Transcending weapon systems: the ethical challenges of AI in military decision support systems

Communities in conflict-affected areas are direly impacted by growing climate risks and shocks. Over the last few years, political will to strengthen climate action in these settings has been growing. Commitments need to be urgently translated into tangible outcomes for communities – and avenues to do so exist. In this post, and on the eve of COP29, Catherine-Lune Grayson and Amir Khouzam reflect on pathways to strengthen climate action in conflict settings.

Language matters and the protections of international law are crucial when facing global trends of dehumanization. Dehumanizing narratives strip people of their dignity, making it easier to justify inhumane treatment, torture, and exclusion from legal protections. In this post, Terry Hackett, Head of Division on Persons Deprived of Liberty at the ICRC, emphasizes the urgent need to reject dehumanization, ensure humane treatment, and strengthen compliance with international law to protect the dignity and rights of detainees globally.

In line with its mandate, the ICRC engages with all parties to an armed conflict, including non-state armed groups. The ICRC has a long history of confidential humanitarian engagement with armed groups to alleviate and prevent the suffering of persons living in areas controlled by these groups. However, this engagement has become increasingly complex. Accordingly, the ICRC undertakes an annual internal exercise to evaluate the status of its relationships with armed groups and to identify developments to strengthen its future engagement worldwide. In this post, ICRC Adviser Matthew Bamber-Zryd discusses some of the key findings from this exercise. In 2024, the ICRC estimates that 210 million persons live in areas under the full or contested control of armed groups. There are more than 450 armed groups of humanitarian concern worldwide and the ICRC’s engagement with these groups remains stable. Despite the ICRC’s successful contact with 60% of armed groups worldwide, engagement with some groups remains challenging. These obstacles stem from a combination of state-imposed barriers, notably counter-terrorism legislation, and the precarious security environment prevailing in certain countries.

Gender can still be a confusing and contested subject for international humanitarian law (IHL) and military practitioners. But just as practitioners keep abreast of astonishing technological advancement, and states continue to dedicate significant – and, in numerous contexts, increasing – national spending on defence and security, it is high time that the equal protection of civilians is invested in, too. Gender inequality remains ingrained across today’s conflict-affected contexts, and gender-specific harms shape some of the horrors inflicted on civilians. To encourage parties to armed conflict to take more and better measures to reduce this harm, in 2024 the ICRC, the Swedish Red Cross, and the Nordic Centre for Military Operations published a new report – International Humanitarian Law and a Gender Perspective in the Planning and Conduct of Military Operations – based on an expert meeting with state and military practitioners. In this post, the report’s co-authors set out ten legal, policy and operational recommendations to equip armed forces to reduce the gendered risks faced by diverse women, men, girls and boys in armed conflict, and identify good practices from modern militaries. It’s time for these to be part-and-parcel of how militaries comply with IHL and related civilian harm reduction measures.

The 34th International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent will take place 28-31 October 2024 in Geneva, Switzerland. At this meeting, states party to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the components of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement will meet to discuss humanitarian issues under this International Conference’s theme “Navigate uncertainty, strengthen humanity”. In the lead-up to this meeting, ICRC Legal Adviser Ellen Policinski looks back at the role of the International Conference in drafting the 1949 Geneva Conventions, in particular the Fourth Geneva Convention, which protects civilians.

Food insecurity remains a critical issue in modern armed conflicts, exacerbated by the mutually reinforcing effects of conflict, economic shocks, and climate change. In response, the ICRC's 2024 Challenges Report emphasizes how compliance with a broad range of rules of international humanitarian law (IHL) can help avoid acute food crises, and highlights a number of contemporary obstacles to achieving such compliance in practice. In this post, ICRC Legal Adviser Matt Pollard highlights key legal protections under IHL, including the prohibition against using starvation as a method of warfare. He stresses the importance of a much wider range of rules relevant to safeguarding civilian access to essential resources like food and water, and outlines how avoiding unduly narrow interpretations of such IHL rules is essential to reducing food insecurity and its devastating long-term effects during armed conflicts.

Detention by non-state armed groups is a widespread, diverse, and legally complex occurrence in armed conflicts across the globe. In 2023, the ICRC assessed that around 70 non-state armed groups in non-international armed conflicts have detainees. The circumstances of detention can pose serious humanitarian concerns, including ill-treatment and inadequate living conditions for detainees. In this post, part of a series on the Fourth Geneva Convention and the internment of protected persons and drawing upon the 2024 ICRC Challenges Report, ICRC Legal Adviser Tilman Rodenhäuser discusses the prohibition of arbitrary detention under international humanitarian law (IHL) and how this relates to internment by non-state armed groups in the context of non-international armed conflicts.

Water and wastewater pipelines, electricity lines and telecommunication installations permeate contemporary urban landscapes and form complex, interdependent service networks, which populations rely on for their essential needs. Armed conflict can damage or disrupt these networks and the essential services they provide. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to protecting critical civilian infrastructure, yet addressing the humanitarian impact of essential service disruption requires a broader focus beyond physical infrastructure. In this post, the group of experts behind the newly released report “Keeping the Lights on and the Taps Running”, co-published by the ICRC and the Norwegian Red Cross, highlight the crucial yet often overlooked role of the personnel who operate, maintain, and repair essential service infrastructure during hostilities. They argue that protecting and facilitating safer access for essential service providers during armed conflict should be considered a key component of humanitarian action and review the Movement's experience in doing so.

Since 2003, the ICRC has submitted a report on ‘International Humanitarian Law and the Challenges of Contemporary Armed Conflict’ to the International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, where the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions come together with the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement to discuss key matters of humanitarian concern and to make joint commitments. In this post and drawing from the 2024 Challenges Report, ICRC Chief Legal Officer Cordula Droege presents the ICRC’s analysis of some of the salient legal issues of today’s conflicts, animated, first and foremost, by its desire to achieve greater protection of victims of war from the effects of armed conflicts, and informed by its observation of key humanitarian issues on the ground and its dialogue with parties to conflicts in all parts of the world.

In the debate on how artificial intelligence (AI) will impact military strategy and decision-making, a key question is who makes better decisions — humans or machines? Advocates for a better leveraging of artificial intelligence point to heuristics and human error, arguing that new technologies can reduce civilian suffering through more precise targeting and greater legal compliance. The counter argument is that AI-enabled decision-making can be as bad, if not worse, than that done by humans, and that the scope for mistakes creates disproportionate risks. What these debates overlook is that it may not be possible for machines to replicate all dimensions of human decision-making. Moreover, we may not want them to. In this post, Erica Harper, Head of Research and Policy at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, sets out the possible implications of AI-enabled military decision-making as this relates to the initiation of war, the waging of conflict, and peacebuilding. She highlights that while such use of AI may create positive externalities — including in terms of prevention and harm mitigation — the risks are profound. These include the potential for a new era of opportunistic warfare, a mainstreaming of violence desensitization and missed opportunities for peace. Such potential needs to be assessed in terms of the current state of multilateral fragility, and factored into AI policy-making at the regional and international levels.