Targeted Killing

In this chapter I take the killing of Osama bin Laden as a test case for considering the moral and legal status of intentionally killing individuals deemed a threat to national security, under conditions in which the object of the targeted attack is offered little or no opportunity to surrender to attacking forces. The target in such operations, in short, is treated as though he were a belligerent: a person placed on a kill list may be targeted in a way that would be legitimate if he were an enemy combatant. In such cases, we think of him as having no personal right to self-defense and we attempt to use the element of surprise to avoid affording him an opportunity to surrender or evade capture. But where we are targeting non-uniformed civilians, who do not possess all the trappings of an enemy combatant, is it legitimate to target them in the same open-ended way that we target co-belligerents? In particular, is it legitimate to target them in a way that deprives them of a right of surrender?

My assertion in this chapter is that bin Laden was a legitimate military target, and that the decision-makers involved in his killing had thoroughly considered the range of options available to stop bin Laden from further terroristic acts, and were warranted in the decision to lean towards targeted killing in lieu of a capture operation. I thus conclude that those who carried out the killing were within their scope of authority and responsibility for killing rather than for capturing bin Laden. The structure of the operation, then, and the set of moral prohibitions operating on any such plan, should in theory not require new rules or new law of war prescripts. This holds true, despite the short- and long-term implications of this use of force. What is critical is an abiding and firm moral force underlying this and every other form of warfare, regardless of any minor or significant changes to the legal or operational framework in which it may be undertaken.

Section I will examine the political and military necessity considerations that gave rise to the Neptune Spear “capture or kill” decision-making process at the very highest echelons of the Executive Branch, with the evolution of political will, expressed into military directive, reflecting a careful analysis of authority and opportunity to end bin Laden’s reign of terror. This will afford us an opportunity to distinguish between those who can be the permissible subject of “targeted killing” and those who cannot. Section II considers the operational and legal foundation for undertaking a war against one person via targeted killing. As to the targeted killing of bin Laden, this section will show the operation to be on a continuum of legitimate, operational options, from pursuit and capture under warrant-based targeting. Section III examines the moral foundations of foregoing war in favor of more isolated military operations, such as is involved in targeted killing. Section IV concludes with an examination of how the polarizing paradigm of Neptune Spear affects not only current contexts of counterterrorism operations but how it will shape U.S. and international political will to accept targeted killing over capture and prosecution, not just out of political pragmatism.

The killing of human beings is one of the defining features of war. Yet there has not been much research on understanding its emotional dynamics. The act of close-range killing in war is often interpreted through the two contrasting perspectives: the neo-Darwinian approaches which see killing as an optimal tactic of genetic survival and the micro-sociological perspectives which centre on the tension and fear that arise in an inability to forge effective interactional ritual chains. While the former approach insists that taking lives in war is relatively easy the latter perspective describes it as an extremely difficult and traumatic event. In this paper, I challenge both of these influential views and argue that the process of killing is defined by its variability, contingency and context-dependence. Rather than assuming, as the dominant perspectives do, that violence simply triggers biologically ingrained and uniform emotional responses I argue that the emotional dynamics is created through the acts of violence. Drawing on the primary research with the ex-combatants from wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (1991–1995) I show how the shared experience of close-range violence generates highly diverse forms of emotional dynamics.

This article introduces the special issue’s question of whether and how the current transformation of targeted killing is transforming the global international order and provides the conceptual ground for the individual contributions to the special issue. It develops a two-dimensional concept of political order and introduces a theoretical framework that conceives the maintenance and transformation of international order as a dynamic interplay between its behavioral dimension in the form of violence and discursive processes and its institutional dimension in the form of ideas, norms, and rules. The article also conceptualizes targeted killing and introduces a typology of targeted-killing acts on the basis of their legal and moral legitimacy. Building on this conceptual groundwork, the article takes stock of the current transformation of targeted killing and summarizes the individual contributions to this special issue.

Chapter 13, Kevin H. Govern: OPERATION NEPTUNE SPEAR: WAS KILLING BIN LADEN A LEGITIMATE MILITARY OBJECTIVE?

My assertion in this chapter is that bin Laden was a legitimate military target, and that the decision-makers involved in his killing had thoroughly considered the range of options available to stop bin Laden from further terroristic acts, and were warranted in the decision to lean towards targeted killing in lieu of a capture operation. I thus conclude that those who carried out the killing were within their scope of authority and responsibility for killing rather than for capturing bin Laden. Th e
structure of the operation, then, and the set of moral prohibitions operating on any such plan, should in theory not require new rules or new law of war prescripts. This holds true, despite the short- and long-term implications of this use of force. What is critical is an abiding and firm moral force underlying this and every other form of warfare, regardless of any minor or significant changes to the legal or operational
framework in which it may be undertaken.
Section I will examine the political and military necessity considerations that gave rise to the Neptune Spear “capture or kill” decision-making process at the very highest echelons of the Executive Branch, with the evolution of political will,
expressed into military directive, reflecting a careful analysis of authority and opportunity to end bin Laden’s reign of terror. This will afford us an opportunity to distinguish between those who can be the permissible subject of “targeted killing”
and those who cannot. Section II considers the operational and legal foundation for undertaking a war against one person via targeted killing. As to the targeted killing of bin Laden, this section will show the operation to be on a continuum
of legitimate, operational options, from pursuit and capture under warrant-based targeting. Section III examines the moral foundations of foregoing war in favor of more isolated military operations, such as is involved in targeted killing. Section
IV concludes with an examination of how the polarizing paradigm of Neptune Spear affects not only current contexts of counterterrorism operations but how it will shape U.S. and international political will to accept targeted killing over capture
and prosecution, not just out of political pragmatism and military necessity, but as an emergent norm of customary international law.

Stressing that the pronoun "I" picks out one and only one person in the world (i.e., me), I argue against Hunt (and other like-minded Rand commentators) that the supposed "hard case" of destructive people who do not care for their own lives poses no special difficulty for rational egoism. I conclude that the proper response to a terse objection like "What about suicide bombers?" is the equally terse assertion "But I don't want to get blown up."

Terrorists have worked directly with tobacco companies and used tobacco sales to fund traditional terrorist activities. This familiarity with tobacco, coupled with the high mortality rate of tobacco indicates terrorists may use tobacco investing as a means of covert legal killings (CLK), which refers to the terrorist intention of mass killing in a targeted group using legal means. To provide insight into tobacco investors' motives this study 1) quantifies annual death rate for leading mortalitycausing industries in America.; 2) identifies eight companies responsible for the highest CLK; 3) compares investment returns for eight high-mortality companies to the S&P 500 from 2009 to 2019 to determine if tobacco is the most likely target for terrorist-based CLK. The top three highest mortality rate companies and thus best CLK investments from a terrorist perspective were tobacco companies: Altria Group Inc., Reynolds America Inc., and Imperial Brands. Together, these tobacco companies are responsible for >436,800 American premature deaths/year, yet tobacco investments performed worse than the S&P500 over the last decade. It is clear that for CLK investors, tobacco is the most efficient means of investing to kill Americans. Questionable tobacco investor intentionality, combined with the recent advancement in CLK theory makes it reasonable to assume that some tobacco investors are terrorists using their wealth to specifically target and kill Americans. To determine how widespread this practice is, future work is needed to evaluate CLK tobacco investors against the Terrorist Screening Database.

Targeted killing is a lethal and irreversible counter-terrorism measure. Its use is governed by ambiguous legal norms and controlled by security-oriented decision-making processes. Oversight is inherently limited, as most of the relevant information is top secret. Under these circumstances, attempts to assess the legality of targeted killing operations raise challenging, yet often undecided, questions, including: how should the relevant legal norms be interpreted? How unequivocal and updated must the evidence be? And, given the inherent limitations of intelligence information, how should doubt and uncertainty be treat-ed? Based on risk analysis, organizational culture and biased cognition theories, as well as on recently released primary documents (including the U.S. Department of Justice Drone Memos and the Report of the Israeli Special Investigatory Commission on the targeted killing of Salah Shehadeh) and a comprehensive analysis of hundreds of conflicting legal sources (including judicial decisions, law review articles and books), this article offers new answers to some of these old and taunting questions. It clearly defines legal terms such as 'military necessity' and 'feasible precaution ;' it develops a clear-cut activity-based test for determinations on direct participation in hostilities; it designs an independent ex post review mechanism for targeting decisions; and it calls for governmental transparency concerning kill-lists and targeting decision-making processes. Most importantly, it identifies uncertainty, in law and in practice, as an important challenge to any targeted killing regime. Based on analysis of interdisciplinary studies and lessons from the experience of both the U.S. and Israel, it advocates a transparent , straightforward and unambiguous interpretation of targeted-killing law; interpretation that can reduce uncertainty and, if adopted, protect civilians from the ravages of both terrorism and counter-terrorism.

Is targeted killing an effective counter-terrorism tactic? Several studies published in academic journals over the last decade differ over the answer. While some believe that it is effective as a tactic within a larger counter-terrorism strategy, others believe that it has no effect or possibly a negative effect in countering terrorism. This paper argues that although current studies may be valuable for understanding the impact of targeted killing in specific case
studies, they do not yet provide a basis for making general pronouncements on whether targeted killing is or is not an effective counter-terrorism tactic. Problems include widely divergent definitions, a dearth of evidence, difficulties in measuring “success” and the radical differences between case studies which make comparison and generalization a questionable exercise. However, while the evidence does not yet allow scholars, pundits and policy makers to make general pronouncements on the effectiveness of targeted killing generally, it does provide grounds to begin a normative debate over whether such policies are appropriate. In addition, it suggests that researchers and policy makers should focus on gathering and
improving more empirical data to advance decision making on counter-terrorism tactics in the future; particularly when targeted killing should or should not be employed.

Since 2001, we have witnessed the development of a counterterrorism war paradigm built to advance claims about the post-9/11 scope and discretion of US executive power and to articulate specific interpretations of national security interests and strategic objectives in the "war on terror." What makes this a paradigm rather than merely a conglomeration of evolving policies is the cohesiveness and mutual reinforcement of its underlying rationales about the rights of the US government to prosecute a territorially unbounded war against an evolving cast of enemies. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of a juridical field, the article focuses on how officials who constructed a legal framework for this paradigm, rather than disregarding international law wholesale, have engaged in interpretations and crafted rationales to evade some international humanitarian law (IHL) rules and norms while rejecting the underlying logic or applicability of others. This article traces the counterterrorism war paradigm's development and explains how it now competes with and threatens to supersede the customary law principles enshrined in IHL.

The American embrace of " targeted killing " outside traditional theaters of war has proved highly contentious in recent years. According to detractors, the practice constitutes unlawful political murder or assassination. In contrast, proponents suggest the United States is engaged in a transnational, noninternational armed conflict with Al Qaeda and is thus permitted to kill enemy belligerents. This article demonstrates that arguments in favor of targeted killing are emblematic of the " Global War on Terror " to date, which has sought to limit the application of human rights rules in favor of a war paradigm, to expand the meaning of combatancy, and to erode the geographical borders of armed conflict. These dynamics highlight a critical paradox at the heart of US counterterrorism policy. The more legality is strategically invoked to legitimize security practices, the less able it is to substantively limit state violence and to protect human rights.

This article assesses whether the contemporary consensus of just war thinking to allow only for defence as just cause for war between states should also be applied to the practice of targeted killing of non-state actors. It argues that it should not and puts forward an argument for a just cause of retribution for war between states and culpable unjust individuals. Grounded in a retributive reading of Thomas Aquinas, which considers the death penalty to be the domestic parallel to just war, the article argues that the prudential and charitable concerns which underpin the defence limitation for war between states do not apply to war between states and individuals in the same way. Importantly, however, for retributive targeted killings to be morally justifiable, such uses of force must follow a right intention. In consequence, while targeted killings as retribution are justifiable in principle, only rarely do real-world circumstances make such uses of force morally justifiable in practice.

As military technologies progress at a pace that challenges human cognitive and reasoning capacities and in ways that leaves little room to adequately contemplate and assess the very real consequences of the often virtualised and abstracted means of conducting acts of war, the ethics of the use of these technologies remain obscure, occluded by the shadow of
technological acceleration. The call to clarify the ethics of recent military technologies such as UAVs is loud and widespread and yet, it seems, remains unanswered to date. This paper
examines and critiques how the lethal use of unmanned military technologies – specifically UAVs - is framed, depicted, justified and legitimized as ethical within a (post)modern context. Narratives and representations of UAVs as surgical, ethical and wise instruments for counter-terrorism activities not only rely on the rendering neutral of both, technology and
practice, but also on a conflation of technology with practice as a biopolitical necessity. I argue in this paper that, in this conflation, and within the biopolitical mandate, the practice
of targeted killing is adiaphorised and shifted outside the possibility for meaningful ethical contestation. The ethics that are produced in such a context rely on medical metaphors that posit the body politic and the resulting political practices in terms of prophylaxis and ethics becomes a technical subject.

This study argues that the definition of terrorism should be expanded to include covert legal killings (CLK). CLK refers to the fourth terrorist intention (mass killing in the targeted group or nation by any means) where the law does not provide guidance as those with this intention currently use legal means. Statistics on individuals with this intention are limited because our legal system provides no way to identify or track them at the national or international level. To provide a rudimentary method to begin to detect such individuals, this paper develops new methods for quantifying the effectiveness of CLK using the concept of target national deaths per million dollars (DPM). In a case study of high death rate advertising the DPM was found to be only 3.4 because of the existing saturation of the United States market. This data coupled with previous studies indicate an opportunity to disrupt both legal and illegal terrorist intent. These new methods of evaluating the effectiveness of CLK can be useful for identifying and protecting target populations and the analysis presented in this study indicate that considerable future work is needed in evaluating the DPM of other CLK methods to provide guidance for an evolution in the law.

In the post-9/11 era, the label " asymmetric wars " has often been used to question the relevance of certain aspects of international humanitarian law (IHL); to push for redefining the combatant/civilian distinction; and to try to reverse accepted norms such as the bans on torture and assassination. In this piece, we focused on legal and policy discussions in the United States and Israel because they better illustrate the dynamics of State-led " norm entrepreneurship " , or the attempt to propose opposing or modified norms as a revision of IHL. We argue that although these developments are to be taken seriously, they have not weakened the normative power of IHL or made it passé. On the contrary, they have made it more relevant than ever. IHL is not just a complex (and increasingly sophisticated) branch of law detached from reality. Rather, it is the embodiment of widely shared principles of morality and ethics, and stands as a normative " guardian " against processes of moral disengagement that make torture and the acceptance of civilian deaths more palatable.

This article illustrates how the well-known norm life cycle model has been under-utilised for understanding global political behaviour. The model has generally been applied to norms advancing human rights or prohibiting certain behaviour. This article uses the norm life cycle, modified to account for norm fluidity, to examine a practice which enables the state to pursue its security interests, at times by violating human rights. Specifically, this study explores variation in global responses to targeted killings, with Osama bin Laden’s death serving as a focal point. These reactions generally range from condemnation of targeted killings occurring before his death, to widespread acceptance of his death, to subsequent efforts to regulate the practice. This article concludes that this variation could be understood as consistent with the initial stages of the norm life cycle. Through this analysis, the article demonstrates how the norm life cycle model can helpfully shed light on very diverse political behaviour.

Targeted killing operations conducted outside Afghanistan have prompted debate regarding their lawfulness. For opponents of targeted killing operations, the debate tends to center on the number of civilians killed. Proponents respond by questioning the credibility and validity of the methods employed to determine the number of civilian casualties. This debate is important, but it also obscures the fact that the lawfulness of targeting killings is not determined by whether civilians were killed alone, while also lending legitimacy to unsubstantiated claims that the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda and “associated forces.” This article classifies the hostilities in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. It then applies the applicable body of law to targeted killing operations in each of these respective states based on how the hostilities were classified.

The following essay seeks to examine the legality of targeted killing within domains of Law Enforcement and Just War theory. It concludes that the practice seems to fail to satisfy their criteria in both paradigms however notes that Law Enforcement laws seem idealistic in assuming justice can be executed on foreign grounds, while the armed conflict domain fails to characterise terrorists as combatants due to the assumption that they visually distinguish themselves at all times. Ultimately I seek to justify targeted killings inspired by Walzer’s consequentialist theory of ‘Dirty Hands’, yet assert that while America has used technology showing moral compliance with aspects of distinction and proportionality, the process remains imperfect and may contain hidden hazards. Overall, I suggest to combine targeted killings with targeting socio-economic factors fuelling terrorism to eliminate such with increased efficiency.

BJP+RSS DECLARE HOLY WAR AGAINST KERALA
RSS/BJP rulers of India have finally woken up against violence! You are grossly mistaken if you believe that they are seeking forgiveness for large scale killing/raping/maiming/robbing people of the minorities specially Muslims and Christians in 1992-3 (nationwide carnage of Muslims before and after demolition of a mosque at Ayodhya), 1998 (widespread violence against Christians in Gujarat), 2002 (carnage of Muslims in Gujarat) and Kandhmal, Orissa violence of 2007-8 (cleansing of Christians in the area). The RSS/BJP rulers have not expressed intention of discarding or checking the present spate of violence against minorities in the name of cow, love-jihad, ghar wapsi (forcible conversion of Muslims and Christians to Hinduism) and allegiance to Hindutva. There has been no respite in violence against Dalits too. In fact, in last three years incident of violence against Dalits has galloped by around 300%. The Casteist, criminal and patriarchal elements are having free run in inflicting violence against women. The same is the fate of peasantry, working class, students and intellectuals. Never in the history of India's independence, these classes were subjected to such brutal denigration and repression in the name of Bharat Mata. But it is Kerala only where violence is running amok perpetrated by the CPM government of the State against RSS/BJP cadres which has been labelled as 'red terror'. The rulers flying the banner of Hindutva have declared war against Kerala government by launching a strident Jan Raksha Yatra. It is not that only CPM government is under attack. The whole of the Kerala society, its ethos and culture is under attack. The national leadership of RSS/BJP has descended on Kerala to fight Left, to be specific, CPM form perpetrating violence against the anti-national CPM. The UP chief minister Mahant Yogi Adityanath who has many criminal cases pending against him in UP courts is leading the leading commander of the Hindutva juggernaut. According to Adityanath the Left has turned the state into a factory of "jihadi terrorism" which should be matter of serious concern for India as a whole. To quote him, "In the guise of secularism, CPM has turned Kerala into hub of jihadi terror. It must be rejected for which we have come here to create public consciousness".
READ THE WHOLE STORY...

Abstract: The present article takes into account the question of international responsibility and the problem of its attribution in the light of state and individual responsibility. Th e contribution develops the question of elements of those two regimes with a special attention to the relations between them, specifi cally when it comes to the international justice, targeted killings and the technology of drone warfare. Th e considerations will not, however, be limited only to states and
individuals, but attention is paid also to some specifi c subjects such as terrorist groups and their status in international law as well as their responsibility for committed crimes.

Resumé: Článek přináší úvahu o otázce mezinárodní odpovědnosti a problematice přičitatelnosti ve světle státní a individuální odpovědnosti. Příspěvek rozvíjí otázku prvků obou režimů odpovědnosti se zvláštním důrazem na vztahy mezi nimi, konkrétně pokud jde o mezinárodní spravedlnost, cílená zabíjení a technologii vedení války za použití dronů. Předmětné úvahy se však neomezují pouze na státy a jednotlivce; pozornost autorka věnuje rovněž některým specifi ckým subjektům, jako jsou teroristické skupiny a jejich postavení v mezinárodním právu, jakož i jejich odpovědnost za spáchané zločiny.

ABSTRACT This article offers a contextualized comparison of Israeli targeted killing operations aimed at Palestinian high value targets before and during the Second Intifada. Utilizing four indicators that can be directly attributed to a particular operation (elimination of the intended target, civilian and non-target casualties, directly-linked retaliatory attacks, and adverse political consequences), we analyzed thirty-eight Israeli targeted killing operations to determine whether the policy changes introduced during the Second Intifada (regarding the scale, legal basis, and targeting methods) resulted in increased operational success. Our findings indicate that according to all but the first indicator, Israeli targeted killing operations conducted during the Second Intifada were less successful than those conducted prior to this conflict.

One of the most contested arguments in contemporary just war thinking has been the question of the right starting point of analysis. On one side of the argument, one finds Catholic Church officials who argue for a ‘presumption against war’ as jumping-off point. On the other, one encounters critics of that position, led by James Turner Johnson, who defend a ‘presumption against injustice’ as the correct point of entry. Interestingly, both sides refer to St Thomas Aquinas, the key figure in the systematisation of the classical just war, as giving support to their respective position. While Johnson was vindicated as far as Aquinas’s historical starting point is concerned, debate about the contemporary purchase of the presumption against war has continued until the present day. Historical just war thinkers like Johnson have criticised the Church not only for turning the logic of the just war tradition on its head by reversing the inherited hierarchy between the so-called deontological and prudential criteria, but have also questioned the empirical evidence that has put the Church on this trajectory. In this article, I explain how the debate about the presumption against war continues to be relevant by engaging with the general direction the Catholic Church has taken up until Pope Francis and by investigating the particular example of its position on drone warfare. I point out that while the presumption against war runs counter to what Aquinas wrote during his days, Thomistic virtue ethics is generally open to development. The Church may thus claim a Thomistic patrimony in advocating for a presumption against war, but, as I demonstrate, the just war thinking that results, often referred to as modern-war pacifism, struggles to address important moral issues raised by contemporary warfare.

This article undertakes a textually oriented discourse analysis of six Obama-era arguments, delivered by key legal personnel, on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Our analysis situates these seminal texts within a broader discourse analysis of the emergent War on Terror, as articulated by President Bush between 2001 and 2003. This analysis finds that the Obama administration sought to situate their systematized killing programme within the existing confines of the law of armed conflict. In doing so, the Obama administration attempted to unilaterally rewrite the law of armed conflict to permit the killing of ‘terrorist suspects’ and ‘suspected terrorists’ outside of an active battlefield. Key to accomplishing this, our analysis shows, was the Obama administration’s use of innovative techniques of dehumanisation. Obama adopted a sanguine, bureaucratic language to veil the act of killing. The significance of our findings is two-fold. Our research contributes to critical complementary literatures on: (i) the role of dehumanization in US foreign policy, and (ii) the influence of power in the directional flows of law-making and law-receiving from West-to-East and North-to-South. Together, dehumanization and law acted as complementary enablers of political violence perpetrated by the US against those residing in the Global South.

This paper articulates the role of visual primacy in drone warfare through an analysis of a recent ill-fated operation and a study into its developing technologies. In analyzing a drone operation, the first part moves through a discussion of the intervening role of the camera as described by Walter Benjamin as well as aspects of visual reproduction that depart from the mechanical to the digital realm of realtime video, referencing the theory of Paul Virilio. The second part focuses on some developing technologies within drone warfare particularly, the Gorgon Stare and the Mind’s Eye programs. These programs highlight specific transformations in modes of perception brought about by drone warfare, such as an industrialization of vision and automated vision. These aspects are increasingly leading tactics in war as seen in the use of so-called, signature strikes. In studying the empirical evidence of drone technology and its trajectory of reorganizing and defining the scope of military space as well as the target, it reveals how a visual primacy is impacting actual space.

In this paper, I argue that today's 'high value targeting' of individuals in the context of the 'War on Terror' is rooted in strategic debates about 'decapitation strikes' that predate September 11. The 'decapitation' paradigm assumes that any enemy organization - whether a state, insurgent group or terrorist organization - can be dismantled by cutting off its 'head'-by killing their leaders. It anticipates a paralyzing effect on the groups the targeted individuals were 'heading'. The concept has its origins in late Cold War nuclear deterrence theory and gained relevance in the late 1980s and early 1990s as an aerial warfare strategy. Crucially, 'decapitation' and its set of 'body' metaphors established a new logic of enemies as organisms, detaching military targeting from the concept of the nation state. This contributed to an individualization of threat that proved to be applicable beyond its origins in interstate warfare, spilling over into counterterrorism. It connected decapitation with the logic of preemption and its set of medicinal metaphors. The latter stabilizes the nation state as the sole relevant legal person, contributing to a conception of individuals as targets, but not legal subjects. By tracing the storied career of 'decapitation' - as a concept and a metaphor - in United States targeting strategies, I emphasize normative change as slow and incremental. Metaphors offer a promising analytic pathway into this type of discursive transformation. They have a stabilizing function through the structuring force of the discourses embodied in them, but also allow leeway for agency. Their intertextuality and inherent contradictions can be leveraged by actors, both to transform and to stabilize meaning.

Today’s military drones permit an extreme separation between rivals. Along with these weapons comes James Der Derian’s concept of virtuous war, which encapsulates a certain normative view of current and future wars. A rationale of the actors waging these wars is that violence is used in a cleaner way, resulting in ever fewer casualties. I argue that the next step in the progression of military weaponry is the inclusion of artificial superintelligence (ASI). I begin this article by examining certain components that will likely compose ASI. I then use a combination of virtuous war and jus in bello to trace the development of automated weaponry and the conduct of war from afar that characterizes the American ways of war. Finally, I take that trend to a point where virtuous war will reach what could be seen as its logical culmination, namely when ASI is blended into its ways of war.

Military and intelligence agency whistleblowers increasingly justify their actions with reference to international law enforcement. This paper examines the merits of viewing whistleblowing as an appropriate means of IL enforcement and what, if anything, could be done to increase international protection for such whistleblowers.

By authorising the targeted killing of Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin by drone strike in Syria on 21 August 2015, the British government has revealed its late adoption of the same modern interpretation of International Humanitarian Law which the United States has employed since the launching of its War on Terror 14 years ago. Whilst never having openly opposed the American decision to regard acts of terrorism through a war paradigm following 9/11, the UK government had, up until this point, treated terrorism as a criminal activity, with responsibility for counterterrorism operations being the domain of the civilian security services. But in deploying the Royal Air Force to eliminate a terror suspect (Kahn was the specific target), Britain has set a new precedent for the conduct of its counterterrorism operations.

Leadership targeting, or decapitation, which involves the removal of an organization’s leader, has been utilized in various military conflicts. The use of drones has been particularly consequential in such schemes, earning themselves the reputation of being “Washington’s weapon of choice.” The existing literature on leadership targeting gravitates around the question of the practice’s strategic effectiveness, focusing on the targeted groups’ internal characteristics to explain their (in)ability to withstand decapitation. However, this literature overlooks a key feature of terrorist groups, namely their identity’s organizational dynamics. Highlighting the importance of group identities in determining the outcome of decapitations, this article fills this void. Looking at the cases of al Qaeda in Iraq and Ansar al-Sharia in Yemen, it argues that groups which have a global identity are likely to retain cohesion when their leaders are the victim of decapitation while groups whose identity stems from an ethnic or tribal lineage tend to fragment, therefore creating “veto players.”

This book operates on two levels. On the more practical level, its overarching concern is to answer the question, When is it permissible to use lethal force to defend people against threats? The deeper concern of the book, however, is to lay out and defend a new account of rights, the mechanics of claims. This framework constructs rights from the premise that rights provide a normative space in which people can pursue their own ends while treating each other as free and equal fellow-agents whose welfare morally matters. According to the mechanics of claims, rights result from first weighing competing patient-claims on an agent, then determining if the agent has a strong enough agent-claim to act contrary to the balance of patient-claims on her, and then looking to see if special claims limit her freedom. The strength of claims in this framework reflects not just the interest in play but the nature of the claims. Threats who have no right to threaten have weaker claims not to be harmed than bystanders who might be harmed as a side effect, all else equal. With this model, a central problem in just war theory can be pushed to the margins: determining when people have forfeited their rights and are liable to harm. Threats may lack a right not to be killed even if they have done nothing to forfeit it.

This chapter lays out the Mechanics of Claims. This is a draft of a chapter that has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in the forthcoming book, The Mechanics of Claims and Permissible Killing in War, due for publication in 2019.

A startling symmetry exists between the War on Terror and the critical turn in feminist thought. Within the armed forces a reconfiguration has been underway over the past several decades, often referred to as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). A primary goal of the RMA is the ability to wage zero-death warfare; as such, military and state officials have worked alongside private industry towards eliminating personnel from the battlefield, with the introduction of unmanned technologies.
Concurrently, within critical feminist thought, critiques have emerged against the supposed stability by which bodies are ontologically constituted as only fleshy material. This shift away from biological determinism occurs in the works of Judith Butler, N. Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway. Taken together, these authors provide the theoretical framework of “body drift,” a phenomenon described by Arthur Kroker in his 2012 book of the same name as “how we circulate so effortlessly from one medium of communication to another; it is how we explore intimately and with incredible granularity of detail the multiplicity of bodies that we have become.”
With this in mind, I use cognitive science in conjunction with the canon of critical feminism to assert that under the RMA’s leading edge it is only fleshy bodies that are displaced from battle. These archaic bodies are replaced by a hybridity of steel and flesh - the drone. This spectral figure of the drone haunts the emancipatory moment that unshackled the human subject from the chains with which the double helix held the body. A self-aware bodily drift, the drone is the negative undoing of the emancipatory potential which Kroker emphasizes. Though it fulfills the ontological criteria of body drift, the drone reproduces the same systems of oppression, violence, and death against which the critical feminist school has historically set itself.

Since 2001, we have witnessed the development of a counterterrorism war paradigm built to advance claims about the post-9/11 scope and discretion of US executive power and to articulate specific interpretations of national security interests and strategic objectives in the "war on terror." What makes this a paradigm rather than merely a conglomeration of evolving policies is the cohesiveness and mutual reinforcement of its underlying rationales about the rights of the US government to prosecute a territorially unbounded war against an evolving cast of enemies. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of a juridical field, the article focuses on how officials who constructed a legal framework for this paradigm, rather than disregarding international law wholesale, have engaged in interpretations and crafted rationales to evade some international humanitarian law (IHL) rules and norms while rejecting the underlying logic or applicability of others. This article traces the counterterrorism war paradigm's development and explains how it now competes with and threatens to supersede the customary law principles enshrined in IHL.

Targeted killing, if not legal, is murder, or at the very least an illegal act of war. Assuming it is not the latter, its legality will depend on whether it can be justified as an act of self-defense. That justification is easier to make if the targets have lost their immunity because they function as enemy combatants. But the law on killing enemy combatants is both under-and over-inclusive. To rest on more solid normative footing, three fundamental questions must be addressed: (a) Did the targeted person forfeit his right not to be killed? (b) Even if not, may he be killed because of the threat he poses? And (c) however those questions are answered, is targeted killing a necessary and proportionate response? The legal justifiability of targeted killing should aim to track those notions. To do so, the law should develop a clear sense for how they are to be applied, and a standard of proof for deciding whether those standards have been met.