (HAB) entered U.S. airspace near Alaska and, after transiting Canadian airspace, continued its voyage from the west to the east coast. On February 4, 2023, the United States shot down the HAB over the territorial...
Ukraine Symposium – Field-Modified Weapons under the Law of War
Combatants in armed conflict may choose to modify weapons in the field for a variety of reasons. They may modify them to improve their reliability. They may alter them to increase their range or accuracy. Or they may adapt them to novel purposes. During the...
A Digital Red Cross: What Would It Defend Against?
On November 18, 1991, after enduring a three-month artillery assault, the city of Vukovar in Croatia fell to what was then known as the federal Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and Serb paramilitary forces. After JNA units took control of a hospital where hundreds of sick...
Ukraine Symposium – What’s in a Name? Getting it Right for the Naval “Drone” Attack on Sevastopol
Editors’ Note: As part of our 2023 Year Ahead series, our Board of Advisors member Prof. Dr. Wolff Heintschel von Heinegg presciently identified legal issues concerning maritime drones as a subject to watch this year. It did not take long for the field to respond. Our...
Ukraine Symposium – The “I Want to Live” Project and Technologically-Enabled Surrender
In their ongoing armed conflict, the Russian Federation and Ukraine have engaged in sustained information campaigns using leaflets, social media posts, radio appeals, text messages, and television spots to provoke surrenders. Further leveraging modern communications...
Year Ahead – Emerging Technologies and the Collection of Battlefield Evidence
In a recent series of posts on responsible artificial intelligence (AI), various authors (including Chris Jenks) have discussed the role of “responsibility” in the context of using of AI enabled systems, including weapon systems, on the battlefield. In each of these...
Year Ahead – The Legal Status of Unmanned Maritime (Naval) Systems: A Never-Ending Story?
An international workshop held at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I., from 20 to 21 March 2012, was to discuss the legal status of unmanned maritime systems (UMS) operated by the regular armed forces.[i] The result was not necessarily conclusive. Since then,...
Programming Systems Like Soldiers: Using Military Control Mechanisms to Ensure AWS Are Operated Lawfully
Time is overdue for moving on from discussing whether autonomous weapons should be banned to looking at how to ensure autonomous weapon systems (AWS) are used in a manner that complies with the law of armed conflict (LOAC). This post illustrates that although...
Coding the Law of Armed Conflict: First Steps
[Editor’s note: The following post highlights a subject addressed in the Lieber Studies volume The Future Law of Armed Conflict, which was published 27 May 2022. For a general introduction to this volume, see Professor Matt Waxman’s introductory post.] Killer...
The Law of Armed Conflict in 2040
In the summer of 2020, the Lieber Institute team and I convened a workshop at West Point titled “LOAC 2040.” We invited a group of law of armed conflict (LOAC) scholars and practitioners from around the world, and with a range of perspectives, to consider how that...
Augmented Reality Battlefield
States are prioritizing measures to enhance soldiers’ situational awareness during military operations, including the development of augmented reality capabilities. Augmented reality, as distinguished from virtual reality, superimposes digital content on a live view...