Rules of Engagement

The conduct of military operations is governed by laws, rules, and agreements. For the US, the regulations applicable in the case of military operations and contingencies on US territory and abroad are defined in the operations law.

The operations law is a collection of domestic, foreign, and international regulations. This law includes crucial martial laws, such as the law of armed conflict (LOAC), also referred to as the law of war. For any operation, which can range from peacetime missions to armed conflicts, military authorities issue standing Rules of Engagement (RoE), which "delineate the circumstances and limitations under which United States forces will initiate and/or continue combat engagement with other forces encountered".

Multiple players involved with or impacted by military operations, for instance commanders, judge advocates, and peace keeping forces, need to be able to gain a fast and precise understanding of the various terms and procedures defined in any such legal document.

This project will extract rules, definitions, and networks from the operations law text using AutoMap. The rules will be extracted to be used for understanding by judge advocates as well as to be fed into the GMU RULER system for discrepancy analysis. The definitions contained in the law will be extracted to be used in a search tool, such as GMU's Zotero. Finally, the networks contained within the laws will be extracted to be analyzed by CMU *ORA for analysis of the relationship of laws to each other and to show the implication of the changes as the applicable laws change.