Unconventional warfare has proven to be a force to be reckoned with in recent years. In fact, the industry has grown to a whopping value of US $100 billion per year (X). It is not going away any time soon and because of this the traditional notions of security and the legality surrounding unconventional warfare are changing rapidly and are still in the beginning phases. As stated by the Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, Admiral William McRaven, “the direct approach . . . only buys time and space for the indirect approach . . . [and] in the end, it will be such continuous indirect operations that will prove decisive in the global security arena,” (X).
The last major conflicts in the world have lead to massive amounts of loss of life with an extraordinary amount of resources being used in the process. The tactics of unconventional warfare are able to refrain- mostly- from physical harm on the peoples of the world. Nations use unconventional warfare to “aggressively achieve their national security objective while simultaneously remaining below the threshold of what would be considered an act of war,” (X).
Nothing has changed the traditional notions of security as much as unconventional warfare; beginning with the proxy wars during the cold war. Traditional notions of security “states that the nation-state acts as referent object of security and that their motivation is the appropriation of military and economic power, rather than the pursuit of ideals or ethics,” (X). One entity that internationally rejects that concept in one stroke is the United Nations. The United Nations, in 1994, defined their notion of security as “freedom from fear and want” or better known as “human security,” (X). What could of been many cases of state vs state conventional warfare since the UN’s inception, has instead been UN intervention that has debatably saved many lives and resources. This globalized force has a primary focus of the world around them and the members are not just focused on their own state- centric concerns. They have a responsibility to protect the world, and quite literally, in 2001 the UN came out with the Responsibility to Protect report which stated that the “international community has a responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other means to protect populations from these crimes. [genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, and their incitement] If a State is manifestly failing to protect its populations, the international community must be prepared to take collective action to protect populations,” (X) “sovereignty no longer exclusively protects States from foreign interference,” (X). On top of the traditional notions of security being transformed into a collective ideal, one of the realist traditional ideas of security is military capabilities. What this new notion of security offers, and specifically in the UN, is an opportunity to use unconventional warfare techniques such as economic warfare and cyber warfare to debatably damage the state just as much as it would in conventional warfare. Many would argue that the problem with this is that this affects the state as a whole including civilians, while this is true, in economic/ cyber warfare for example, nobody is physically harmed whereas a stray bomb would undoubtedly have physical damage on civilian life (X).
Being that unconventional warfare is an up and coming, and soon to be dominant tactic of warfare on the worldly stage, it seems only natural that there be legal dimensions to the usage of it; much like the Geneva Conventions for conventional warfare. In regards to the UN, it only began being effective in the 1990s with their increased usage of intervention in state affairs but previous to that it proved rather ineffective in hindering the proxy wars during the Cold War. Another actor that has risen onto the state of unconventional warfare is cyber warfare which was created (the Internet) around the same time that the UN began intervening more and more. Private military contractors, although they have been in existence since the 1960s, have recently had enormous growth in the amount of times they have been used in what could of been conventional warfare. Although efforts are being made to regulate and establish laws concerning the usage of each of these tactics, as pointed out, the need to establish laws and regulations has just now surfaced. Not until recent years has unconventional warfare came onto the main stage and became something that needed to be worried about by the global community. The legality issues that may arise in regards to the use of unconventional warfare include the rationalization as to when to implement the tactics, how far a state may go before the tactics are considered unhumanitarian, and to what extent international organizations such as the UN may take to prevent the tactics from being used or to stop them from being used.
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