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US Army Legal Counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 January 2015
Brigadier General Richard C. “Rich” Gross is the US Army Legal Counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He attended the Military Academy at West Point and was commissioned in the US Army as a second lieutenant in the Infantry. He also attended the University of Virginia School of Law and the US Army Judge Advocate General's Corps. He holds a Master's degree in strategic studies from the US Army War College. Prior to his current position, he served as the Chief Legal Adviser for the Joint Special Operations Command, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), US Forces-Afghanistan (USFOR-A) and at US Central Command.
The scope of application of international humanitarian law (IHL) is a deceptively simple concept; broadly speaking, it is where, when and to whom the IHL rules apply. Although this has always been a precondition for discussing IHL issues, the outer limits of the law's applicability remain unsettled. To open this issue on the nuances of the scope of the law's application, Brigadier General Gross gave the following interview providing the US perspective on the circumstances in which IHL applies, and the challenges that lie ahead in light of the ongoing evolution of the way war is waged.
* This interview was conducted at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on 9 April 2014, by Vincent Bernard, Editor-in-Chief; Daniel Cahen, Legal Adviser, ICRC Washington; and Anne Quintin, Legal Outreach Adviser, ICRC Geneva.
1 Editor's note: In recent years, there have been two mass shooting incidents at Fort Hood military base near Killean, Texas. The first, which took place on 5 November 2009, left thirteen dead and more than thirty injured. The second, referred to here, occurred on 2 April 2014, leaving four dead, including the gunman, and sixteen others injured. For more information, see Manny Fernandez and Alan Blinder, “Army Releases Detailed Account of Base Rampage”, The New York Times, 7 April 2014, available at: www.nytimes.com/2014/04/08/us/officials-give-account-of-fort-hood-shooting.html?_r=1.
2 Editor’ note: The Tallinn Manual is a study of how jus ad bellum and IHL apply to cyber-operations and cyber-warfare, produced by a group of experts. Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, April 2013, available at: www.ccdcoe.org/tallinn-manual.html.
3 Editor's note: To give “no quarter” is to refuse to spare the lives of enemy fighters who surrender or are otherwise rendered hors de combat on the battlefield. Orders or threats to give no quarter are a war crime in both international and non-international armed conflicts. See Jean-Marie, Henckaerts and Doswald-Beck, Louise (eds.), Customary International Humanitarian Law, Vol. 1: Rules, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005Google Scholar, Rule 46.
4 Editor's note: This interview took place well before the signing of the US-Afghanistan bilateral security agreement and the NATO Status of Forces Agreement on 30 September 2014.
5 Editor's note: These “Leahy provisions” are codified in the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended, P.L. 87-1954, §620M, 22 USC 2378d; and Department of Defense Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014, PL 113-76 (signed into law 17 January 2014), §8057.
6 Kevin Baron, “Hagel's Plan for the Military in the Post-War Era”, Defense One, 5 November 2013, available at: www.defenseone.com/ideas/2013/11/hagel-plans-for-military-in-post-war-era/73203.