Military Law and Buddhism

How do you find a word that means Terrorism? Part II

In the previous post, I discussed a rough framework of a definition of terrorism, based on the current common usage of the word, that includes the following elements:

• The use of violence.
• The violence has no lawful excuse and is not part of a legitimate military action.
• The violence is not merely a criminal act.

The question then becomes, what do we do with this definition?  We’ve taken what we ordinarily dispose of in our criminal justice system and marked it as something distinct.  In our attempts to investigate, control, prevent, and perhaps even eliminate it, how do we treat terrorism, as opposed to ordinary crime?

How do you find a word that means Terrorism? Part I

On September 14, 2001, President Bush said to the people of the United States, “our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”*fn1*  Ever since, we have been waging a “War on Terrorism,” with little time spent on explaining what we mean when we say “Terrorism.”  This is a broad topic that perhaps could not be fully explored in a large book – humans have been using terror against each other for all of history, and a truly complete exploration of the term must discuss that history.  So this blog post will necessarily just skim the surface of what could be explored.

Terrorism is difficult to define at least partially because its existence is dependent on its definition, on someone pointing at something and calling it terrorism.  It is like crime, somewhat – an action is not a crime without a law that calls it that.

It could be said that terrorism does exist without a definition, in a moral sense, just as murder is murder, and wrong, without the law to say so.  This may be.  But we are a society of differing morals, and if we are to be in agreement about how to solve a problem, we must first agree on what the problem is (and sometimes, whether that problem even exists).

“Morale, Good Order and Discipline, and Unit Cohesion”

Last week the California Supreme Court considered whether homosexual couples should be allowed to marry.  This case coincided perfectly with a discussion in my military law class of the US military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy.  This policy, which has been in place over ten years, creates an odd sort of atmosphere wherein commanders cannot proactively search for homosexuals, but those who identify as homosexual (or anything but straight, really) must pretend that they are not.*fn1*  They cannot be intimate with someone of the same sex, cannot marry someone of the opposite sex, and cannot “state” that they are homosexual.*fn2*

There are exceptions, of course.  The soldier can try to prove that the acts were out of the ordinary for them and won’t happen again, or if they simply stated that they were homosexual, that they won’t engage in “homosexual acts.”  There is also an exception if “the member engaged in conduct or made statements for the purpose of avoiding or terminating military service.”  The immediate question that springs to my mind in response to the latter exception is: how would they know?

BattleBots, or: Why the Cylons Are Scary

A recurring theme in military history is the advancement of technology; more specifically, technology that allows soldiers to be farther and safer from the thing they are attacking.  From clubs, to swords, to arrows, to guns, to machine guns, to bombs, to bombs dropped by aircraft, to ICBMs: we constantly get better and better at destroying things far away.  We haven’t completely eliminated the risk, obviously.  The number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq will probably pass 4,000 within the next month, and seven times as many soldiers have been wounded.

What I’m interested in is what happens when we do eliminate the risk, when we are able to entirely replace the soldier patrolling the streets of Iraq with a robot of some sort?  This currently only exists in the realm of science fiction, but the reality may not be far off.  The U.S. currently uses remote missile attacks to attack those it believes are terrorists.

If a country was able to completely eliminate its risk (in human life terms) in going to war, how does that affect the laws of war?  Does this completely change the playing field?  Or perhaps this is simply a question of an imbalance of technology among fighting forces, a question that is as old as war itself.