New technologies and war legislation: a progress?

[M-A Lagrange]

ROBOT WARS: LEGAL AND ETHICAL DILEMMAS OF USING UNMANNED ROBOTIC SYSTEMS IN 21ST CENTURY WARFARE AND BEYOND
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc...f&AD=ADA502401

Much of this innovative autonomous mission planning described above relies heavily on the required speed and memory capacity in which a system’s computer can process the real time data that is occurring throughout a robot’s environment.

P62

Higher levels of unmanned system autonomy will allow an unmanned combat aerial system to locate and launch weapons at specific targets that are selected in advance.

P64

It opens an important field of questions as in such view the interaction with human decision is reduced to minimal. The diagram on page 17 clearly shows that nowadays primary legal responsibility in the use of Drones is still based on human decision. As the previous posts have shown, the legality of an order to use force, especially the problematic of proportionality, is still extremely difficult to establish and can be establish on at posteriori.
(See the excellent article from German Law Journal. Thanks to Mike).

And
How Just Could a Robot War Be?
http://www.peterasaro.org/writing/as...obot%20war.pdf

The relevance of the civilian-combatant distinction to robotic soldiers is that if
they are to be autonomous in choosing their targets, they will have to be able to reliably
distinguish enemy combatants from civilians. It seems that this capability will remain
the most difficult theoretical and practical problem facing the development of such
robots. While there are technologies for picking out humans based on computer vision,
motion and heat patterns, it is extremely difficult to identify particular people, or even
types of people, much less to categorize them reliably into groups such as “friend” or
“foe,” the boundaries of which are often poorly defined and heavily value-laden.

This question is interesting as the first reference establish a course of technology development ending up with the use of “smart weapons” which have the capacity to engage opportunity targets and/or predefined targets without human interaction but only based on computer programming.

This opens the question of the chain of legal responsibilities in such case: if there are no more human interaction to make the decision of using force: who is legally responsible and how to make sure that IHL is respected.
This also echoes the question on proportionality opened in the German Law Journal.