The Opaque Society, Part 2

Yesterday’s CounterStory looked at the implications for civilian policymakers of the mass use of automated surveillance cameras to sift through images of people’s movements in search of suspicious patterns. Today I’ll examine a few of the military implications of the same technology.--PK

Military Scenario: Even as civilian courts debate privacy issues in the years 2012-2013, automated mass identification is old news for the U.S. military, whose application of this technology is significantly ahead of civilian programs. In fact, U.S. forces can now target specific soldiers and officers in opposing armies by combining UAV footage, data-mining of enemy nations' records, and social-networking software that reverse-engineers soldiers’ movements and communications to create a remarkably accurate picture of an army’s order of battle.

While this is an unprecedented jump in precision targeting, it has one important side effect: Every military shot fired can now be seen as an assassination. Unless a target is an imminent threat—he is firing or readying a weapon to fire, or directing others to do the same—knowing the target's identity and rank makes it difficult to justify killing him and not his commander.

By 2020, this phenomenon has caused rules of engagement to tighten until few people besides heads of state and senior military commanders are legitimate targets of war. Anyone else who is not actually holding a weapon or directing fire is off limits.

Perversely, just as the U.S. military circa 2009 avoided providing “body counts,” it now avoids specifying the identity or reasons for killing any specific opponent. This makes it difficult to trumpet the “good” news of eliminating a particular enemy leader.

Question: Is the law of armed conflict (LOAC) equipped, and is the U.S. military ready, to handle the phenomenon of large-scale but targeted killings?

Reference: P.W. Singer’s Wired for War