The Law of Armed Conflict for Soldiers

PME 201 · Professional Military Education · Level 200 (Phase Two)

A Royal Army College course in the laws of war.

Course length: 10 hours, studied online and asynchronously at the student's own pace, together with any in-person practical instruction and assessment the course requires.

Foreword

It is sometimes imagined that war is a place where law falls silent, where anything is permitted because everything is at stake. The opposite is true. Precisely because war is the most dangerous thing people do to one another, it is bound by law, a body of rules agreed by almost every nation on earth and binding on every soldier who fights. Those rules do not ask a soldier to lose. They ask a soldier to win without cruelty, to fight the enemy and spare those who are not, or are no longer, a threat, and so to remain a soldier rather than become something worse.

This is the soldier's law, not the lawyer's. It is carried in the field by ordinary members at every rank, decided in seconds, and lived or broken by the person with the rifle, not by a court far away. It is also, in the plainest terms, what separates a soldier from a murderer, and a disciplined army from a mob. For a small principality whose strength lies in its legitimacy and its honour as much as in its numbers, keeping this law is not a constraint on the Army's power but a large part of where that power comes from.

Who this course is for

Every member of the Royal Kaharagian Army, of every rank and trade. The law of armed conflict binds all who serve, and ignorance of it is no defence, so the course assumes no legal background and builds from the ground up. It follows the Basic Training Manual, in particular the module on military law, and sits alongside the first-aid and leadership courses, with which it shares its foundations. Commanders carry heavier responsibilities under this law, treated more fully in the College's later command courses; this course gives every soldier the foundation all of those rest upon.

A note on names

Two names are used for the same body of law. Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) is the term used across the British and Commonwealth armies, and it is the term this course uses. International Humanitarian Law (IHL) is the term used by the International Committee of the Red Cross and in international writing. They mean the same thing. Where you meet either name, in this course or beyond it, treat them as one.

What you will be able to do

By the end you will be able to:

• explain why the law of armed conflict exists, and why keeping it is in the soldier's own interest;
• describe the basic framework of the law, and how it relates to your Rules of Engagement;
• apply the four principles of distinction, proportionality, precautions, and humanity;
• recognise who and what the law protects, and the duties you owe them;
• conduct yourself lawfully in operations, including toward those who surrender or are wounded;
• handle a prisoner or detainee humanely and by the proper sequence and record;
• state your own responsibility under the law, refuse an unlawful order, and report a violation; and
• apply the law and the Army's values in the humanitarian and home operations the RKA actually undertakes.

How the course works

The course is self-paced and studied online, lesson by lesson, with a reflection at the end of each. But the law is kept in the field not by recollection under fire but by habit: by training, by drills practised until they are instinct, and above all by the Army's values, which point the same way the law does. This course gives you the understanding; the Army's standards, the Rules for the Use of Force and the Detainee Handling instrument, are its own practical application, and your training makes it second nature.

The shape of the law

Beneath all its detail, the law rests on two simple ideas. Protect those who are not, or are no longer, fighting: civilians, the wounded, the surrendered, the captured. And limit the means: even against a lawful enemy, not every weapon and not every method is permitted. From these flow the four principles that run through the whole course, distinction, proportionality, precautions, and humanity, each of them a balance struck between military necessity and the demands of humanity. Necessity explains why force is permitted; humanity sets the limit it may never cross.

Structure

A note on the RKA's reality

The Royal Kaharagian Army is far likelier to serve on a humanitarian task, a peace-support deployment, or in aid to the civil authority at home than in high-intensity war. The full law of armed conflict applies only in armed conflict, but its spirit, and the Army's values, bind every operation the Army undertakes, and on home soil and in peace it is human rights law and the Rules for the Use of Force that govern. The final lesson grounds the whole course in the operations the RKA will actually carry out.

A note on sources

This is the College's own course. It is built on the open authoritative sources, chiefly the International Committee of the Red Cross (its Comprehensive Introduction to International Humanitarian Law, Answers to Your Questions, and The Roots of Restraint in War), together with the United Nations protection-of-civilians guidance and the Sphere and Oslo humanitarian standards, and on the Army's own values and standards, written fresh in Kaharagian terms rather than reproduced.

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