Cybernetic Enhancement of Soldiers: Conserving hors de combat Protections for Combatants Under the Third Geneva Convention

This article asks whether cybernetically enhanced soldiers retain the protections owed to combatants who are hors de combat under the Third Geneva Convention. The author, Amanda McAllister, opens with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the "destructive birth of the nuclear age", using it as the clearest modern example of a technology that permanently altered both the conduct of war and the law written to govern it.

McAllister sets cybernetic enhancement in that lineage, tracing how advances from the twelfth-century crossbow through to cyber warfare have repeatedly forced the law of armed conflict to absorb capabilities its drafters did not anticipate. The article takes up what follows for a combatant whose body and cognition are technologically augmented, and for the surrender and incapacity rules that determine when such a combatant must be spared.