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The Army Lawyer | 2020 Issue 2View PDF

A Foreign Perspective on Legal Interoperability

With apologies to Sun Tzu,“Know your [allies] and yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.”1 Bottom line up front: no two states have identical national laws; even our understanding and application of the laws of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) (Geneva and Hague being the cornerstones) are not uniform. As judge advocates (JA) and legal advisors (LEGADs), we have a central role in identifying and understanding the relevant national positions within combined forces, the implications for the force, and advising how to minimize the operational or tactical impact, in order to ensure mission accomplishment.

No. 2: The Past Is the Present

Specification 3d. In declaring, in the open street, in front of the marine barracks, on or about the 1st of September, instant, in the presence of a number of his officers, that he did not care a damn for the president, Jesus Christ, or God Almighty.1

No. 4: DoD’s Artificial Intelligence Problem

Some believe the emergence and proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents humanity’s “fourth industrial revolution” and that it will drive evolutionary and revolutionary innovation — i.e., make us better at what we do (the things we know) and shape what we do in the future and how we do it (what has yet to be done).1 The breadth of AI possibilities is not easy to conceptualize, but there is great interest in understanding AI and how it can be effectively and responsibly leveraged.