Humanitarian Treatment of Insurgents: Is the U.S. Making a Mistake? (A View from Outside the Legal Community)
Abstract
In the past 200 years, a concerted movement to make war more humane has successfully created legal boundaries surrounding the conduct of war. These efforts increased significantly following the World War II attacks on civilian populations, with the result that in today's warfare there is a legal requirement to focus military efforts against the military forces of the enemy. One of the prime tenets of this legal distinction is the protections contained in the Geneva Conventions surrounding uniformed combatants. In the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, the United States has in effect chosen to extend these rights to combatants who choose not to wear uniforms. The ramification of this decision is that there are no longer any incentives for enemies of the United States to wear uniforms, but instead they are free to use the anonymity of street clothes to blend into the civilian population, without fear of consequences. While warfare is constantly changing, the United States, through its own actions, is in the process of fundamentally making warfare more difficult. The United States needs to revisit this decision, or its implementation, to prevent enemy forces in all future conflicts from shedding uniforms to limit the effectiveness of U.S. military power.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 16, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA463541
Entities
People
- Robert L. Gardner
Organizations
- Naval War College