Coding the Law of Armed Conflict: First Steps

Killer robots have captured the collective imagination, but many other predictive algorithms will arrive on the battlefield sooner to provide decisional support to militaries. Militaries may seek algorithms that help them predict the legal status of a person, or whether someone is holding a weapon in a hostile pose, or whether a particular attack would be proportional. Even if coders cannot embed the law of armed conflict (LOAC) directly into those algorithms, militaries will benefit from algorithms that are informed by LOAC.