I'm very. I mean, if you guys already know her handbook that I hear in public practice and international relations, etcetera,
Merton, Associate Fellow of the Oxford Institute of Ethics and Law of Conflict Detail here and still from Cambridge.
I would say so that qualifies.
And of course, originally from Germany, because, you know, we'll be interested to know about her background there as well.
We had a great conversation at lunch about that and her research has focussed on a number of areas and the two things she's working on that moment,
but I'm not going to steal from you,
let you make sure we are aware of those things at the very end because I was time she was going to particularly the new
book which we're waiting for with bated breath and I hope we'll see the light and make sure that they publish that soon.
So anyway, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Rob, for that kind introduction and for the opportunity to speak in this forum.
So this isn't actually a book yet. It's my dphil, which I defended in September 2011 and which I'm still turning into a book.
This project was originally inspired on a puzzle.
There's a certain type of international armed conflict that is increasingly legalised, and it is mostly the coalition Western coalitions,
often under the leadership of the US intervening in third world countries and these highly legalised
armed conflicts nevertheless engender more rather than less moral outrage and public criticism.
While basically every US military intervention since the 1991 Gulf War has been hailed as the most legalised war in the history of mankind.
These same wars has all have always also inspired, vociferous criticism regarding the humanitarian implications.
This sort of dichotomous commentary, I think,
reached a peak over the last couple of years with the US tightening its rules of engagement for air strikes in
Afghanistan a number of times until they were actually much stricter than the law would require them to be.
Yet these measures failed to quell public disaffection and the continuous protest by the international community.
So there are these incidents of moral condemnation and commendation for comprehensive legalisation is obviously there are multiple,
multiple reasons for that.
It is a complex question, but I think it raises one question with some urgency, which is can international law be effective in war?
Can it actually meaningful restraint? States actions during armed conflict.
The existence of international law and the compliance of states with international law specific in the context of armed conflict,
is still somewhat of a surprise to scholars in international law and strategic studies,
and even actually to international lawyers,
because war is in some ways the realist ideal type of anarchical international relations where the survival
of the state is on the line and security is a zero sum game and common ground is hard to come by.
So in some ways, our most immediate reaction to seeing that law has penetrated that realm of international relations was surprise.
And as a result, a lot of the time in public commentary, as well as in academic discussions,
effectiveness of international law is equated with recourse to it.
International law is being called upon in decision making.
Hence it must be effective. But I think, not least in light of this dichotomous commentary with continuous moral outrage by legalised war,
I think we have to ask the question differently. Effectiveness must mean more than just recourse to law.
And what I think it must mean is we have to ask where the law actually makes a
difference in warfare and whether the difference amounts to a normative improvement.
And in order to shed light on that question, I asked three specific questions one theoretical, one empirical and one normative.
The first question is can international law actually make a difference for behaviour
and more specifically for the definition of a legitimate target of attack?
It is necessary to ask this question because states create international law and international law addresses states.
And for that, because of that, there's this lingering suspicion that international law merely reflects state interest.
So international law endorses how states want to act anyway, and as a result, it doesn't really make a difference.
I would mostly bracket my sort of theoretical inquiry into that question.
I answer the question affirmatively that international law can make a difference for behaviour,
and that is mostly because at the level of the individual,
the individual cognitive and motivational processes of decision making are influenced by whether or not a matter results to a law or not.
But since this is a question that is about international law in general and not specific to war,
I won't talk about this very much in the context of today.
The empirical question I then ask is Does international law actually make a
difference specifically in US air warfare definition of legitimate targets?
And I answer that question affirmatively as well. International law is what I call behaviourally relevant.
It makes a difference. I then put that difference.
To a normative evaluation. Is the difference a normative improvement?
And I answer the question negatively. Hence, the conclusion of partial effectiveness of law in war law is not normatively successful.
I should probably specify that by that I don't mean that more would be normatively preferable or better if there was no law,
if belligerence did not at all recur to law. What I'm basically meaning by saying it's not normatively successful is that law could do better in war.
It could regulate war in a way that is normatively preferable.
And I hope this will become clear over the course of the talk. Obviously, I can't make this argument in its entirety today.
So in the talk I will focus on making three points, sort of by way of theoretical,
the introduction I will outline what I perceive as the vision or the logic according
to which positive international law forces that conduct a war ought to be waged,
which I call the logic of sufficiency. I would then talk about my empirical findings and explain that the legalisation of U.S. air warfare
has coincided and actually law has encouraged the rise of an alternative logic of warfare,
which I call the logic of efficiency.
And I will then compare these two logics and argue that sufficiency is normatively superior to efficiency, hence the lack of normative success.
Let me start with the theoretical and the legal part. As everyone probably knows,
law as well as conventional just war theory relies on two main principles to define exactly the target of attack the
principle of distinction which prohibits to ever deliberately and directly target what is defined as civilians,
either persons or objects. And the principle of proportionality, which is not in the law in this form, but basically in its origin,
says that the side effects of legitimate military operations should not be disproportionate to the military advantages achieved.
I will focus on distinction today because I'm specifically interested in how law proposes to the limit war to the limit,
the sphere of legitimate military engagement from the rest of society.
So how is distinction enshrined in positive law? Article 52 Paragraph two of the first additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions
embodies the definition of a military objective as far as objects are concerned,
which is what I will focus on. And it certainly gives us two criteria for defining an object that is a military objective.
It has to make an effective contribution to military action, and its engagement has to yield a definite military advantage.
Most commentators nowadays think that this actually logically presupposes rather.
So you only get a military advantage out of an engagement because if the object made a contribution to the enemy's military action in the first place.
But what do these two mean? How does the law hence propose we should delimit legitimate from illegitimate objects of attack
that two interpretive controversies that plague this definition of a military objective?
And the first is about the degree of nexus between an object and the military activity of the enemy,
and hence between the attack and the resulting military advantage.
The US interpretation is that the military advantage arises from the engagement of objects that contribute to an opposing states ability to wage war.
This is taken from a doctrinal document of U.S. doctrine.
Basically, this is incredibly broad definition. Almost anything can be construed as contributing to a state's ability to wage war,
its morale, its civilian leadership, its infrastructure, its industry.
Specifically, if we consider that states tend to streamline their activities when they are in war.
Basically putting everything to use in the context of the military activity.
This interpretation stands in stark contrast to the International Committee of the Red Cross's take on
what military advantage means and the degree of nexus that an object has to have to military action.
Basically, that it can only be can only consist in ground gate and the light annihilating or weakening the enemy armed forces.
So this is a very restricted definition.
A military advantage is really an erosion of actual military capability.
The second interpretive controversy concerns the frame of reference for for the definition of an advantage.
Again, the ICRC cautions and says an attack as a whole is a finite event, not to be confused with an entire war.
So basically it tells us there has to be a limited piece of military action out of which we want to gain an advantage.
We can't talk about the entire war and what we might might be advantageous in light of winning the war.
The US interpretation, on the other hand,
is that and this is not actually just the US that has this interpretation that military advantage is not restricted to tactical gains,
but listening to the full context of war strategy besides being grammatically somewhat confusing.
The implication of this is that basically the. Framework.
The frame of reference for defining what counts as progress. What counts as an advantage can be so broad as to include what war is ultimately about.
And not only since Clausewitz, we know that wars are always about politics, right?
States do not end up in war unless they have a political goal in war.
So the danger of that interpretation, when we actually see the results of that in contemporary US air warfare, as I will argue later,
is that there's a short, ever shorter line of thinking between the overall political goals of a war and specific targeting choices.
And let me give you an example that is not actually related to U.S., but Israel's intervention in the Gaza Strip in late 2008.
Israel famously targeted the police academy during a graduation ceremony.
So if you consider the goal of the intervention to be stopping Hamas from launching rockets into Israel, then that seems somewhat strange.
It's not entirely clear how the military what military advantage should arise from an attack on the police academy.
But if you use the broader political goal of this intervention,
the sort of strategic context of Israel wanting to loosen Hamas grip on the Gaza Strip,
undermine it politically, then it makes perfect sense to attack the structures of the political fabric of Hamas.
Hold on the Gaza Strip.
Basically, I argue that the first edition of protocol gives us a clue as to which one of those interpretations is the correct one.
I concede that the textual interpretation of the of Article 52 is open ended.
However, if we put the provision in the systematic context,
the law actually settles the matter in favour of a high degree of nexus and a narrow frame of reference for interpreting military advantage.
And the reason is that the first additional protocol is the first international treaty to actually regulate the conduct of hostilities as such,
in light of the prohibition of the use of force, by implication.
There is it doesn't rest on a virtual list of how you stop legitimate political goals that one may pursue with force.
Basically,
it rests on the independence of questions of conduct from resort and the independence of what we can judge for use in dialogue from use up bellum.
As a result, a law that attempts to regulate behaviour in war without reference to the reasons for state's
fight must rely on a generic concept of generic military victory that applies across wars,
no matter their political and moral concept. And it is that concept of generic military victory.
I argue that is the broadest possible frame of reference for interpreting military advantage.
Because in turn, if you think if we do not actually delimit the frame of reference in that way,
we would not be able to devise how to act in war without reference to the either
political reasons why we are in war or the moral goals that we think we are defending.
But it is uncontroversial that the first edition of protocol applies as the preamble
states in all circumstances and without adverse distinction based on the nature,
origin of the conflict, and most importantly, on the causes espoused by or attributed by the parties to the conflict.
Another argument backing up this interpretation in favour of a narrow frame of reference in the high degree of Nexis.
Is that what an international humanitarian law actually balances to contradict conflict and goals?
It is neither about just rendering war as humane as possible, nor is it about letting military pragmatism run wild.
It is about striking a balance between imperatives that often point in opposite opposing directions in war.
While we don't actually know what it means to strike a balance between humanitarian and military concerns,
if we didn't specify that the frame of reference for military advantage would need to be a generic military victory,
then states would actually have the ability to simply follow their military, their interests, their military imperatives,
because, in effect, whatever they could define, whatever they define as their goal would determine what is a military objective.
So if they wanted to attack a specific object, they could just redefine their military objectives and hence be able to do so.
So basically I believe that as a result, I does not allow the frame of reference to expand as far as political goals of war,
and it insists on a very high degree of nexus between an object and the military,
the competition among militaries for that object to be a military objective.
And I argue that out of these interpretations, we can draw up a logic according to which h l wants or thinks war ought to be waged,
and it rests on two commands addressed to belligerents.
And the first is to sharply distinguish between objects and persons that are closely related to the competition among military and everything else.
Everything else is immune from attack. And the second is to sequence the use of force from the achievement of political goals.
So while in war, violent, the conduct of hostilities and belligerents have to bracket their political or moral goals and
only refer to the military victory when devising how to act and who to injure and who to target.
And only once we have achieved what we have achieved.
Military Victory. You can then translate that into your political goals.
So what I call sequencing, you have to sequence the use of force from the pursuit of politics.
And these two commands rely on two assumptions of sufficiency, which is why I call the logic of sufficient sufficiency.
The first is that actually the engagement of objects that are closely related to the competition
among militaries in a significant number of cases is sufficient for such a competition to proceed.
And one side to win. To achieve generic military victory.
And that generic military victory is in a large number of cases sufficient for states to then achieve their political, legitimate political goals.
Now, that is always very controversial, specifically the second part,
and I think the second sufficiency assumption only actually makes sense based on the
fact that the international order is built on a presumption against the use of force.
If states had the right to use force for the pursuit of political goals, then this would be essentially incoherent.
But because it is not no longer a legitimate tool of statecraft to use force in order to pursue political goals,
international law can actually rule out war as a useful instrument for the achievement of a very wide range of political goals.
And I'm happy to say something about self-defence later, because that obviously being the one exception where states do have a right to use force.
Something similar can be said about the first efficiency assumption.
Obviously there is no eternal canon of objects that you need to be able to engage.
For such a military competition to go forward and for one side to achieve military victory.
This is obviously a set situation and contingent judgement of what is and what is actually sufficient to do so because of that.
Basically what I would interpret that is not so much is assumptions or descriptions of reality, but as normative commands.
What positive international humanitarian law US belligerent to do is to draw such a line
in good faith and to bracket political goals during the combat during combat operations.
So let me move on to the empirical part of the talk.
I this is based on a comparative case study, and I contrast the U.S. air campaigns against North Vietnam,
the Democratic Republic of Vietnam from 1965 to 1972.
And they include sort of three discrete air campaigns, the Operation Rolling Thunder and the two linebacker operations.
And I contrast this to Operation Desert Storm, the war against Iraq in 1991 and the war against Iraq in 2003.
Operation Iraqi Freedom. And the selection rests on three criteria.
And the first is the extreme variation in the independent variable, which is the input of law into decision making about targeting.
Basically, law played a negligible role for targeting decisions during the Vietnam War.
However, the Vietnam War paved the way for the legalisation of US combat operations.
It is hence the war that is closest in time to the later legalised combat operations.
So I use it as a baseline case and it is because it is closer in time.
It is more comparable to the wars in Iraq than something like the Korean War or the Second World War would be.
So basically the second criterion being comparability that as many as possible, that other parameters of war are as similar as possible,
but not quite that similar as I would like them to be, but as similar as one could could hope for.
And basically, if you look at the period from 1965 to 2003, there are a number of US major U.S. forces abroad that I don't look at.
And one of the most important exclusion criteria is that I don't look at coalition warfare in which actually
the coalition partners had substantive say over targeting choices such as during Operation Allied Force
because of the extreme variation where we go from no legal in almost no legal input to very comprehensive
legalisation that is supposed to make it as easy as possible to draw out the difference that law makes.
And the other sort of underlying rationale is that in U.S. air warfare,
specifically air warfare in the 21st century is possibly the most legalised warfare that is out there.
So I chose basically the easiest case for law to be effective in terms of extrapolating from my findings.
So the legalisation of use ever for from Vietnam to Iraq.
I basically follow or trace two indicators across these three cases,
and the first is the entrenchment of professional legal opinion in military decision making.
And this is about the increased role in sight is of a judge advocate general court that basically had nothing to say during the Vietnam War almost,
and then increased in size and institutional standing targets.
Elections during Operation Rolling Thunder were made, famously made at the Tuesday luncheons of President Johnson with his advisers.
And the record is quite clear that there were no lawyers present for those luncheons.
The operate line linebacker operations were conducted by the Nixon administration and the
selection of targets shifted out of the White House into the field to military commanders.
However, that did not at all lead to increased legal input because at that point in time, Judge Advocate, general,
judge Advocate General did not actually count among their top to give advice on operational legal matters.
They were essentially private litigators, but did not were not expected to advise on international humanitarian law.
It is only in 1974 that the Pentagon, in reaction to the public outcry over the Me Lai massacre,
actually tasked with advising on the legality of combat operations and then trains an entirely new
generation of objects that are combat savvy and knowledgeable in international humanitarian law.
350 attacks were then deployed with the troops in Operation Desert Storm,
which was an unprecedented number at the time and amazed a lot of commentators.
Yet this is actually dwarfed by the numbers of lawyers that accompanied the troops 12 years later.
And I have this number somewhere. Yeah, 2200 JAG, 350 civilian attorneys, and 1500 paralegals went with the troops during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
And it's not just the numbers, it is actually also the role that they had.
That changed quite significantly. In my research, I make quite detailed in inquiries into the separate stages of the targeting process from the
early development and intelligence gathering all the way to the execution of an airstrike.
And let me just summarise that basically during Operation Desert Storm,
lawyers were only really involved during what is called the master attack plan, the drawing up of the master attack plan.
And even then it wasn't at all a routine or an institutionalised involvement,
but they basically were just there to be consulted if someone wished to consult them.
So their input was quite haphazard in a way. To the contrary.
During Operation Iraqi Freedom, all these stages from very early intelligence gathering to the execution of the airstrike,
there's a systematic and institutionalised involvement of opinions that goes as far as that.
Jacks are 24 hours in the command centres and they're available to give legal opinions even while the air crew is in the air.
So besides the other passageway of how law could influence targeting decisions is not sort of by a professional opinion,
but by the fact that military decision makers themselves internalise law and perceive a legal obligation as bearing on their behaviour.
And that parameter changes pretty much as radically as the involvement of JECTS.
The documents, basically the records of both the Johnson and the Nixon administration are largely declassified,
and there's really nothing to indicate that either. You know, the political the political decision makers,
nor really the military brass were at all concerned about international law as far as the conduct of operations is concerned,
international law, if it is mentioned at all,
it is always in the context of legitimising the use of force in the first place, and that changes quite radically.
Again, I used interviews to tease out the sense of legal obligation among military decision makers for the both Iraq wars.
And I'm happy to say more later about the questions I asked and the answers I got.
But mostly they can be summarised in the sense that military personnel were aware of the legal obligations in 1991.
It wasn't that they didn't know there was international humanitarian law,
but there was a very general feeling that because of the type of war that the type of warfare that professional U.S. military personnel would wage,
there wasn't really a need to separately consult law because good intentions,
limited wargames technological superiority all meant you weren't really in any danger to break the law in the first place.
That is radically different to veterans of the 23 more war who basically are acutely, legally aware and even eager for legal input.
And they all describe how comprehensively they were trained. And how they don't just have to know the law,
but basically have to internalise that in the sense that if someone makes them up in the middle of the night,
they can not necessarily quote the Geneva Conventions, but the rules of engagement and the special instructions.
So the finding is basically that international law goes from virtual irrelevance to only presence in targeting decision making.
So what was actually hit in these three campaigns?
There are three main trajectories of change. And the first is the increased decreased importance of interdiction operations.
I consulted many different definitions of interdiction and ultimately just made up my own then, which I based on two criteria.
And the one is that the target falls in a certain range of categories, which is essentially military personnel,
military equipment, military transport routes and infrastructure that is used mainly for military purposes.
And the second criterion being the intent or the purpose behind the attack being attrition, the erosion of actual military capabilities.
So during the three campaigns against North Vietnam, about 90% of airstrikes fall in the category of interdiction.
Interdiction then continues to play a role, but it declines during the Operation Desert Storm.
86% of airstrikes fall in that category.
68, if you take out of the equation the Kuwait Theatre of Operations, the airstrikes against Kuwait,
and I can say more about it later, whether or not that makes sense, but it is definitely a decrease.
And 75% of airstrikes against during operation, the initial stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom fall in the category of interdiction.
And I'm also happy to say more about how I came up with these numbers later.
So hand-in-hand with this trend goes the emergence of new categories of dual use targets and
an increase of their role in the sort of increase of their share in the overall airstrikes.
Obviously, that has to be the case because these remaining airstrikes have there has to be another function of air power that gains in importance.
Basically dual use targets during the air campaigns against Vietnam are mostly
limited to transport and industry and during what is called Rolling Thunder 52,
which is sort of one little outlier in the bombing of Vietnam, it is also related to oil industry and fossil.
Anything related to energy that is still an interest a target category in Operation Desert Storm.
But in Operation Desert Storm, on top of that, there is a much more systematic effort to neutralise infrastructure,
power plants, water treatment plants, basically the industrial backbone of a society.
In Operation Iraqi Freedom. That is less important, but this time entirely.
New categories of targets emerged, for instance, civilian leaders.
So civilians in inverted commas, to a certain extent, civilian leaders, but also politically, generally,
genuinely civilian political infrastructure like party headquarters as well as media facilities, both state and privately owned.
And that actually points towards the third trend, which is the emergence of target categories or airstrikes,
which there are virtually no direct and have virtually no direct impact on the military capabilities of the enemy actually to a certain extent.
The US attempted to bypass destroying military capabilities in Operation Desert Storm and even more so in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
And there's really no clear connection between targeting privately owned media facilities and the military capabilities of Iraq.
So this is the third trajectory of change. And if we ask what is the common denominator of this?
It is pretty clear that they have there is a loosening of the nexus between objects and the actual military effort of
the enemy and basically the frame of reference changes to the extent that in the later in in Operation Desert Storm,
but even more so in Operation Iraqi Freedom targeting emerges.
That is has come out of a very short line of thinking from the overall political goals and the strategic context of the war to the targeting choice.
I attempted to make this a little more clear in this cable, which was maybe not successful.
But basically what I try to do is based on the documents that I had available to make
the call to change the imagined cause or change that lead to targeting choices.
And there are different ones for all of these three case studies and then count the average number of steps.
And those are longest because the change for the air wars against Vietnam,
even though I counted fully the last causal chain, which is only for the last 11 days,
the so-called Christmas bombing in which the US sort of strayed from the separate articulation of political goals and military goals and,
and its military objective.
During Operation Desert Storm you have this traditional causal chain, but you also have and this is something I maybe have to argue about more later.
You have targets that are inspired not at all by the military goal of ousting Iraq from Kuwait,
but some of the targeting specifically of down to downtown Baghdad can only
basically explain in terms of the current strategic context of the US wielding its
might in a post-Cold War world in which it won't allow to write any state roughshod
over the international order and wants to actually drive the point home.
For Operation Iraqi Freedom. This becomes incredibly complicated because it all stages at all levels of abstraction.
Military and political goals are very tightly enmeshed.
There's almost no separate articulation of political goals at the highest level.
On the other hand, even what is considered to be a list of operational objectives includes things like making making Iraq safe for the Middle East,
promoting democracy and laying the roots for a democratic state.
So basically another thing that's very telling the US doesn't operate with the concept of targeted anymore,
but calls these desired mean points of impact that are based on what they call strategy to task missions.
So it is acknowledged that each of these targeting choices should be as closely
as possible related to the overall political goal in this case of regime change.
So the average number of calls is this has yet again declined.
So if this is a move away from the logic of sufficiency in light of the degree of nexus in the frame of reference what takes its place?
I call it the logic of efficiency because it rejects the commands of distinction
and sequencing exactly to the extent that those are efficiency defying.
So this logic doesn't formally adhere to distinction.
It's not that the US doesn't distinguish anymore at all,
but it basically broadens the loose ends the degree of nexus between objects and the military competition.
And based on the broader range of available objects, it can then choose those that promise to most efficiently contribute to victory.
And victory is defined no longer as generic military victory, but as the desired political end state.
So essentially this logic rejects sequencing and it redefines distinction.
And I probably can't say this often enough that I'm not arguing at all that the US has gone back to sort of Second World War terrible thing,
because this logic of efficiency is obviously reminiscent of some of the early sort of air power enthusiasts thought about strategic bombing.
But I have put it here in basically that this would be the logic of efficiency in extreme versus what we see in US.
Warfare is the logic of efficiency in a moderate form.
Both reject the sequencing in the sense that they do not think you should separately articulate military and political goals,
but actually that political goals should enter every decision at whatever low level in combat operations.
But the difference between those two is that strategic bombing doctrine, to a certain extent, rejects distinction.
Whereas the logic of efficiency just redefines it,
and it does so in the within the indeterminacy that the definition of a military objective provides at least this textual interpretation,
as I said at the very beginning. So basically what we have is sort of a change in the penumbra of uncertainty of an indeterminate law,
rather than a rejection of the longstanding legal principle of how to wage war.
But obviously, there's still quite a lot of difference to the logic of efficiency.
So how do I think that? Why do I think that sufficiency is normally normatively preferable to efficiency?
I should say that this is not at all an argument based on any kind of investigation or empirical
claim regarding how much casualties or harm or suffering either of these logics will produce.
For various reasons, it is impossible to make systematic predictions about which logic in which context will make me more or less human suffering.
It's basically the question, you know, are quick wars, sharp and quick and brief, worse, better?
I'm thrown out and distinguished in war is better. But ultimately there's it would be almost irresponsible to make claims about that because we
just can't repeat the same exact war with once with one logic and once with the other one.
It would also, to a certain extent, be dishonest to make that the normative standard,
because neither of the logics actually acknowledges as a goal the absolute minimisation of human suffering or civilian, civilian or other casualties.
Both of the logics attempt to strike a balance between the demands of military, of combat operations and humanitarian imperatives.
But the way they strike a balance is radically different. And what I'm saying here is that the way that the logic of sufficient sufficiency strikes,
the balance is preferable to the way the logic of efficiency does so.
And the first is that the efficiency, the logic of efficiency undermines possibly the most fundamental normative pillar of the international order,
which is that you cannot pursue politics with force.
So a lot of people have said to me, but obviously, if you wage war according to the logic of sufficiency, you also pursue politics with force.
You just have the extra step of having to get generic military victory in between.
But I don't think this is merely in the static problem that I have if you allow basically efficient.
The use of force is an efficient tool for the achievement of political goals.
The logic of sufficiency actually makes winning wars hard and rules more out as an effective instrument
for a whole range of political goals that you cannot simply achieve based on a generic military victory.
So in that sense,
it is much more in line with an international order that is premised on a presumption against the use of force than the logic of efficiency.
The second point is that under the logic of sufficiency, there is a certain amount of predictability in agency.
What sort of objects land on? What sort of side of the distinction line to the contrary, for the logic of efficiency, what will be attacked?
What is a legitimate target is a function of the political goals of a belligerent that is not just in theory open ended,
but it is also in practice much less predictable and much less individuals can do
much less about it as they attempt to go to safe places or preserve their property.
The fourth reason is that what I said earlier, that even though it is in some ways striking a balance,
if you say we get the war over with as quickly as possible, that is a way of attempting to do justice to both humanitarian and military imperatives.
But I think it is radically inferior to the way that the logic of sufficiency strikes the balance,
which is essentially by ring fencing war, by limiting its reach.
And I think the the problem is that in reality, in effect, this provides efficiency,
provides an opening for belligerents to ultimately just follow their their military goals,
partly because we don't know how quickly you could possibly ever achieve efficiency and because there is the essentially open ended,
infinite range of political goals that an belligerent might set for themselves at one point in time.
Every in every war one belligerent will realise they are probably going to you to lose.
The logic of efficiency then provides an incentive, even an invitation,
if you consider how high the stakes are for that belligerent to just redefine their goals and
therefore bring entirely new categories of objects within reach of legitimate engagement.
So basically, rather than making war is free in reality at best the danger of drawing them out and escalating them.
The last normative problem with the logic of efficiency only applies for extreme versions of the logic of efficiency
that they basically undermine one of the most widespread and legitimate principles of the regulation of war that is,
non-combatant immunity. All of what I have said so far is about objects and the law that defines the distinguishes between combatants and civilians.
So the law about persons is actually not as indeterminate as the law about objects.
So this is mostly just about objects, but it is an argument that needs to be made in much more detail.
But basically, this is a slippery, slippery slope argument at once.
You start basically undermining the law, drawing a clear and definitive line of distinction between objects.
There is an incentive to do the same for persons specifically because if the
targeting of objects is so open ended as it is under the logic of efficiency,
you're much more likely to produce much more collateral damage in the first place.
I should acknowledge that there are a couple of steps admitted in this argument and I'm happy to elaborate on any one of them in the Q and A.
And the first is that I have actually not shown the connection between legal input and the rise of the logic of efficiency.
All have shown here is a coincidence in time, and I have skipped that because this is ultimately again about the social science,
the the theoretical discussion I have about cognitive and motivation processes and how they change.
And in my work, I try to establish how the specific recourse to this law encourages or contributes
to constituting a meaning of what it means to do the legitimate thing in war,
and that is waging war efficiently.
What I don't argue at all is that international humanitarian law is the only.
The rise of legal input is the only factor in this increased emphasis on efficiency.
Quite the contrary. Actually in place it is possibly necessary as part of a bunch of factors, and one of them is military doctrine.
The rise of doctrines like effects based operations or strategic attack or network network centred attack.
They all have essentially similar currents that they try to make very short line of thinking between
political context and choices in war and the other sort of incentive to be efficient in war.
International public scrutiny, which has risen in in parallel with the legal input military technology,
is relevant in so far as the logic of efficiency is much more dependent on extremely precise targeting than the logic of sufficiency.
So it is in some ways an enabling condition. Could international humanitarian law impose the logic of sufficiency?
This is obviously a necessary argument, if I want to say. Currently, international humanitarian law is not normatively successful.
For that to be true, I have to show that it could actually do better.
But I think this is quite straightforward. It is clear why attackers have an incentive to wage war efficiently.
So in order for law to actually constrain them,
it would just have to be much more determinant regarding the required degree of
nexus and the required frame of reference for the determination of progress in war.
But then there's really no reason why it shouldn't be able to impose the logic of sufficiency.
The last point I want to make here, which goes back to the initial puzzle of legalisation not quelling at all moral outrage about war
is not the logic of sufficiency actually satisfy our moral expectation of legally regulated war?
Would we then have fewer problems with warfare? No, unfortunately,
I argue that the logic of sufficiency still treats the allows the individual to be treated as a
means to an end and allows the victimisation of individuals regardless of their personal status.
That allows the violation of the most basic human right, the right to life.
And basically, what accounts for the increased moral outrage about war and much larger trends that
increasingly expect international law to provide just that to protect the human person,
even in war. And that international law cannot possibly fulfil that goal and definitely not based on the logic of sufficiency.
So just to recap,
I think the international community in law is found to be behaviourally relevant because it encourages the rise of the logic of efficiency,
but because of the logic of sufficient efficiency is normatively inferior to the logic of sufficiency,
I find it not normatively successful and hence only partially effective.
Thank you.