New Battlefields

The World at Night: 21st Century Global Security Challenges, with ADM Eric Olson (Ret.)

DATE: April 15, 2019
TIME: Noon
LOCATION: 350 Dineen Hall, Syracuse University College of Law

Eric OlsonADM Eric Olson (Ret.) is a former Commander of US Special Operations Command and Four-Star Admiral Navy SEAL. He is now President of ETO Group, consulting on national security; an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs; a Director of Iridium Communications; and a Director of the Special Operations Warrior Foundation.

Command and Control Doctrinal Challenges in the British Army, with Professor Gary Sheffield

Command and Control Doctrinal Challenges in the British Army: From the Trenches to the War on Terror

  • WITH: Professor Gary Sheffield, University of Wolverhampton
  • WHEN: Friday, Sept. 21, 2018 | Noon – 1:30 p.m.
  • WHERE: Eggers 151 (History Department Conference Room)

World War I saw the greatest challenge to military command and control the world had ever seen. A combination of factors produced a “wicked” problem that profoundly changed land warfare. There were no easy solutions, and generals in all armies struggled to adjust. In this lecture, Professor Gary Sheffield looks at the British army’s experience, examining topics such as command philosophies, doctrine, communications and coalition warfare, and gives brief case studies of command at Gallipoli in 1915 and Douglas Haig as Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front. He then looks at the same army from the Falklands War in 1982 to the present day, using the BEF’s experience to shed light on another period of dramatic transformation in C2.

Gary Sheffield is Professor of War Studies at the University of Wolverhampton. He works primarily on the armies of Britain and the Empire in the era of the two World Wars, 1914 to 1945. His publications include Douglas Haig: From the Somme to Victory (2016) and Forgotten Victory—The First World War: Myths and Realities (2001). Sheffield has previously held Chairs at King’s College London, where he was Land Warfare Historian on the Higher Command and Staff Course at the Joint Services Command and Staff ­College, and the University of Birmingham. He began his academic career at the Department of War Studies, Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.

 Co-sponsors: Department of History & INSCT

New Battlefields/Old Laws 2018—When Disaster Hits: Threats, Preparedness, and Legal Gaps

New Battlefields/Old LawsThe 2018 edition of INSCT’s signature initiative New Battlefields/Old Laws will take place at the World Summit on Counterterrorism, to be held Sept. 3-6, 2018, at the Institute for Counter-terrorism (ICT), Herzliya, Israel.

Co-chaired by Professor Emeritus William C. Banks and Professor Daphné Richemond-Barak, Head of International Humanitarian Law Desk Law and Security Program, ICT, the theme of this year’s multi-disciplinary NBOL workshop—on September 5—is “When Disaster Hits: Threats, Preparedness, and Legal Gaps.”

The workshop will investigate multiple facets of law and policy responses during and after major natural and human disasters. Papers will address disaster governance, cyber disasters, responding to health epidemics and pandemics, and “disaster law,” or the analysis of gaps in national security and international law that disasters can expose.

ICT’s annual international summit is the largest and one of the most influential events in the field of counterterrorism. Bringing together academics, scholars, law enforcement officials, and decision-makers, this year the summit will convene around the theme of difficulties liberal democracies face in combatting terrorism, such as striking a balance between democratic values and security.

“Countering terrorism by developing solutions to these dilemmas is not just a strategy, but a true art. This year’s conference will delve into the ‘Art of Counter-Terrorism,'” the workshop organizers write. Five themes will help to highlight the challenges of combatting terrorism: Assessment and Response; Rationale and Rationality; Motivation and Capability; Terrorism and Democracy; and Recovery and Resilience.

Read more about the ICT workshop.

 

David M. Crane to Speak on Yemen Crisis at Stimson Center Event

David Crane Stimson CenterINSCT Faculty Member David M. Crane will join other distinguished international law scholars and practitioners at “Crisis in Yemen: Accountability and Reparations,” an event designed to bring the world’s attention to a growing humanitarian disaster in this Middle East nation.

The panel discussion takes place at The Stimson Center in Washington, DC, on June 26, 2018, from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. The simulcast can be viewed here.

Sponsored by the American Society of International Law, the Stimson Center, and the Washington Foreign Law Society, the panel also features Stephen Rapp, Former US Ambassador-At-Large for War Crimes; Mark Agrast, Executive Director, American Society of International Law; and Sarah Leah Whitson, Executive Director, Middle East and North Africa Division, Human Rights Watch, among others. View the full list of panelists here.

The Yemen Civil War, which had its roots in the political upheaval of 2011-2012, has since turned into a complex conflict among a central, recognized government and its powerful Saudi-led allies, an alternative government in the country’s north backed by Houthi rebels, and several terrorist groups.

Escalating in 2015, the civil war has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. An estimated three quarters of the civilian population have been affected by the devastation from warring parties on all sides. Death, disappearances, detentions, torture, displacement and famine are ravishing the country. A cholera epidemic is being exacerbated by raids on civilian populations.

Meanwhile, critical ports for delivery of food and medicines have been blocked. Arms and deadly munitions, funded by the US and UK, have proliferated. Secret prisons established inside and outside the country are detaining countless numbers of civilians, women, children, and aid workers.

The panel of experts, led by Rapp and Crane, will assess the situation on the ground in this stage of the Yemen crisis, and propose solutions drawn from fundamental international laws and standards.

Corri Zoli Co-Authors Safety Science Article on “Terrorist Critical Infrastructures”

INSCT Director of Research Corri Zoli has published “Terrorist Critical Infrastructures, Organizational Capacity, and Security Risk” in the engineering journal Safety Science. This interdisciplinary article is co-authored with Zoli’s Syracuse University colleagues Professor Laura J. Steinberg of the School of Engineering and Computer Science and Professor Margaret Hermann of the Maxwell School, along with Martha Grabowski, an engineering professor at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, NY.

This essay addresses gaps between studies of terrorism and infrastructure resilience to explore “terrorist critical infrastructures” (TCIs) as one critically missing framework to understand the rise of terrorist political violence globally. This approach to global terrorism maximizes core perspectives common in resilience and safety research and uses comparative analyses from terrorism studies, systems engineering, and infrastructure protection.

The authors develop a topology of terrorist infrastructures, introduce the concepts of “enabling” and “coopted” TCIs, and contrast characteristics of TCIs with those of conventional infrastructures. They argue that the organizational intelligence that comes from aligning strategic goals with infrastructural capacity is critical to explaining the prevalence, durability, and resilience of many terrorist organizations (as well as their increasing use of violence).

“We can understand these emerging organizational forms by their design and development, often flat, mobile, and flexible ‘networks of networks’ themselves,” the authors explain.

Article Highlights
  • Analysis used a systems-based interdisciplinary approach to terrorism.
  • Informal, illicit non-state groups, such as terrorist organizations, build and design critical infrastructures to effect terrorist aims and goals, including targeting soft targets.
  • The types of TCIs can be categorized according to terrorist organizations’ strategic targeting priorities; interface with existing context-specific civilian infrastructure systems; and their need to design, build, and engineer new infrastructure systems particular to illicit organizations.
  • Such TCIs involve formal and informal, legitimate and illegitimate, and physical and virtual systems.
  • TCIs often interface with criminal networks and low-governance.
  • Results show the need for more research and a targeted, infrastructure based approaches to combating terrorism.\
  • Practical implications for governments and security sectors are discussed.

 

“An Extraordinary Situation:” William C. Banks Discusses Enemy Combatant “John Doe” Case with Bloomberg Law

Federal Judge Questions Enemy Combatant Detentions

William Banks, a professor at Syracuse University Law School, discusses how long the Federal government should be allowed to detain legally detain a U.S. citizen before letting them challenge their detention. He speaks with Bloomberg’s June Grasso on Bloomberg Radio’s “Politics, Policy, Power and Law.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2017-12-12/federal-judge-questions-enemy-combatant-detentions

William C. Banks to Discuss “Fighting at the Legal Boundaries” During Georgetown Law Workshop

INSCT Director William C. Banks—an expert on new battlefields, asymmetric warfare, enemy combatants, and other jus in bello issues in modern warfare—will be a discussant at the Georgetown Law Center workshop on “Fighting at the Legal Boundaries: Controlling the Use of Force in Contemporary Conflict.”

The workshop addresses a book by Kenneth Watkin, QC, which offers a holistic approach toward the application of the various constitutive parts of international law and that reviews case studies on how international law addresses insurgents, terrorists, and transnational criminal gangs.

The Nov. 17, 2017, workshop is sponsored by the Georgetown Law Center, Center of the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law, and Human Rights First.

Workshop Commentators are:

  • Geoffrey Corn, Presidential Research Professor of Law, South Texas College of Law
  • Laura Dickinson, Oswald Symister Colclough Research Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School
  • Noam Lubell, Professor, School of Law, University of Essex
  • Marko Milanovic, Associate Professor in Law, University of Nottingham
  • Tom Ruys, Professor, Department of European, Public, and International Law, University of Ghent
  • Rachel Van Landingham, Associate Professor, Southwestern University School of Law

Workshop Discussants are:

  • Ken Watkin, author, Fighting at the Legal Boundaries: Controlling the Use of Force in Contemporary Conflict
  • William C. Banks, Director, INSCT
  • Gabriella Blum, Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Harvard Law School
  • Audrey Kurth Cronin, Professor, American University School of International Service
  • Janina Dill, University of Oxford
  • Charles Dunlap Jr., Executive Director, Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, Duke University
  • Josh Geltzer, Executive Director, Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, Georgetown Law
  • CPT Todd Huntley, Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School, Charlottesville, VA
  • Richard Jackson, Adjunct Professor, Georgetown University Law Center
  • Marty Lederman, Associate Professor, Georgetown Law Center
  • Dan Mahanty, Senior Adviser, Center for Civilians in Conflict
  • Jens David Ohlin, Vice Dean and Professor of Law, Cornell Law School
  • Deborah Pearlstein, Professor, Cardozo School of Law
  • Stephen Pomper, former Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs, Multilateral Affairs, and Human Rights, National Security Council
  • Charles Sabga, Acting Deputy, New York Delegation, International Committee of the Red Cross
  • Gary Solis, Adjunct Professor, Georgetown Law Center
  • Emily Spencer, Director, Education and Research Centre, Canadian Special Operations Forces Command
  • Jane Stromseth, Professor of Law, Georgetown Law Center

Moderators are:

  • Mitt Regan, McDevitt Professor of Jurisprudence, Georgetown Law Center
  • Rita Siemion, International Legal Counsel, Human Rights First
  • Heather Brandon, Advocacy Counsel, National Security, Human Rights First

Cyber Attribution & War: William C. Banks Presents at West Point Emerging Technology Conference

From October 25 to 27, 2017, INSCT Director William C. Banks took part in the “Impact of Emerging Technology on the Law of Armed Conflict” conference at the US Military Academy at West Point. Hosted by the Leiber Institute for Law and Land Warfare at the West Point Center for the Rule of Law, the hosts described the topic of emerging technologies on the battlefield as a “complex and dynamic field” within the law of armed conflict (LOAC).

Professor Banks discussed “Cyber Attribution and In Bello Compliance During an Armed Conflict.” He spoke on the “Distinction, Marking, and Attribution” panel with COL Mike Meier, of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, and LTC Mark Visger, of USMA-West Point (moderator).

Also speaking at the event were Professor Laurie Blank of the Emory University International Humanitarian Law Clinic; COL Geoffrey Corn, Staff Judge Advocate, US Cyber Command; Professor Peter Margulies, Yale Law; and Professor Michael N. Schmitt, USMA-West Point.

Other topics discussed at the conference included “not-yet-emerged” weapons technologies; how technology “distorts” the nature of conflict; distinction, emerging technologies, and civilians/combatants on the battlefield; concealed cyber operations; perfidy and invisible technologies; and artificial intelligence at war.

 

“A Sea-Change of New Issues”: The Jerusalem Post Reviews 10 Years of New Battlefields/Old Laws

ARMED ISIS CHILDREN CAN BE TARGETED, LEGAL EXPERTS SAY

(The Jerusalem Post | Sept. 14, 2017) Though children have always had a protected status in war, armed ISIS children can be targeted under the laws of armed conflict, IDC Herzliya Professor Daphne Richemond-Barak told the Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.

“If children are holding a gun then direct participation in hostilities rules apply to children… children might be targets and not just victims,” she said.

Richemond-Barak and Syracuse Professor William Banks spoke to the Post in the midst of the International Institute of Counterterrorism Conference in Herzliya, discussing a range of new battlefield and law issues ranging from subterranean warfare to new standards for targeted killings.

The premise of Richemond-Barak’s comments about armed children as targets is that until ISIS started to use children on a mass scale, the issue of Western countries going up against large numbers of children simply had not come up.

That meant that children were victims and protected from targeting as a given.

ISIS’s new tactic of arming children on a mass scale changed that paradigm and required taking a new look at the “new battlefield” and how to apply the laws of war.

Regarding the sea-change of new issues confronting military lawyers on the battlefield, Banks noted that his university and ICT started to work on new solutions to these issues dating back to 2006.

Banks said, “During the 2006 Lebanon War we were here on the IDC campus… mulling over what was happening. It was clear from the circumstances that the framework we had been using in the West and in Israel was ineffective because the fighting was of a new kind.”

He said that currently many Western adversaries “do not use uniforms, use unconventional tactics, unconventional weapons, are failing to follow the laws of war, are hiding in civilian neighborhoods and are [using human] shielding.”

The Syracuse professor said that the legal framework needed to be updated to deal with new challenges posed by non-state actors abusing the laws of war, while remaining committed to principles like “the rule of law, protecting civilians and treating all combatants with dignity according to the laws of war.”

Richemond-Barak added that in 10 years of conferences, their group of US, Israeli and other legal scholars have “always tried to invite a mix of military officials… to get them in with the lawyers because the dialogue is so important, the conversation between lawyers and non-lawyers… we need to impact policy decisions at the operational level.”

Further, she said, “it is important that” many of the meetings “take place in Israel” since Israel is the frontlines where so many new issues arise.

Addressing another new issue, Banks said that the US and Israel were revealing far more information about what intelligence and other issues led to attacks which ultimately led to harming civilians, even if the harm to civilians was unintentional.

One example was the 2015 mistaken US attack on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan which killed 42 innocent civilians. Banks complimented the US for unprecedented disclosure of how the mistaken attack had occurred and on its disciplining of over a dozen military personnel.

However, human rights groups criticized the US for not fully disclosing how and why its intelligence failed and for not criminally prosecuting the soldiers involved …

Read the whole article here.

Never Forget: Sbarro Pizzeria Massacre, Jerusalem, Aug. 9, 2001

By Miriam Elman

(Re-published from Legal Insurrection, Aug. 9, 2016) On this day 15 years ago, a Hamas terror gang based in the West Bank executed a bombing attack on a busy restaurant in the center of Jerusalem.  In the horrific act of savagery 15 people were killed, including 7 children.

“Although perpetrated by a Hamas terror cell, Israeli officials at the time held the Palestinian Authority and the late PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat complicit in the carnage.”

Two U.S. citizens were among those murdered. Four additional Americans were wounded — one severely.

In total, some 130 were injured with varying degrees of severity by the “human bomb” and his team of accomplices.

The mastermind was Ahlam Tamimi, relative of Bassem Tamimi, and a hero to this day in her home village of Nabi Saleh where international activists still protest the security barrier constructed in response to the Sbarro and dozens of other suicide bombings.

I’ll describe the attack, its victims, and the team of terrorists involved in order to underscore the disgraceful fact that for over two decades the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has not prosecuted a single Palestinian terrorist who has killed Americans in Israel or the disputed territories, even though U.S. law requires it to do so.

Included at the end of the post is a statement exclusive for Legal Insurrection by Frimet and Arnold Roth—the parents of Malka (Malki) Roth, a 15-year-old American girl who was murdered in the Sbarro atrocity.

At 2:00pm on a hot summer day, a Palestinian terrorist entered the Sbarro Pizzeria and detonated a bomb.

Situated at the corner of King George Street and Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, probably one of the busiest pedestrian crossings in Israel, the bomb blast completely gutted the restaurant.

I ate at this Sbarro a number of times when I lived in and visited Israel. It was a popular kosher eatery, conveniently located, and a good place to bring the kids.

On August 9, 2001 the restaurant was filled with lunch-time diners—many of them children and their mothers. The street was also crowded with pedestrian traffic.

At the time, like most public spaces in Israel the pizzeria wasn’t guarded, something which enabled the human bomber to enter the place unimpeded.

According to media reports, documentation by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and accounts piece together by those who lost loved ones in the horrific attack, the terrorist and his 10 kilogram bomb was transported by taxi to the site by a woman named Ahlam ‘Aref Ahmad al-Tamimi, also known as Ahlam Tamimi, and another Palestinian, Izz al-Din Shuheil al-Masri.

They reportedly concealed the explosives inside a guitar case. The case was also packed with nails, screws, and bolts to ensure maximum damage.

The terrorist al-Masri was killed in the blast. Tamimi escaped but was arrested a few weeks later. Hamas and Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the bombing.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Jerusalem municipality police closed down the PLO’s east Jerusalem headquarters (known as the Orient House) and the IDF took control of Palestinian military and political buildings at Abu Dis, just outside of Jerusalem. The IDF also attacked the PA’s West Bank police headquarters in Ramallah.

Although perpetrated by a Hamas terror cell, Israeli officials at the time held the Palestinian Authority and the late PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat complicit in the carnage. Then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, the architect of the Oslo peace accords, reportedly said on the day of the attack:

If the Palestinian Authority had acted with the necessary determination and carried out preventive detentions of Hamas terrorists and their operators, the murders today in Jerusalem would have been prevented”.

Six weeks after the bombing an exhibit at Al Najah University in the West Bank, which included a mock-up of the Sbarro pizzeria complete with bloody plastic body parts and partially-chewed pizza crusts, glorified the attack and the bombers …

To read the complete article, click here.