A starting point for thinking about war and preparations for war is that today the average citizen in Western countries has absolutely no interest in fighting in a war him or herself. The best study of this phenomenon rightly notes that what might be called the “great refusal” of ordinary people to involve themselves in actual war making reflects what might be called the “great disillusionment” with war itself. However, this has not meant the end of war, or of preparations for war, but rather war's transformation from a “nationalized” to a “postnationalized” arrangement. For the United States, this has meant expansion into a new type of empire. As part of the symposium on Ned Dobos's Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine, this essay explores these developments and the challenges they pose.

In November 2000, a few weeks after the outbreak of a major uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Israeli government officially acknowledged it was operating a policy of targeted killing against selected Palestinian militants. On 14 January 2002, an Israeli (PCATI) and a Palestinian (LAW) human rights group jointly submitted a petition to the Israeli High Court to halt the policy and to issue an interim order suspending its implementation. The Court subsequently refused to issue the requested interim order and, when it finally delivered its judgment in the case on 14 December 2006, at least 213 targeted persons and 137 bystanders had been killed and hundreds of others injured in operations of targeted killing. In its judgment, the Court neither banned nor justified the state policy as a whole, but ruled that the lawfulness of targeted killings must be examined separately for each operation.

The modern Law of International Armed Conflict is principally framed upon a linear notion of warfare. It classically anticipates massed armies engaging one another upon the battlefield where victory is achieved by way of decisive military defeat of one side by the other. The targeting philosophy underpinning this paradigm is that civilians are to be spared to the greatest extent possible during the course of the conflict. Concomitantly, military force is to be applied in a surgical and economic manner mainly against the sovereign forces of the enemy as well as defined ‘military objectives’, with the law being relatively comprehensive as to the character of each of these categories. Under the prevailing philosophy, the law nonetheless acknowledges that where civilians vitiate their protected status and elect to participate directly in hostilities, then they might also be targeted. The paucity of legal prescription in this area strongly suggests, however, that this is regarded as a somewhat exceptional phenomenon.