Great. Well, it's a wonderful opportunity we have today to have with us Professor Michael Moylan, who teaches philosophy at Marymount University.
And I had a chance to chat him beforehand and we're particularly lucky because I would describe him as a philosopher who's a practical philosopher,
someone who is really engaged in the policy world in a number of domains.
So you may have come across his work in bioethics, for example, thinking about ethics as they apply to a variety of aspects of our lives.
He has most recently written a book called Philosophy, An Innovative Introduction with Charles Johnson and a book Morality and Global Justice,
which some of you may be familiar with justifications and applications,
which also had part of it a reader in the morality and global justice reader that involved contributions from a number of scholars around the world.
He was actually a fellow, interestingly, at the Centre for American Progress in 2007, for two years,
where he worked on a number of issues in domestic American politics, as well as international issues.
And he's here to talk to us today with a provocative title, This War Has a Meaning.
So I will turn it over to Michael and I'm sure have lots of opportunities for questions.
So there's actually four parts to this this talk.
And I'm going to talk through the first two because I think that that they probably are less controversial and more people have written on them
and I'm probably time doesn't get away after I read the last two the first two being on intrastate warfare and non-state sponsored terrorism,
the third part being on robotic warfare and the last on cyber warfare.
Okay. Traditionally, talk of war has been explained under the canon of just war theory.
This paradigm envisions inter-state conflicts amongst sovereign nations.
Since the end of World War two, this paradigm has stretched considerably until perhaps it is no longer accurate to
describe intrastate and the new technological warfare of cyber and robotic warfare.
So if that is the case, you see and meanings get stretched, then that's kind of the genesis of the title.
That is war. As you know, it may have no meaning.
So under their traditional paradigm, war is sort of to be this is what I'm going to take to be just for theory, for the purposes of the paper,
an aggressive act by one state against the territory or sovereignty of another
state for the purposes of gaining land resources or strategic tactical advantage,
according to the internationally recognised rules and constraints governing actions.
I bellum and in bello the attacking the state acts immorally because it caused the conflict.
This is an important feature of the traditional paradigm respecting at balance.
Attacking states who act aggressively with their military personnel out of their own interests in a might makes right move.
I turn to be belligerent. Crowd credit credulous and credit is is a term I use from ancient Greek to espouse
a theory of justice such that the successful exercise of power is self-justifying.
So I've termed this, you know how in justice you have it to each according to little a slogan.
That's how we try to remember theories of justice to each according to his ability to snatch it for himself is the slogan for the coronaries.
I have argued elsewhere that such a worldview is unethical, but how far do you go with this assessment?
General Sherman in the United States Civil War believed that once one party violated the bellum provisions that any colour options were open to him.
But this is to mistake the difference between going to war and and conducting the war.
Michael Walzer has that famous example where he compares Eisenhower and Rommel.
And even though Rommel is part of the evil Nazis, he acts better than Eisenhower.
In this particular instance, he cites. So they are quite distinct and need to be thought of differently.
Another way we think of in the traditional paradigm is that the war is a go about according to rules and these rules have outcomes.
Famous argument from Aristotle's politics goes like this war may be just or unjust.
Premise two and just wars, virtue and excellence make for winning.
Premise three Virtue and ethics are marks of mass.
Premise four In just words losers are properly slaves.
Inference from two and three sets premise an unjust wars,
virtue and ethics may not account for winning inference for one and two Overall Conclusion In unjust wars.
Slavery may also be unjust. So this is very controversial.
It's often brought up as RSL slip up where he seems to be defending slavery.
But he's thinking of this in terms of a consequence of warfare, which is more like an athletic event than we think of as warfare today.
People, you know, got into shape. You know, battles can last a long time.
If you think of, I don't know, rugby matches or American football, it might seem closer to what Aristotle had in mind.
And in fact, technological advances, even the failings, was very controversial because as a tactical device,
because of sort of this possibly cheating and giving the Greeks unfair advantage over the Persians.
So his idea was that, you know, if you won, then you were clearly got some spoils, which for them included our seats over here, too, if you want.
Don't feel anything. Okay? All right. No problem. So the winning side deserves to win, and they deserve all the spoils there.
And so so the first part, which I'm talking through inter intrastate.
So we're moving out of the interstate to the intrastate model.
And since World War Two and especially since the 1990, the trend has been more towards intrastate warfare away from interstate warfare.
And the Prio Institute that in Oslo where I've talked before, but not about warfare, actually, about gun control,
they they've done a lot of statistics on this and they document how we have been moving in the world away from warfare.
And they have interstate warfare to intrastate warfare and they have various statistical frames to put around this.
So, for example, since 1946, the most war prone countries in interstate warfare are in order.
And you might find this odd being it from the United Kingdom.
The United Kingdom is number one with 21. Each time we went to our war,
it counts as another episode and even small interventions like the Falkland Islands count as as a war under their statistics.
France's number two at 19. And some of these also are post-colonial artefacts.
I might mention the United States had 16 and Russia nine when we when we changed it to adding inter to
intrastate warfare and those on behalf of supporting an intrastate intervention such as Korea or Vietnam,
for example, things change. But in a very odd way, Burma comes out number one, 232.
So obviously some of these interventions are just on bordering territories that that
sometimes been separate and sometimes their nationality is is not in question.
But now we're linking the two together that's it's there for any almost military action outside of their own as well,
actually, any thing that would not come as a police action in their in their country.
So anytime you bring out the troops and some some countries don't make a distinction between
using the military for for keeping the peace and using the military in a war situation.
And they're going to get a lot of ticks on the on the register. So that's probably why Burma is number one.
India is number two at 156 and United Kingdom sound sounded 77.
I've skipped a few. The USA is at 49 in Iran, closely behind at 48.
Okay. So if we accept the statistics as accurate and there are several of these, what do we what do we make of it?
Well, remember, this is the standard paradigm we start out with.
One state invades another state of their territory, sovereignty for the purposes of of gain of some sort.
Now we have instances of violence within the state, and it's it takes on a different character.
If this is where war is moving and the trends seem to be that way, that traditional paradigm seems to need some alterations.
Now, the traditional paradigm, when you have full blown civil war are certainly inefficient.
That certainly envisions something like guerrilla war moving to civil war.
But what if we're talking about.
Intrastate violence that doesn't have the taking over of the country as its goal, but has maybe some sort of other social purpose,
such as ethnic cleansing or a social purpose of of identifying issues with the particular group,
getting rid of the group so that you can skirt other forms of of sovereignty.
And, and when you're day by getting rid of the people who are against you,
these are these are possible images of the interesting future of conventional warfare.
And what they would probably need for war to maintain its meaning is additions to
its inclusions of these sorts of realities into the definitions we put forth.
And so that's that's the first category.
And second category, which I also talk through, is non-state sponsored terrorism.
And these are there are several varieties of this. You know, it's we're not so so what we're we're making that out of bounds is,
you know, the late Moammar Gadhafi, who had a notoriously state sponsored terrorism,
you know, almost close to home here with the, you know, the Lockerbie bombing and so forth on where those are out of bounds.
We're not going to talk about those because those could be construed as attacks by a state against another state.
So instead, what we're looking at are are different group such as well,
one would be illegal activity in the United States, especially southern United States and Mexico, for example.
We have a lot of illegal drug activity and terrorism by the these drug cartels against peoples in Mexico and the United States.
And their purpose is to create a feeling of terror in the population so that they won't turn them in so that they can exist carte blanche.
This worked earlier in the United States during the Prohibition era by, you know, the Sicilian Mafia and other groups who were involved in terrorism.
And it worked. Then they they try to work now.
So we've got criminals who are breaking the law of the country using terroristic tactics so that they can operate with impunity.
Okay. And so far, that's been fairly successful in the United States.
The drug trade is greater than ever.
And despite what various politicians like Rick Perry, governor of Texas, might say, and they don't really have a handle on it much at all.
Okay, then we have other ones that the groups that seem to have other motivations, some of them are political,
some of them seem to be just to wreak havoc on the of presiding society back to the red brigade in Europe during the seventies.
They were very prominent in Central Europe, Germany, and they didn't want to take over Germany.
They weren't they didn't want to become like a guerrilla outfit. They didn't want to change the government.
They were interested in creating havoc. They they were angry, disaffected, hard to know what their motivations are.
We've had lots of different accounts, even even the Baader Meinhof group gave different accounts every time someone would question them in prison.
I don't really know if they know why they were doing it.
We had in the United States, the Symbionese Liberation Army and others that were acting in a similar fashion.
Today we have a lot of splinter groups in the Middle East, such as al Qaeda.
Why do why do they operate? It's difficult to know.
It doesn't seem that they want to establish their own government, doesn't seem like they want to create, say, a new government in Afghanistan.
How do you see al Qaeda being separate from Taliban who obviously do want to establish another government,
but they seem to be interested in wreaking havoc?
And let's see, how is it a policy briefing at Georgetown University about two weeks ago?
And they were talking about, you know, the effects of the Arab Spring and so forth and what would happen.
And, you know, Tunisia sounded really great because I'm not an expert on the Middle East,
but people who are giving testimony were and they said that they have lots of family relations,
that the people they have a lot of cronyism and they thought that they could have stability
from all these family relations and cronyism in a way that Egypt and Libya might not.
And Libya be especially problematic because many of the tribes.
Rival factions didn't like each other. And and this this happens in the post-colonial world, as you know.
And when we left, we see I'm not the colonialists, but I aligning myself to whatever powers they are for the purposes of this set of comments,
what left these countries, oftentimes they created artificial boundaries.
Well, the most notorious was Nigeria. They had many tried to put together that hated each other.
And they still hate each other. Why? Why?
When they broke up the country and left, why not leave?
47 different countries then one country in which everyone hates each other.
Remember in perpetual peace fight manual card. He said that if you have smaller countries, even if they do make war,
it's less problematic that you can have less havoc because they don't have the manpower to do it.
So, you know, and around the world,
the post-colonial system often left countries that were artificially created just because there were deals between France and Germany and and Britain.
And they said, well, we'll do it this way. We'll take this, you take that.
And they're kind of artificial constructs. Sometimes they follow rivers, sometimes they follow mountains.
Sometimes they just followed whatever the people in the world wanted to do.
So this may have something to do with the United States supported terrorism in May linked to the first category of the intrastate violence.
Again, because creating a violent act can be sometimes the only way that some group of people know of of making a statement.
It's a rather odd statement, especially if you kill yourself in doing it, but it seems to be a reality on the ground.
And another change or addition to our understanding of what war is now so that war can have meaning as we talk about it going forth.
And you know, Tim McVeigh is one of these cases that you can talk.
I've talked through that session, so just talk through it. Okay.
So you're probably more interested here.
And I think in the last two categories, robotic warfare and cyber warfare, since there's been lots of changes and not much has been done policy wise.
So let's consider there are many sorts of robots that that perform more duties and
a lot of them are kind of duties that that you wouldn't think of as offensive,
like robots that defuse bombs or robots to do reconnaissance work.
And they have robots sent from the Navy that go out in little tiny ships or SUVs, and they go try to find out who's where.
And they can even attack if they wanted to. But they rarely are used. The ones that are used most right now are the drones.
And it's beginning of the Gulf War or Gulf War is, as you saying, the US had really no robotic warfare capability.
Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the number has grown to 7000 unmanned aircraft and 12,000 robotic drone vehicles.
So if we a singer has written quite a bit about this so far, except his connection to robotic warfare,
to Moore's Law and in computer science, that is, every 18 months memory will double and computer power just keeps exponentially growing.
We can imagine, since these robots are run by computers, what the future will bring many, many, many war vets.
So. Peter Singer that's not a, you know, Australian.
Peter Singer has written about the origins of robots and he claims and I have nothing to say against it.
That's Karel Capek, who invented this term.
And from a Czech word in a play in which you had mechanical servants doing the bidding of their masters.
So we're thinking of robots from that. And I guess the word is robotics.
And they were going to lead a peasant revolution, I guess think of this in kind of Stalinist way.
And we've had spinoffs of this, like, you know, The Terminator and The Matrix, popular movies.
And people have thought about what happens as these robots develop.
And, you know, you have the side argument at some point, if the robots have a capacity to reason,
if, however we define that we have to have a good definition, then they may.
And if you have a moral theory that grounds respect in ability to reason and should have, say, for Kant and myself,
then you're going to have a problem because your robots have more respect as well and they become another form of life.
Okay, so that's down the road and most of my responses are going to be before that.
So because robots don't make any sense if you think of them as alive,
because then there's no real great advantage of using robots as opposed to people.
If robots are considered to have moral status, the big advantage of robots is we think they have no moral status.
It's just a little machine that you throw in there and it gets crunched off right as a loss.
Now we're thinking about this in the terms of lowering the bar, about going to war.
All right. Being from the United States, I've seen this happen by by stages.
Richard Milhous Nixon, who given the Vietnam War from Lyndon Baines Johnson,
when Nixon was elected in 1968 on the pledge, just like Eisenhower, I will get you out of Vietnam.
Well, Nixon felt that one of the problems of the Vietnam War handling it as a policy
issue was that we had the draft in the United States and anybody could go.
I mean, had the Vietnam War lasted eight months longer, I would have gone.
I had number 13 and the draft. And they thankfully for me, for me that the war ended when it did.
But every son of a millionaire, son of a factory worker,
everyone was subject to the draft and no one could get out of the draft except for very specific exemptions.
And there weren't too many of them, really. Okay.
So that meant that, you know, if everybody sun at that time and still today in the United States, only men can be drafted.
Males I if you're if your son can be drafted you have an interest in the war.
Now Nixon create the volunteer army to get rid of that objection.
Now you say, Oh, everybody. The Army wants to be in the Army.
Why should I care? They've made a choice, assumed risk. They know the risks that were involved.
They did it to help their education. Or they did it because they.
They they like being soldiers or some other reason.
Therefore, if something happens to them, I don't have an obligation for empathy for them because they chose this as their career.
Knowing what could happen to them, that lowered the bar significantly and made it possible for the certainly the two Bush wars,
Afghanistan War and the Iraq war to be a push with very little opposition in the United States.
It would have been a far different thing if the draft had still existed.
The second thing is paying for your wars since the Vietnam War.
Lyndon Johnson famously talked about guns and butter. That is, we can fight the war and we can have economic growth at the same time.
We can have a war and not pay for it. This was also famous at the same time, George W Bush.
He cut taxes at the same time he was going to war.
So instead of levying taxes, which had been American history, the income tax, for example, was developed to pay for the Civil War.
World War One, World War Two, and so forth. We had special taxes were going to war and higher expenditure.
We need to all suffer everybody, even if you don't have a son or daughter going to war.
Everybody has to pay for it. That was another bar to make it harder to go to war.
If you know you're going to have to pay for it, you'll be less likely to go to war.
So we have the draft and we have no taxes. These are examples of lowering the bar.
Now, if you don't have to eat the same people, that's lowering the bar even more.
Right? If you only have to send robots to war,
it makes it much easier to go to war because you're probably less concerned about the death of a robot or the destruction of oil.
But we don't even like to use the word death of robots. Right?
If someone said to you, Oh, I got mad and broke my singer sewing machine or my Hoover vacuum cleaner,
would you say, Oh, you terrible person, you broke your vacuum cleaner.
My, I'm going to shun you. I'm not going to talk to you anymore. And to show my moral displeasure at your conduct.
That'd be a highly unusual response when we have very little since we're not even talking about those smart machines I mentioned a moment ago.
We assume that there's no moral respect at all given to machines.
Therefore, if only machines are fighting or doing a great deal of fighting, the bar drops down.
When when Americans were flying manned missions against al Qaeda,
there was some concern that that's occasionally if a pilot might be shot down and killed, even worse,
shot down and not killed, because then they would show on the Internet pictures of them being tortured and and saying,
you know, I don't like Mickey Mouse or something. You know, that's probably the worst thing you can say in America.
Okay. So this is this is this is a the first change of just war theory is that the idea of going to war becomes different because of this lower bar.
The second is reliability and civilian casualties.
This becomes a more complicated question because it gets mixed up with the drones already in service in the United States.
In 2009, as many as 709 deaths were attributed to drone strikes in Pakistan, and at least one third of these were civilian.
That's a pretty high collateral damage rate, isn't it?
This track record is when systems were operating well, but there have been cases where technology did not perform as promised.
For example, in 1988, a Navy cruiser using automatic detection system in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian passenger plane, killing 200 people.
In 2007, the first batch of armed tank robots called Swords fired their guns on friendly forces.
A crime in Iran did target a U.S. helicopter, incorrectly identifying it as an enemy rocket fire.
Singer also reports that swords and fields inexplicably began whirling around chaotically during a demonstrate field demonstration,
firing all over the place instead of an attractive target. On the other side, there are clear advantages.
For example, a drone can accelerate past the speed that a human operator can in an aeroplane because a human operator would pass out.
In other words, it can accelerate and get these speeds that a human couldn't.
That makes it more effective in the field. It can also execute evasive manoeuvres that humans can't.
These planes are also more ecological because they can be programmed to fly at maximum fuel efficiency.
So these are advantages, balance to the disadvantages I just mentioned.
Okay, then. Then we never say who is.
Who are operating the systems. Traditionally we have warriors fighting warriors and just war theory that drones are
often and almost actually always operated by the CIA who are civilian employees.
So we have civilians out of the theatre of a battle.
Sometimes there's a big place in Nevada where they operate.
Nevada is a western state in the United States, and they're in Nevada controlling planes that are going to Pakistan.
So you have civilians running planes that are in Pakistan.
Again, you can either change your idea that that that warfare makes a sharp distinction between civilians and military.
You can change the CIA and only have military people flying these.
If you if you care about the theatre of engagement, you can make them right off the Pakistan in like an aircraft carrier or something.
I mean, there are ways you could fix it,
but at present there there seems to be a kind of a divergence from traditional understanding of how warfare is conducted.
So who's operating the systems is another challenge to robotic warfare now.
Somewhat demur and say that that only those civilians who are engaged in the warfare is lose their immunity because we're concerned,
you know, if it's civilians are engaged in the conflict. Have we given up civilian immunity for all our civilians?
Some would say, you know, the traditionally thought of people working in munitions factory.
Only those civilians lose their immunity and the rest of the civilians retain their immunity.
You could say that only those civilians who are operating the drones lose their immunity and all the rest don't.
Yeah, that's maybe a patch, but there might be a real conceptual problem here by bringing in computer operators.
And that's why they're using the civilians, because I guess that's our art and our intelligence agency.
We have some of the best computer people. They're they're brought in and they're brought in sometimes at very low oversight level.
There's one operator is looking at maybe 30 aircraft at once,
and then they have a way to get their attention and they can quickly divert to
another operator and put all this attention on plane number 32 or something.
This is this is certainly possible, but it really it has been done kind of haphazardly.
We haven't really thought about the ethics of war and how we're creating arranging this robotic warfare with the drones.
Okay. The last subsection in our trouble on the drones here is fairness.
Sometimes people think, like General Sherman, that fairness isn't something we talk about with war.
But there might be an issue that's at the moment in this essay,
there are 40 countries that have some level of robotic warfare, including Iran and China.
But the United States has the most developed drones in the world and land tanks
devouring robots and unmanned vessels for naval reconnaissance and attack.
So what do you have if if you have a warfare situation, you have you think you can fight and have a response.
And the traditional theory,
what if there's no longer any response capability because you have such a technological advantage that that you cease to be able to properly respond.
Does this change the traditional paradigm of what war should be?
For example, say say you had troops, even if the troops were very strong coming in, say, like the Nazis coming in to Belgium or something,
you still had the theoretical possibility of acting against them, fighting against them.
You might choose not to because you think of a senseless loss of life.
But if you have these drones, you have a machine and that the humans involved in Nevada,
how could you possibly unless you sent a sleuth group into Nevada to try to blow up their their system, how could you fight against them?
It seems that at least it stretches the conventional understanding of what retaliation is.
Okay, let's let's move on to the last section.
I skipped the rest of the robot section, and we'll think about cyber warfare.
Okay. So the traditional paradigm here is alter because killing, though it may occur, is not primary.
Attribution is not always clear who commits the acts like the Stuxnet virus, the conceptualisation of attacks in response.
Again, these further clarification. So alterations first is a change in the normal way we think of an act of war.
Earlier I suggested that it was an aggressive act by one state against the territory of cyber.
Another state for the purpose of gaining land resources or strategic advantage according to internationally recognised rules and constraints.
Well, the traditional understanding requires aggressive act of one state against a territory or sovereignty another and a loss of gain,
land, resources or strategic advantage. And both of these are called into question by cyber warfare.
So traditionally you for example, the delivery system is either via the Internet or the agency of a fifth column person who
has malware on a flash drive and which was the probable launch of the black spider worm.
So so among the attacks, agents we have, our viruses generally wouldn't be used for warfare.
It's malware that attaches itself to a file program or email and replicates.
The only time they use this is when they want to overload a site. They would sometimes attack a site and shut it down because it replicates so much.
The site can't hold it. And if it's an important site, there are some sites that could really hurt a country if you shut them down.
As silly as it might seem, if you shut down Amazon.com, you've altered the United States commerce in some significant ways.
The second or more interesting one is the worm.
It's a free program that can be more targeted, like the max worm that was used against Iran by either Israel, the United States, or both.
That's our best guess. This might be the malware of choice in the near term for cyber war arsenals.
Now, if you have an Internet system, then you need an insider.
That's what I call fifth column person,
somebody who's going to come in and infect the system from the inside because it's not available from the outside.
And this is, of course, the what they did for the nuclear system in Iran.
Okay. So a third would be the Trojan horse.
So like the worm, it's not self-replicating, though.
It's not as easily detectable because it kind of comes in on a time delay and it can be a slip
under firewall protections because of this and can be also delivered into Internet systems.
So and sometimes you mix the two. So, for example, in 2000, Israel disabled the public websites of Hezbollah and the Palestinian National Authority.
In 2001, because of a maritime dispute dispute, China launched an attack against a California electric plant that caused the grid to shut down.
In the case instead. Next, the worm target was a nuclear power plant that intelligence said was being converted to create nuclear weapons.
And the goal was to disable. And it's worked. However, in other cases, we sometimes mixed the two warfare's.
And September 1927, Israel launched a cyber attack against the radar and anti-aircraft devices in Syria.
Then this manoeuvre was followed by the Israelis successfully bombing a nuclear
facility that might have been on the verge of creating nuclear weapons.
So they first got rid of the anti aircraft radar and then they sent their planes in so they wouldn't be shot down or detected.
And one could imagine the air traffic systems that could be attacked and civilian loss of life occurring,
because many times you have dual use radar systems and because you may have the intent of of of hurting military anti aircraft,
but because they can't protect civilian planes, civilian planes go down and there's civilian loss of life.
Electric grids could disrupt fire, police and hospitals and create domestic havoc.
Again, civilian repercussions, food stores, sewage plants, water purification could all be affected.
Or what if there was a cyber attack on the New York Stock Exchange, forcing it to, you know, go down to whatever the break neck levels?
They do have automatic levels. They stopped trading at a certain point.
But you can imagine a concerted attack in which you could cause significant economic havoc no matter what's a delivery device,
attacks on electric grids where the stock market would have wide ranging effects that would blur military and civilian non-combatant targets.
Okay, how about attribution and target distinction?
Attribution is one of the toughest things because of the Internet and because internet is is devoted to privacy,
we don't really know who is starting the attack.
That's why we even with that the worm, with the flash drive, they have no idea for sure who did that.
This is maybe one of the worst things about cyber warfare is that we we wouldn't be able to attribute who is committing the aggression.
And because the world over is is a grid,
your ability to be neutral in war can be violated because we could go right across your country and without your permission.
So there's a number of great challenges in cyber warfare that that need to be addressed.
One way that we can do it, make a great change would be to change the way in which computer war computers operate.
If computers had a device that would signal who they are and where they are.
The privacy would be lost in the Internet.
And I know a lot of people love the privacy on the Internet, and it's one of the things that they think is most valuable,
but it's also that which can create the biggest problems and we can connect this to cyber warfare.
In my Blackwell series, Public Philosophy,
I've got a guy over two in a book on this very topic of evil and the Internet and what privacy has to do with bad things that occur on the Internet.
A way to, again, to solve this sense technologically possible, I've been told, is to identify, give up Internet privacy and identify it.
Whatever you do can be tracked back to you or your computer at least.
Okay. So we can see that the target distinction we don't know.
You know, we can't say we're necessarily attacking military targets.
Attribution of who did it. Territory, neutrality.
These are all ways in which we have a problem with the traditional theory.
It renders meaningless the traditional understanding of war.
So in our search, in this paper to find a meaning to war, we can look at one more problem in cyber warfare, and that's attack and response.
There's certainly two ways we can imagine this in cyber warfare, cyber attack, cyber response, if we knew who did it and we attack back in kind.
But it becomes more complicated if we think of this, say you don't have the capability of a cyber response.
What if you have a conventional response to a cyber attack? What if we could say attribution?
You make a mistake and you kill lots of people in a country that really didn't do it because you had prejudice,
you said, Oh, yes, I'm sure they did it. I'm sure it was the Iranians.
They did it right. They they they committed this cyber attack and and so forth.
Or if you're in the Middle East and you might say Israel did it to us and we know Israel had to do it because we're enemies.
The state of Israel, you can imagine great problems with the cyber attack, conventional response scenario.
It again creates great challenges to the way we understand war.
So what can we do? Policy thing? Sorry, this is end of the paper.
So you get to your questions. Ready now to address the new reality of intrastate war.
Major Armies. The world should prepare for multilateral action in the role of nation building.
Soldiers in the future should be trained more in the skills of policing than in traditional combat roles reserved for national defence.
non-State sponsored terrorism is best handled by a cooperative international intelligence network.
Where possible, the suspects should be captured and tried under the existing laws of state from which they reside,
or when there's a failed plot or when there's a failed plot, or after the terrorist incident in the state where the terrorist action took place.
Second, regarding robotic and cyber warfare, new rules must be drawn up.
These rules governing anything will only work when participating parties agree to the rules and the mechanisms for enforcement.
In two years at the Centre for American Progress, it became apparent to me that both of these proposals will not be easy to accomplish.
Some suggestions. One In the case of cyber warfare, move away from at fault liability mindset, the traditional mindset.
Move away from that and move into a strict liability mindset.
This new mindset would look at damage caused by some actor and move it to international civil law.
Since the attribution problem is so high, the new mindset would look at damage caused by some actor and move it to the civil law.
We'd have to have agreeable penalties and so forth because the top 75 economies have most of the assets in the world in their banks.
Or it's probably easy to enforce fines in the case of robotic and cyber warfare.
There needs to be a set of internationally recognised compensation for when we do kill civilians, hurt civilians, injure them.
International insurance companies already have these who's a great problem after 911 having compensation for the families that died or were injured.
That's that proved to be a great problem. It took a number of years for it to be resolved.
Time to do it is not after incidents, but before. So we should have a new international tribunal for that.
A fifth fourth is a fifth Geneva Convention.
And we would talk about issues of robotic and cyber warfare and restrict unjust actors in intrastate warfare and non-state sponsored terrorism.
So these are these are four policy suggestions.
Wouldn't it be a blessing in disguise if the contemporary challenges to just war theory of international conflict.
Actually resulted in a new mechanism rooted in recognised law and backed up by global banking system that was actually able to find
an original way to settle acts of aggression on territorial sovereignty of another nation through recognised legal protocols,
instead of the sharing of blood in the traditional wave or via robots or cyber destruction.
The integration of an updated rule of international law that an enforceable
would bring just war theory up to date and give a new positive meaning to war.
That's a.