Law and the Future of War UQ Law and the Future of War

We start our futures mini-series by speaking with an eminent military historian on the future of warfare. In this episode we are delighted to be joined by Sir Lawrence Freedman. Recorded in September 2023 he joins us to talk about the future of warfare, having regard to his approach to predicting future war, as outlined in The Future of War: A History; and the update to this commentary, taking into account the lessons to be learned from the ongoing conflict in the Ukraine.: Modern Warfare: Lessons from Ukraine.
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman is Emeritus Professor of War Studies, King's College London. Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1995 and awarded the CBE in 1996, he was appointed Official Historian of the Falklands Campaign in 1997. In 2003, he was awarded the KCMG. In June 2009, he was appointed to serve as a member of the official inquiry into Britain and the 2003 Iraq War. He has written widely on international history, strategic theory and nuclear weapons issues, as well as commenting on current security issues.

Among his books are Strategy: A History (2013, OUP) and Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine (2023, Penguin).

You can read more of Freedman's commentary on his substack, Comment is Freed.

Additional resources:
Lawrence Freedman: Modern Warfare, Lessons from Ukraine (2023, A Lowy Institute Paper/Penguin)
David Patreus and Andrew Roberts: Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine (2023, Harper Collins)
Mick Ryan: War Transformed (2022, Naval Institute Press).
Mick Ryan's substack: Futura Doctrina
Phillip O'Brien's substack: Phillip's Newsletter

Recorded in early September 2023,  this episode continues our futures mini-series, where we speak with Dr Ian Langford and Professor David Killcullen about the future of war in the Indo-Pacific region. In this episode we will be getting a download on what the change in geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific means for Australia, and how that might impact choices relating to technology, acquisitions and their subsequent use and regulation; as well as discussing what the future of proxy warfare and modern counterinsurgency might look like.

Dr Ian Langford, DSC and Bars, is a member of a member of UNSW’s Future Operations Research Group and is a strategic adviser with UBH Group, a leading Sovereign Information Domain (SID) company. Dr Langford is a regular contributor to the Australian Army Research Centre, and in addition to being a Distinguished Graduate of the United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College and the School of Advanced Warfighting, he has recently retired from the Australian Army as a Brigadier where he filled multiple senior roles including – relevant to our discussion today – as the Army’s Director General of Future Land Warfare and the Head of Land Capability.
Dr David Kilcullen is a former soldier and diplomat, and a scholar of guerrilla warfare, terrorism, urbanisation and the future of conflict, who served 25 years for the Australian and United States governments. During the Iraq War, he served in Baghdad as a member of the Joint Strategic Assessment Team, then as Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor, Multi-National Force Iraq in 2007, before becoming Special Advisor for Counterinsurgency to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on counterinsurgency; and in addition to holding senior academic roles across a number of institutions, he has written six books on counterinsurgency.

Additional resources:
-  Australian Defence Strategic Review
- USMC Stand-In Force Concept
- UK Future Commando Force Concept

In this third episode in our futures mini-series, we continue our scoping of the utility of seeking to predict the future of war; before deep diving into emerging and disruptive technologies. Recorded in late September 2023, we are speaking with Artur Gruszczak about the Future of War, and his recently edited Handbook on the same topic, released by Routledge this September.

Artur Gruszczak holds a PhD in Political Science from Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Currently he holds an appointment there as an Associate Professor of Political Science, Chair of National Security at the Faculty of International and Political Studies.  Since 2014 he has been Faculty Member of the European Academy Online run by the Centre international de formation européenne in Nice. His academic interests and research areas include: security studies, EU area of freedom, security and justice, intelligence cooperation in the European Union, and the evolution of modern warfare.
Additional resources:
 Handbook of the Future of Warfare, Edited By Artur Gruszczak, Sebastian Kaempf, Routledge, 2023The Weaponisation of Everything, Mark Galeotti, Yale University Press, 2023New and Old Wars, Mary Kaldor, Stanford University Press, 2012Pearl Harbour: Warning and Decision, Roberta Wohlstetter, Stanford University Press, 1962Theorising Future Conflict, Mark Lacy, Routledge 2024.War Transformed, Mick Ryan 2022. The Future of War: A History, Lawrence Freedman 2018.Warrior Geeks, Christopher Coker, 2013.

Continuing our future of war series, this episode dives into the legal implications of increasing transparency of the battlespace as a result of technological change; and looks at developments in biological warfare that challenge the long-standing prohibition on biological weapons at international law. We speak with Rob Lawless from the Leiber Institute, at the Westpoint Academy to hear more. 

Robert Lawless is an Associate Professor in the Department of Law at the United States Military Academy, West Point. He teaches various courses, including military law and the law of armed conflict. He is also the Research Director of the Lieber Institute for Law and Warfare and one of the editors of Articles of War.  
Professor Lawless previously spent ten years as an active-duty military officer in the U.S. Army JAG Corps., serving in several positions advising commanders on legal issues. He also spent almost three years as an Army litigator, representing both the U.S. government and individual soldiers in courts-martial and other military justice forums. 
Additional resources:
Lieber Studies SeriesArticles of War BlogProfessor Nasu's works on nanotechnology1925 Geneva ProtocolBiological Weapons ConventionSean Watts, Law-of-War Perfidy, 219 Mil L. Rev. 106 (2014)

In this episode, Dr Lauren Sanders speaks with Professor Stuart Casey-Maslen about Directed Energy Weapons. They traverse the existing legal controls on these weapons, and speak about the potential for future regulation of novel uses of energy weapons in armed conflict. 

This conversation preceded a presentation by Dr Casey-Maslen, Dr Sanders and  Dr Altman for UNIDIR, which was a side event to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons Meeting of States Parties, held in November 2023. 

Stuart Casey-Maslen is an international lawyer and Professor at the University of Pretoria, specialising in the use of force and the protection of civilians, and he has published numerous books and articles on this topic. He is also an Associate Fellow within the Global Fellowship Initiative of the GCSP. 

Additional Resources: 
United Nations Human Rights Guidance on Less-Lethal Weapons in Law Enforcement, 01 June 2020.ICRC Expert Meeting on Legal Reviews of Weapons and the SlrUS Project.A/78/324: Thematic study on the global trade in weapons, equipment and devices used by law enforcement and other public authorities that are capable of inflicting torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, 24 Aug 23.

As part of our ‘futures’ mini-series, in this episode we are looking specifically at Algorithmic Futures, with hosts of the podcast of the same name: Dr Zena Assaad and Dr Elizabeth Williams, both from ANU. Today we are going to specifically focus on the breadth of the design and uncertainty problem for capabilities augmented by algorithms.  
Elizabeth T. Williams is an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering at the Australian National University (ANU).  She has a PhD in experimental nuclear structure from Yale University. Since joining the ANU in 2012, Liz has held an ARC DECRA Fellowship, mucked about with accelerators, code, and superheavy elements, and explored complexity in real-world technological systems. She also led the creation of the hands-on half of the Masters of Applied Cybernetics, convened the School of Cybernetics 2021 PhD cohort program, and will soon convene the newly created Nuclear Systems major and minor for the School of Engineering’s Bachelor of Engineering programs.

Zena Assaad is a senior research fellow within the School of Engineering at the Australian National University (ANU). Zena studied a Bachelor of Aerospace Engineering and completed a PhD exploring decision-making under uncertainty to support strategic air traffic flow management. Zena currently holds a fellowship position under the ethics uplift program with trusted autonomous systems, exploring human-machine teaming; and is also a fellow with the Australian Army Research Centre researching autonomy in swarms and human-machine teams.
Additional Resources:
Algorithmic Futures - podcast by Zena Assaad and Liz WilliamsKlara and the Sun - K Ishaguro, 2021The Ironies of Automation - L Bainbridge, Automatica, Vol. 19, No. 6. pp. 775 779, 1983