Hizbullah / Hezbollah (just the group)

[Ken White]

Military deception is as old as warfare. Inadvertently placing civilians in danger due to combat exigencies is also an unhappy circumstance of long standing. So too is deliberate use of civilians as shields an ancient practice -- but they are three very different things.

Lawyers and wordsmiths may parse the three to their hearts content to get accord -- because that's what lawyers and wordsmiths do. Fortunately, most of us can safely ignore both.

I know of no western nation or armed force that allows, much less espouses the use of civilians as shields. If anyone here knows of one that does, I'd like to hear about it -- and I am NOT talking about aberrations where some Commander locally gets or got stupid.

Anyone who conflates the three very different things to make a political point simply isn't thinking well.

[Mike Innes]

Military deception is as old as warfare. Inadvertently placing civilians in danger due to combat exigencies is also an unhappy circumstance of long standing. So too is deliberate use of civilians as shields an ancient practice -- but they are three very different things.

Lawyers and wordsmiths may parse the three to their hearts content to get accord -- because that's what lawyers and wordsmiths do. Fortunately, most of us can safely ignore both.

I know of no western nation or armed force that allows, much less espouses the use of civilians as shields. If anyone here knows of one that does, I'd like to hear about it -- and I am NOT talking about aberrations where some Commander locally gets or got stupid.

Anyone who conflates the three very different things to make a political point simply isn't thinking well.

Ken, use of civilian shields is only part of the picture when it comes to concealment warfare. What the legal research is attempting is important in this regard, I think, precisely because of some of the political points that have been made, and because many of the issues they have engendered have been poorly understood, poorly defined, and poorly operationalized.

One of the more difficult aspects of dealing with armed groups that deliberately embed themselves among non-combatant demographics and assets, is that forces that do abide by the laws of armed conflict are forced into situations that don't fit neatly into the laws means to govern military confrontation. Some of those situations require precision knowledge of law - boiling it down to local stupidity suggests an unfair mastery of subjects that not even the politicians and the lawyers have figured out. Elaborating and explaining the body of laws that governs such situations, in a way that reconciles it with the complexities of 4th Gen/compound/unrestricted/hybrid war, can only help forces comply with LOAC.

Another challenge is establishing legitimacy thresholds: laws of armed conflict aren't just designed for one side on the battlefield. How does this work in "asymmetric" conflict? How do you incentivize non-state armed groups to play by the rules? What are the behavioral criteria for ensuring one's own group members remain legally entitled to and protected by LOAC protection, when one's group has resorted to terrorist tactics?

The answers to these questions may seem fairly obvious to most of us. To my mind, the link directly to evolutionary aspects of insurgent and terrorist organizations, and from there to political decisions on when to engage/dialogue with "terrorists".

The reason any of these, which have ample historical precedent, are being revisited now is precisely because: 1) politics has kicked crap out of what's meant by law in/of war; and 2) the shape and conduct of war today is entirely different from what it was when the LOAC were originally designed.

Thoughts?