Human Shields: The Weapon of the Strong By Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini Thursday, October 22, 2015 at 9:30 AM In a series of interventions, Adil Ahmad Haque and Charlie Dunlap have debated the Defense Department Law of War Manual ’s position on human shields (here , here , and here ). Claiming that the manual does not draw a distinction between voluntary and involuntary human shields, Haque maintains that it ignores the principle of proportionality, thus permitting the killing of defenseless civilians who are used as involuntary shields. Dunlap, however, insists that the manual includes all the necessary precautions for protecting civilians used as shields by enemy combatants, and argues that the adoption of Haque’s approach would actually encourage the enemy to increase the deployment of involuntary human shields. The two scholars clearly disagree on a number of legal issues, and yet they both treat human shielding as an ahistorical phenomenon and therefore fail to address a much more fundamental question: Why does the Law of War Manual suddenly include clauses dealing with human shields? Why in 2015 and not before? At first glance, this might seem like an irrelevant question. However, if one considers that human shields were neither mentioned in the 1956 Department of the Army Field Manual , which preceded the new manual, nor in much more recent manuals published by the DOD (such as the 2009 US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual , where human shields are extremely relevant), it becomes clear that the introduction of human shields clauses in the new manual has great legal and political significance. This is not to say that DOD has never mentioned the use of human shields in its manuals. In the 2005 Law of War Handbook , one clause is dedicated to human shields, but it is significantly different from the clauses in the new manual. It reads: “Civilians may not be used as ‘human shields’ in an attempt to immunize an otherwise lawful military objective. However, violation of this rule by a party to the conflict does not relieve the opponent of the obligation to do everything feasible to implement the concept of distinction.” But, other than that, DOD has not weighed in on the use of human shields until its latest manual. This becomes even more striking once one takes into account that human shielding is not a new phenomenon and, at least theoretically, could have appeared in all the previous manuals. Already by 1867, immediately after the Civil War, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman explained the advantage of using human shields on the battlefield. He wrote: