The confluence of tributaries ...
meeting at a point none could foresee; but in which all have some interest. How's that for an inscrutable statement.
Comes about from having downloaded two articles by Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., within the hour: Sam's link and a non-scifi piece, Law and Military Interventions (2001), which deals with Lawfare.
How I got to Lawfare came from reading Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (1999) - about 1/2 way through - which has a brief discussion of Lawfare. Briefly, Lawfare is the use of I Law to weaken the position of a stronger opponent (negative use vs the US), or to strengthen an already strong position (positive use if employed by the US, which has not done well at it).
Use of Lawfare vs the US (and its Western allies) is not really new. The 1959 JAG Treatise on irregular combatants predicted its use (pp.5-6):
Not a bad crystal ball for 1959 - and a concept equally applicable to Islamic violent actors where the Western regular war laws are ignored.Finally, any estimate of the use of irregulars in the future must consider two key tenets of Communism; the inevitability of class warfare, and the command to turn ordinary wars into class wars. Irregular combatants are the means by which a class war is begun and carried out. A Russian publicist has advanced a theory of the legality of irregular warfare based upon a just-unjust war dichotomy, which is partly based upon Marxian theory. The theory seems peculiarly suited to application in class warfare. Therefore, in the future large numbers of irregular combatants may oppose conventional armies. If so, the problem of the legal status of the irregular combatant will be posed in a more acute form than heretofore.
In fact, adoption of 1977 Additional Protocal I to the GCs seems the earliest example of Lawfare at its highest level. See Rex A. Childers, THE RATIONALITY OF NONCONFORMITY: THE UNITED STATES DECISION TO REFUSE RATIFICATION OF PROTOCOL I ADDITIONAL TO THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS OF 1949 (2008), which discusses this example of Lawfare from the standpoint of national strategies.
Things on this board seem to come around to Small Wars regardless of where they start. Now, on to reading the Dunlop articles & finishing the Chinese piece, which is more up Sam's alley - but also is generally of interest to the question of how much will war be "civilianized" in the future.
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