‘The Lawyers’ War’

2020 ◽  
pp. 117-156
Author(s):  
Craig Jones
Keyword(s):  
Planning Process ◽  
Gulf War ◽  
Laws Of War ◽  
Dual Use ◽  
Civilian Life ◽  
Collateral Consequences ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Slow Violence

This chapter analyses the involvement of military lawyers in the planning and conduct of the US-led First Gulf War in 1990–1991. Contrary to representations of the First Gulf War as one of the cleanest, most precise, and limited wars the US military has ever fought, this chapter outlines the planning process and rationale behind the US military’s destruction of Iraq’s key infrastructure. The laws of war and military lawyers played no small part in the patterning of violence as key legal interpretations turned ‘dual use’ infrastructures into legitimate military targets—with cascading collateral consequences for civilian life in Iraq. The chapter considers how calculations of proportionality failed to properly consider the ‘slow violence’ of targeting, which enabled and legitimized forms of infrastructural violence and military destruction that might otherwise be considered impermissible.

America, the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and War Crime Courts-Martial in the Vietnam Conflict

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary D. Solis
Keyword(s):  
War Crimes ◽  
Laws Of War ◽  
Law Of War ◽  
Us Military ◽  
Geneva Conventions ◽  
The Us ◽  
Customary Laws ◽  
The Law ◽  
Post Trial

Throughout the US-Vietnam conflict (1965–1973), American forces labored to comply with the Geneva Conventions and customary laws of war, though US war crimes largely overshadowed those efforts. This chapter relates the training US forces received on the law of war and describes how military lawyers practiced law “in country.” US combatants were constantly directed to report war crimes, known or suspected. Too often those directives were not obeyed. My Lai is fully examined, including its badly failed military prosecutions. Disturbing post-trial clemency by civilian authorities, in many cases, is also detailed. On the whole, however, the sentences of US personnel convicted by courts-martial of war crimes were sincere efforts to appropriately punish battlefield criminality. This chapter argues that, under difficult conditions, US military efforts in Vietnam to comply with the Geneva Conventions, and to punish known US war crimes, were more genuine and effective than have been generally recognized.

Targeting Without Lawyers

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-88
Author(s):  
Craig Jones
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Laws Of War ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
Us Military ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Military Commanders ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Way

This chapter argues that the US-led war in Vietnam (1955–1975) paved the way for institutional changes in the US military, including the establishment of the US Law of War Program, which later precipitated the emergence of a new doctrinal approach to the laws of war called ‘operational law’. Military lawyers emerged from the Vietnam War better equipped and with a formal mandate to advise military commanders on the legality of targeting operations. Military lawyers performed a wide range of duties in Vietnam, especially around Prisoner of War (POW) issues, and were deployed in unprecedented numbers. Military lawyers were not involved in targeting, neither during ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’ nor ‘Operation Linebacker’, but the Vietnam War in general and the My Lai massacre of 1968 in particular helped to create the conditions for their involvement in subsequent wars.

MEDIA AND WAR. BETWEEN INFORMATION AND PROPAGANDA

2012 ◽  
Vol 165 (3) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Irena WOLSKA-ZOGATA
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Information Management ◽  
Gulf War ◽  
The Public ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Political Public Relations ◽  
Cooperation Strategy ◽  
The Military

The article is of demonstrative nature. It contains the data that come from the examinations of other authors. It is aimed at showing in what way politicians and military personnel can influence the winning of the hearts and minds of the public opinion for their own purposes with legally available assets.In spite of exploiting the press from time immemorial for waging wars, the Vietnam war prompted politicians and the military to develop a cooperation strategy with the media.The second Gulf War was fought in accordance with the principles worked out by the US military from the style of information management during the first Gulf War in 1991. In the process of information management, the majority of specialists were from the field of political public relations rather than civilian spin doctors.

Health Status of Gulf War and Era Veterans Serving in the US Military in 2000

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (5) ◽  
pp. e261-e267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Porter ◽  
Kyna Long ◽  
Rudolph P. Rull ◽  
Erin K. Dursa
Keyword(s):  
Health Status ◽  
Gulf War ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us

Project ‘Transparent Earth’ and the Autoscopy of Aerial Targeting

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 270-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Bishop
Keyword(s):  
Gulf War ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Us Military ◽  
Military Research ◽  
Main Challenge ◽  
Military Planning ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Control

The import of underground facilities in military strategy in the US grew exponentially after the Gulf War. The success of precision-guided conventional missiles meant that any above-ground building or complex could be accurately targeted and destroyed, thus driving states with less sophisticated weapons to go underground to secure space for covert weapons development and the protection of command and control centres for military and governmental functions. Underground facilities have thus become the main challenge to objects of detection and targeting practices for US military research and development. This article provides a meditation on the underground in relation to military planning and technology, the limits of aerial visual control of terrain, the plans by the US military to counter underground defensive moves, the efficacy of tele-technologies to detect and destroy such installations at a distance, and an oblique genealogy of aerial and subterrestrial strategies in relation to technologies to overcome the limitations of each. In so doing, the article argues a deeply connected relationship between the imaginary and the material in attempts to realize a mastery of space and populations essential to military operations, thus posing questions about sensory perception, the status of the subject with regard to agency and control, and the prosthetic outfitting of the subject that both supports and blunts agency and control.

Dual use of cigarettes and smokeless tobacco among active duty service members in the US military

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Jie Lin ◽  
Kangmin Zhu ◽  
Aida M. Soliván-Ortiz ◽  
Stacy L. Larsen ◽  
Scott P. Irwin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Smokeless Tobacco ◽  
Active Duty ◽  
Service Members ◽  
Dual Use ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us

‘Lawfare’, US military discourse, and the colonial constitution of law and war

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Freya Irani
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Laws Of War ◽  
Military Discourse ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Western Law ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn this article, I aim to reorient debates, in International Relations and Law, about the relationship between law and war. In the last decade, writers have challenged common understandings of law as a limit on, or moderator of, warfare. They have instead claimed that law is often used as a ‘weapon of warfare’, describing such uses as ‘lawfare’. Below, rather than arguing that law is either a constraint on or an enabler of warfare, I examine how law comes to be represented as such. Specifically, I examine representations, primarily by US military and other governmental lawyers, of ‘non-Western’ invocations of the laws of war, which seek to constrain the policies or practices of the US or Israeli governments. I show how these authors cast such invocations as not law at all, but as tools of war. I suggest that this move rests on, and reproduces, colonial discourses of ‘non-Western’ legal inadequacy or excess, which serve to render ‘non-Western’ law ‘violent’ or ‘war-like’. I show that the referents and boundaries of law and war are stabilised by notions of civilisational difference, which serve to give meaning to what law is, what war is, and whether particular claims or practices are understood as martial or legal.

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