GUARDIAN: "Military 'Invisibility Cloaks' Could Breach Geneva Conventions"

From Owen Bowcott and Alice Ross' 3-14-16 GUARDIAN article entitled "Military 'Invisibility Cloaks' Could Breach Geneva Conventions":

“Invisibility cloaks” and other future advances in military camouflage techniques could violate the Geneva conventions, a top military lawyer has warned.

Refinements of technologies that are already used on stealth bombers could breach compliance with international laws regulating armed conflict if equipment is disguised or soldiers’ weapons are hidden, according to Bill Boothby, a former air commodore and deputy director of RAF legal services.

Scientists and military contractors are spending tens of millions of pounds researching methods for generating effective invisibility through more sophisticated “metamaterials” – substances designed to absorb or bend light and/or radar waves in order to conceal approaching aircraft or troops.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has been one of the major funders of metamaterial science, triggering excitable comparisons with Harry Potter’s fictional invisibility cloak. Last year the US army announced it was planning to test prototype metamaterial uniforms.

Such chameleon-style technology is not entirely new. The first stealth planes went into service with the US air force in the 1980s and took part in air raids on Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Their narrow profile, radar-absorbing paint and deflectors are intended to make them virtually invisible to enemy radar.

In Weapons and the Law of Armed Conflict, a comprehensive survey of emerging defence technologies published this month by Oxford University Press, Boothby highlights difficulties further technological success could pose [...].

[I]f camouflage is used to pretend to be a non-combatant in order to deceive the enemy and thereby to cause death, Boothby says, it could be outlawed under the Geneva convention clause entitled “prohibition of perfidy”.

Similarly, camouflage that involves misuse of enemy, UN, protective, or neutral signs, flags and emblems is banned. Wearing an invisibility uniform might, it is suggested, additionally breach a combatant’s obligation to have a fixed distinctive sign recognisable at a distance and to carry arms openly.

“A combatant whose weapon is rendered invisible by its coating is arguably not complying with the minimal requirements [of carrying a weapon openly],” he states.

To read the entire article, click HERE.