One of the major legal instruments the US Department of Defense (DoD) will be relying on in terms of planning and carrying out its activities in the near future is a new law of war military manual which is expected to be published sometime in 2011. While on the surface such a document may not seem of critical interest to those interested in security/strategic studies or to humanitarian activists seeking to ban rather than regulate violence, there are important reasons to place a certain amount of emphasis on this DoD product and to expect that it will have a significant impact, especially on issues that are presently widely debated within the humanitarian legal community.