Warfare is evolving in a way that jeopardizes war crime accountability. Autonomous drones illustrate this concern. Autonomous machines are operated by computers far removed from the battlefield. They are often less accurate in identifying targets than human militants are. But the real problem is that autonomous weaponry largely eliminates humans from the “kill chain,” the process by which the military carries out an attack, from target identification through the actual launch. In traditional warfare, if something goes awry, the commander is ultimately responsible, as they sit at the apex of the kill chain calling the shots. With automated decisionmaking and a compressed kill chain, it will be harder to track culpability for a specific attack. Who should be responsible for an AI drone that mistakenly targets civilians? Is it the commander who relied on autonomous drones? Or the engineers whose algorithms yielded a problematic target list? Will computer scientists stand trial for a drone’s war crimes, or nobody at all?
The introduction of civilian volunteers in the Russia-Ukraine war raises further questions about accountability. Under international humanitarian law, civilians have a protected status: both parties in a conflict must take all necessary precautions to avoid the disproportionate loss of civilian life. But what happens when thousands of civilians begin to take direct part in hostilities, and in fact get paid to do so, using weaponry offered by the state? Likely, these civilians, though not enrolled in the army, are transformed into combatants, thereby losing protections afforded to them by the Geneva Conventions. When they cease to partake in these hostilities, interestingly, they again become classified as civilians. This liminal status – not quite militants, not quite civilians – will pose challenges for investigators and lawyers attempting to discern war crimes in the aftermath of a conflict. In fact, we are already seeing this in Gaza, where the IDF can claim that most civilians killed have been those with links to Hamas. At the moment of a strike, how can a military decide whether or not its victims have a protected status?
These questions about the nuances of accountability might ultimately be unimportant, as it’s clear from this week’s readings that there is widespread disregard for the rule of law in times of war. I was particularly struck by one man’s anecdote in the Ukraine documentary: despite the clear designation that only women and children were hiding in the basement of a church, Russia’s military still chose to attack it. Hundreds of innocents died as a result. And the children who are lucky enough to survive this war suffer devastation in their own way. Some Ukrainian children are forcibly transferred to Russian territory for “re-education” in their schools (which is clearly defined as an act of genocide in Article II of the Genocide Convention, by the way). And as the heartwrenching children’s literature depicts, the youngest generation in Ukraine is forced to confront death, violence, and unimaginable loss as facts of daily life. Bunkers are as commonplace as classrooms. I can’t quite imagine how pervasive the trauma is as a result of this war, how embedded it is in the culture. To rehabilitate the soul of the nation, not just its wrecked infrastructure, will be a core part of the “day after” rebuild.
