Modirzadeh: “Violent, Vicious, and Fast”: LSCO Lawyering and the Transformation of American IHL

Naz K. Modirzadeh (Harvard Univ. - Law) has posted “Violent, Vicious, and Fast”: LSCO Lawyering and the Transformation of American IHL (Harvard National Security Journal, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

This article examines a phenomenon unfolding within the United States’ military legal establishment: an effort by a segment of military lawyers to define how the law of armed conflict (LOAC) applies to the wars they anticipate fighting in the future. I refer to this effort as LSCO lawyering: the development, advancement, and institutionalization of a vision of LOAC tailored to large-scale combat operations (LSCOs), understood here as multi-domain warfare against a peer adversary such as China. Through extensive engagement with military writings and conversations with current and former armed-forces legal advisers from the United States and allied or partner forces, I trace how LSCO lawyering reflects a diagnosis of crisis — a perceived mismatch between prevailing legal expectations and the operational realities of high-intensity war — and a response that aims not to dismantle LOAC but to restore it on terms seen as credible under conditions of existential conflict.

At the heart of this project lies a reconfiguration of what I call American IHL: the United States’ distinctive assemblage of interpretations, practices, normative commitments, and exceptions that shape its approach to LOAC. While LSCO lawyering is often framed as a modest clarification of existing law, I suggest that it functions as something more ambitious — a legal and institutional move to strip away what are described as counterterrorism-era overlays and to reassert a baseline vision of LOAC that privileges military necessity, internal discretion, and speed over external constraint or civilian protection. The result is not lawlessness but an attempt to ensure that legal interpretation does not, in the view of its proponents, impose normatively undue or operationally unsustainable limits on commanders preparing to fight — violent, vicious, and fast — in a war that is framed to be potentially existential.

Although this legal reasoning emerges from within the U.S. national-security context, its implications extend beyond American military and LOAC doctrine. The interpretive logic underpinning LSCO lawyering may find resonance with all states that seek to frame their approach to the conduct of hostilities as lawful. In this sense, LSCO lawyering is not necessarily only an American legal development. It is also a project with the potential to reorder certain expectations — including about what law requires, who interprets it, and how it should structure violence in war — far beyond the Pentagon.