Of the four jobs available to Sailors serving in the Intelligence Specialist rating (IS), three of them—Expeditionary Warfare Intelligence Analyst, Operational Intelligence Analyst, and Strike Warfare Intelligence Analyst—have explicit instructions to “comply with the Law of Armed Conflict.” And while Imagery Intelligence Analysts are not given this same duty, they are tasked with providing critical information for developing Battle Damage Assessments/Bomb Hit Assessments (BDA/BHA) and Non-Combatant Evacuation Operations (NEO), presumably invaluable data when determining if an operation is in compliance with the Law of Armed Conflict.
But while complying with the “Law of Armed Conflict” certainly sounds noble, understanding precisely what that “law” consists of is and what complying with it entails is far more complicated than you might imagine. Simply put, if you search for “the Law of Armed Conflict” in order to familiarize yourself with it, you discover there isn’t such a law by that name—at least not in the United States Department of Defense or any of the branches of its Armed Services.
The United Kingdom, for instance, has a Law of Armed Conflict, but while its principles might be the most ethical and noblest ever printed, they have not been codified into a treaty or international law to which the U.S. is a signatory. More applicable to the United States is the “Law of Armed Conflict” published by the International and Operational Law Department of the Judge Advocate General of the Army’s Legal Center & School; unfortunately, it admittedly is “not a substitute for official publications” and is only appropriate for “how Army JAG School teaches its judge advocate students.”
On the other hand, the United States Department of Defense published a Law of War Manual in June, 2015—but it clocks in at over 1,000 pages and just as many (if not more) footnotes. Full understanding of such a tome would probably require a Naval rating all its own. Finally, complicating the matter for Sailors in the Intelligence Specialist rating is that cyber warfare is now being seriously considered as a form of “armed conflict.” Determining the “collateral damage” ramifications of cyber operations is hardly a precise science, and Intelligence Specialists and Sailors serving in other ratings in the Information Warfare community will likely have to operate with extreme thoughtfulness to ensure they minimize such consequences.
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