THE FUTURE LAW OF ARMED CONFLICT

Warfare is changing-and rapidly. New technologies, new geopolitical alignments, new interests and vulnerabilities, and other developments are changing how, why, and by whom conflict will be waged. Just as militaries must plan ahead for an environment in which threats, alliances, capabilities, and even the domains in which they fight will differ from today, they must plan for international legal constraints that may differ, too. As states, including the United States, plan for how they will conduct warfare in the future, West Point's Lieber Institute for Law and Land Warfare, in collaboration with Columbia Law School's National Security Law Program, convened an expert workshop to consider the future legal context in which conflict will be waged. Titled "Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) 2040," we assembled leading academics and practitioners from around the world to consider how that body of law and institutions for creating, interpreting, and enforcing it might look two decades ahead-as well as what opportunities may exist to influence it in that time"--