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This podcast is for and about soldiers of the Canadian Army.
Its primary goal is to provide them with useful information through thoughtful and open discussions that reflect their mutual interests and concerns.
Though soldiers are our primary audience, the topics covered on this podcast should be relevant to anyone who supports our soldiers or who has an interest in Canadian military matters.
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Captain Adam Orton: Hi, I'm Captain Adam Orton with the Canadian Army Podcast. The Army is buying much-needed weapons and equipment. Before we go out shopping and paying for it, we have to make sure that the gear is legal for us to use. It might surprise you to find out interpreting international law can be tricky. My guest is Major Michael Smith, a Canadian Armed Forces legal officer with the Directorate of International Operational Law. He's going to explain what we need to know when examining new weapons. Welcome to the podcast.
Major Michael Smith: Thanks. Great to be here.
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Capt Orton: All right. It might not be immediately clear to some people why we need to consult a lawyer or a team of lawyers when deciding if the military can purchase a weapon and advise how it can be used.
Maj Smith: I'm going to take you way back to answer this question. And it starts with the question of what is the point of the law of armed conflict or international humanitarian law? So LOAC or IHL, generally interchangeable acronyms. And the point of it is to set a floor below which humanity has collectively agreed we don't want to fall. Because we intrinsically recognize that war is probably the worst collective activity that we engage in. And from before laws were almost written down. There was a contract almost between warring parties to say, like, “This is terrible. Let's make it slightly less terrible.” So, if you take that as the primordial goo of LOAC and then you arrive where we are today, we've refined that concept into a way that can be operationalized across nations, across militaries. And then we have to still answer that question of where's the floor? How do we make sure we don't fall below that floor? And so when we find ourselves in conflict, we are using what we call in international law means and methods of warfare. And so to know where we are on that map or on that ledger of below or above, we have to know how these weapons work, how they're employed, the effects that they achieve. And then, in answering those questions, we can decide, “All right, collectively, all of us are good using this type of bullet, that type of rocket.” Et cetera.
Capt Orton: Let's get to the nitty-gritty of it all then. What factors are taken into consideration when determining the legality of a weapon?
Maj Smith: Okay, so there are two basic premises. One is: Does the weapon cause unnecessary suffering or superfluous injury? And the other is: Is the weapon indiscriminate by nature? So stated otherwise, can I ensure that the target and the target area is the only area within which the weapon will create an effect? So, the flip side of that is if I can't guarantee that, then I'm not able to use my weapon selectively against valid military objectives, be they people or objects, or protected persons or objects, which then gets me into essentially killing civilians and destroying things that would otherwise be protected. So if I can't make that distinction, then the weapon is of questionable utility.
Capt Orton: Now, when we talk about indiscriminate, like we could say, for example, a rifle is by design pretty discriminate. You point it at the thing and then you pull the trigger and then the bullet goes there. But then we have weapons like grenades or artillery pieces, which are definitely less discriminate. How do we draw that line? That seems pretty fuzzy.
Maj Smith: So I would say we're conflating two concepts there. There's the collateral effect radius of a given weapon.
Capt Orton: Okay.
Maj Smith: So a laser being the ultimate, you know, pinpoint, then a rifle round or a bullet has a slightly larger one. And then we have all kinds of weapons, as we know, that are explosive in nature that have wider collateral effects radius, radii. The question is, “Are these radii predictable and repeatable?” And then, can I use them in a way that doesn't offend my proportionality analysis? Which is another obligation under law. But there are weapons with huge collateral effects radius that are still discriminate. It just matters on the use case. So tanks in the open, in the desert, Desert Storm 1, right?
Capt Orton: That's right.
Maj Smith: Sure. Drop bombs all day with huge radii because there's no collateral concerns around there. And I know that, let's say my radius is 500 metres. Great. I know it, it's 500 metres every time, no problem. But if I then start using that weapon in an urban centre where my radii are overlapping protected persons and objects, that's when I'm then tripping into a matter of targeting. So that's an illegal use of a weapon, but the weapon itself is not illegal.
Capt Orton: Right, I just did my Intermediate Law of Armed Conflict course. And there's a lot of talk about, let's say, 90% of the time it's accurate to 12 metres plus or minus 10 metres. And so there is that collateral calculation that goes into place. And then when you're looking at the potential hazards around that space where you're operating, you do a whole lot of math and then you're like, “Oh, this seems less safe than you would think”, or “Oh, it seems more safe than you would think in a context of combat”.
Maj Smith: So what you're discussing is targeting law and targeting operations, but you can't get there until you've understood the weapons law ramifications and the weaponeering. So it's a sequenced - we go from the idea of, “I want to achieve a capability in the battlespace” to identifying potential solutions to winnowing them down based on a myriad of considerations from cost to performance. And then we say, “I want system X”. Then us, lawyers, we come in along with a huge other technical staff of subject matter experts, right? We play a very small role. And we say, “According to these principles of international law, or with these restraints and constraints, depending on how the weapon functions, you can use it here, but not there, in this way, but not in that way,” then the weapon is good to go. Then the weapon goes into the arsenal, then the end users are in an armed conflict, and then they have to engage in their targeting analysis to make sure it works, or achieves the effect that is aligned with their obligations of distinction and proportionality.
Capt Orton: Right. That's quite a series of activities to get there.
Maj Smith: It's almost like it's complicated.
Capt Orton: Yeah. So let's talk about some examples maybe of recent weaponry that might have undergone this examination. I know the Canadian Army has been talking a lot about HIMARS. We've seen that in operations in Ukraine and other locations. What have you looked at with regards to that?
Maj Smith: So without getting into the specifics of weapon systems that have been reviewed, I think you're on the right path insofar as the Canadian Forces is rapidly modernizing and, in so doing, is adopting new - to the Canadian Armed Forces, but not necessarily new within the Allied construct - weapon systems. I would say though that from a legal perspective, generally speaking, the things currently considered in our artillery long-range rocketry, like this has been around for a long time. We understand how to deal with this because effectively we're talking about firing a projectile, be it rocket propelled or artillery in these cases, and they land somewhere with a collateral effects radius and we just have to make sure that that radius is predictable and repeatable and measurable. And then once we're kind of through that threshold, then it's over to the commanders to use. I guess what I was just describing was more the question of, is it indiscriminate by nature? You can't skip past the unnecessary suffering, superfluous injury. But we've been using explosives for as long as they've been around. And we've come to terms as a species with, is it good or not? And so, presumably, we are not seeking to employ new kinds of explosives that would offend the long-standing foundation of superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering.
Capt Orton: Yeah, and I would say, like, generally speaking, the CAF arsenal, a grenade's a grenade, whether it's attached to a drone or whatever. So that homework still applies. And as a result, we've already established a threshold for a lot of these things. And it's relatively non-complex to examine these technologies in that context.
Maj Smith: Right, it doesn't go below the floor is a way of thinking about it. And then I'm sure there's a question being asked in some people's mind, “Well then why go through this at all?” And the simple reason is it is an international obligation stemming from a treaty to which we are a signatory, that we have ratified. So it is a positive obligation in the terms of like “Thou shalt,” right? So every new means and method of warfare comes with a positive obligation to verify its legality. It tells us as a country with democratically elected leaders and a civilian, a democratic government that still commands the armed forces, that we are aligned with the laws that we have subscribed to both internationally and domestically.
Capt Orton: Yeah, just because the homework might be similar to the other homework, you still got to do the homework. And because we have that obligation, you still got to do your checks because when you don't, that's when something slips through and there's a problem.
Maj Smith: 100%. You got to show your math. And then the other question that we often receive is, “Well, all of our allies are already using it.” Well, great. That means they've probably satisfied their obligations, however they exist within their country. But we have our own. So just because the Danes or the Australians or the Americans are using a system is not necessarily dispositive that it's good to go for us because you could theoretically have more constraints domestically on certain systems. Classic example being like cluster munitions, right? So, we have an international treaty. But not all nations are signatories to it. We are. So if you just looked at another nation and said, “Well, they're using it,” like that's in and of itself not enough to say, “Well, we're good to go,” because each country is free to make the decisions that they think are best for them.
Capt Orton: Yeah. And even though internationally it is recognized that that's where the floor is, we want to try and do slightly better. So maybe we're not going to use these munitions or we're not going to do that. And in other ways, perhaps we might say, “well, you know, this type of situation occurs more for us.” So maybe we're more flexible on that thing. And so it's about your national identity, making decisions based off of what you believe is good and right.
Maj Smith: Totally.
Capt Orton: In conjunction with your allies and international law, et cetera, et cetera.
Maj Smith: It's like an intersection of moral ambition and operational effectiveness.
Capt Orton: Yeah, that's right.
Maj Smith: Like, you can't over-index on either too much, because if you over-index on operational effectiveness, it's a race to the bottom. We all know where that leads. And if you're kind of too morally ambitious, you're hamstringing your armed forces, who - I'll remind everybody and I'll remind anybody when they're willing to listen - are the arm by which the Crown fulfills its primordial duty, which is the defence of the realm. So if you hamstring your forces from effectively being able to defend the realm, then it begs the question of like, “What are we even doing?” So it's that constant balance. And honestly, that balance reflects the constant balance that exists in all of IHL or LOAC, which is balancing military necessity against humanity. We know we have to do dirty things in defence of the realm under the military necessity column, but back to the floor, we need to inject just enough humanity to make sure it's not utterly terrible.
Capt Orton: Can you give us some examples of weapons that maybe lean towards a problematic space, but at the same time is frequently used? And I'll use the example of hollow-point munitions, right? Frequently used by police forces in our own country, but also something that's not used by the fact that it can cause undue suffering and things like that.
Maj Smith: Right. So here we see the difference between international humanitarian law and domestic law. So, you also have to think in this context, like what is the point of using that ammunition? A police officer's job is to eliminate the threat within a public context around generally unarmed people as quickly as possible, probably also worried about over penetration. So in this case, we're going to cause maximum damage to eliminate the threat as quickly as possible. And then you ask yourself, “Well, don't I want to eliminate threats as quickly as possible and cause maximum damage in the battlespace?” Yes, except there's a few reasons there. One, we've collectively agreed in warfare that superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering are terrible. We want to avoid it. Secondly, while I want to put my enemy down in that way, I have to imagine what's going to happen if they're using the same type of munitions against me. It's going to make for like terrible, messy wounds that are less likely to be survivable. So, it is this weird, almost mental gymnastics that you have to do until you realize that, as nations, we have agreed to this. And then we factor in the modern battlespace, you're probably more likely than not encountering enemy combatants wearing some kind of body armour. So your hollow-point ammunition is probably not going to be of much benefit.
Capt Orton: How do you examine potential unintended uses of weapons? So, white phosphorus as a smoke versus as a weapon. How do you examine those as part of the process?
Maj Smith: Right. So, we have to remember that almost any object is a weapon. Like my knife, fork, spoon kit: ostensibly a weapon. Not very effective.
Capt Orton: The person is the weapon.
Maj Smith: Right. Well, like look out for my spoon.
Capt Orton: Yeah, that's right.
Maj Smith: So then in the review of a given weapon or weapon system, you have to examine the most likely use case, right? Like someone's going to give us a concept of operations in the early stages. This is how we envision this being employed. And it's worth noting that the international community agrees you don't have to consider every single possible application because one, that's impossible. Two, the moment you move to these edge cases, the more likely you're going to find areas where it offends. And then you're just probably going to say, “Nope, we're not going to use it.” So what is that within the bell curve of expected use cases? That's where you look to examine the potential legality or illegality of a weapon.
Capt Orton: Intent matters.
Maj Smith: Absolutely.
Capt Orton: Right. Like a great example of something that skirts that line is Claymore or in Canada, a directed command detonated weapon, because that can definitely be used in a victim initiated mode, AKA functionally a landmine. And a lot of nations do use it in that mode. But for us, the only way to use it is to have somebody holding a thing that makes it go bang. And that is an acceptable use of that for us.
Maj Smith: Right, that wraps in beautifully both the concepts of weapons law and targeting. So, it is discriminate because presumably the Canadian Forces member isn't detonating it until they've distinguished that in fact “When I detonate it, it's going to create an effect against an enemy object, and I've done my little mini proportionality analysis that I'm not going to kill the children that happen to be standing next to the enemy combatant or unnecessarily destroying some object, so I can use this in a discriminate way while exercising my obligations under targeting law.”
Capt Orton: This makes me think a lot about the safety control processes in engineering, where at the highest level you have hardware-based controls. So, it is impossible to do the thing because it prevents you from doing it. Then you have policy that is “don't do that thing, it's dangerous.” Then you have a human being who interprets that policy and does it the right way. And at the end of the day, you have protective equipment that ensures that if all else goes wrong, that you don't suffer the consequences of that. And so there's like that whole kind of pyramid of evaluation that allows things to happen.
Maj Smith: Yeah, you're tapping into something there, which is - and this goes more to targeting law - but it is process-based, not outcome-based.
Capt Orton: Yeah, that's right.
Maj Smith: Like, did you follow the steps? So, were you trained? Did you have a weapon that had passed a legal review? Did you use it in accordance with the law on which you were trained and exercised, and you followed the steps and made your best judgment against the standard of feasibility, then ex post facto we look at what happened and determine whether the right decision was made. But not to go down too far of a rabbit hole, these are the same questions we're now grappling with when it comes to autonomy.
Capt Orton: Right.
Maj Smith: Because autonomy itself is not a weapon. It is the displacement of the human operator in space and time from the decision to employ force in the battlespace. But the actual thing that's going to achieve the effect in the battlespace is probably nothing new. It's a 40-millimetre grenade being dropped by an autonomous drone. It is the firing of some kind of small arm. It's potentially an uncrewed surface vehicle using a torpedo or itself is a torpedo. So the weapon question is not actually difficult to answer. The same questions of is it discriminate, et cetera. But now we're into targeting law of the distinction and proportionality analyses, which are historically made by humans, so that when something goes wrong, you're like, well, that's the body to be kicked and the soul to be damned. But in this case, we've created the so-called accountability gap. And like I said, it was a rabbit hole, but it's this confluence of weapons law and targeting law while also triggering deep moral questions that seem intrinsic to every human.
Capt Orton: Yeah, that's right. It's the displacement of the consciousness of the execution, and then in there through the filter of a digital system to do it. Because at some point, somebody programmed that digital system to do it. And so conceptually, they hold responsibility for that, but they're not explicitly responsible for the digital system’s perhaps faulty reasoning?
Maj Smith: So I think even that reasoning is quickly outdated and is a reflection of the limitation of the human mind, not you personally.
Capt Orton: I don't take it personally.
Maj Smith: Because we're not programming, at this point, kind of anything to do. We're creating models, right?
Capt Orton: Yeah, it’s right.
Maj Smith: We are creating forms of reasoning themselves are informed by myriad data sources like large language models, small language models, machine visioning, all these things together. And then we kind of see how it arrives at a decision. But even now, you wouldn't say those are fully autonomous. We're not there yet.
Capt Orton: Yeah. Hurtling towards it, though.
Maj Smith: Oh, yes. The frog is probably being boiled. But back to your engineering analogy, it's probably pretty good. We could theoretically program at the hardware level certain constraints, and then below that, there are policy and guidance, and we have this sort of like cascading series of protocols that help us adhere to our international legal obligations. But to be very clear, nobody has run this to ground yet. The international community has been swimming around this buoy for more than a decade, and then we're just watching conflict rapidly modernize and automate right before our eyes.
Capt Orton: Yeah, the technology curve is advancing quickly. So we see Defence Research and Development Canada, or DRDC, they do a lot of playing around with technology, learning about new weapons, and they do trials and all sorts of interesting science. Where do you fit into that process when they're examining these technologies? Are you a part of that at all?
Maj Smith: That's a great question. To date, in this conversation, we've really been speaking about systems that were much more mature, but the legal obligations exist in the study, acquisition, adoption. So, your obligations exist almost from conception to adoption. And the point of that is really, why go down that potential trail if off the hop, someone can tell you “There's no world in which you're going to be able to use this thing.” But this is where lawyers come in. And I mean, generally speaking, this is where we come in, even outside of weapons law. We should be giving you your arcs. Right? Like I'm not saying “Don't do this.” I'm saying “Within these bounds, you're good to go.” So the scientists who are under the same obligation, if we're engaged in time, we should be able to say, “Hey, that sounds crazy. But if you do the following things, or if we use it in a certain way, let's see where this goes. This could be very interesting.” And then we have a way to potentially identify and adopt new technology that hopefully creates an effect in the battlespace that gives us a military advantage. But I mean, this is advice to engaging with JAG writ large, and that is the sooner you can work with us, the sooner we can help you avoid those proverbial landmines.
Capt Orton: Great question. Great statement. We're going to bring that up right now, in fact. We talked a little bit about, let's call it treaty participation mismatches, where you have a situation where perhaps you're working with allies who don't participate in certain treaties, and we do, and then we're operating in a combined space. How do we handle that type of situation, or how has Canada handled that type of situation in the past?
Maj Smith: Right, so our obligations are our obligations. Theirs are theirs. We are free to operate in a combined fashion, so long as Canadian Forces members are not employing weapons that would be contrary to our treaty obligations. So generally speaking, it's pretty simple. And part of this too is who's bearing the liability in this, right? Like who is the one who decided “I'm going to use this in the battlespace in a given context?” And when that decision is eventually judged to have been indiscriminate or somehow in violation of international law, it's the decision maker, the commander in that case. So, while we may be operating the long side, so long as it wasn't a Canadian who's like, “You know what, I'm going to use this thing here. Damn the torpedoes.” It's the liability that goes to the end user. So that shouldn't prevent us from operating in a combined scenario.
Capt Orton: We definitely see - and there's plenty of examples with the current conflicts in the world, - battle dissolves into a chaotic mess and over a long enough timeline, it becomes sometimes a total worse scenario where you have civilians, people start resorting to tactics that may be otherwise a little bit more questionable. What happens when we start seeing people using improvised weapons or asymmetric warfare like guerrilla tactics and things like that? How does that fit into that potential analytical process?
Maj Smith: I would say you got to play your own game. This was a common refrain in the Afghanistan years saying, “Well, the Taliban doesn't abide by IHL, so why should we?” Race to the bottom, right? We are morally ambitious people and we believe that we can achieve our military and national objectives while still adhering to international and domestic law. And so I think it's like a bit of a red herring argument. So, let the enemy do what the enemy does. We will have to deal with that. But because we are upstanding citizens, again, who are morally ambitious, falling below that given threshold should be morally abhorrent to us. And we collectively agree that, you know, operational effectiveness be damned, we are still going to stick to, you know, how we do business.
Capt Orton: We do spend a lot of time, especially as a professional military force, talking about our responsibilities, like for example, five-day Law of Armed Conflict course, where you spend a lot of time learning what's right and what's wrong. But sometimes you find yourself in the middle bit of the gray zone where it's not always immediately obvious what the best thing to do is in that scenario. And that's where additional training, additional time on studying the material allows you to better define where that line is and make good choices.
Maj Smith: 100%, like war is a giant edge case, right? You can prepare all you want, but you will inevitably be confronted with a crazy decision that has to be made in a short amount of time with literal life and death stakes. So, I mean, first of all, insane respect to everybody who has done that, has to do that. It's not easy. All we can do is provide guardrails, right? Like, I mean, remember in your rules of engagement training and even in basic, and there's always somebody who's like, “Well, what about this? And what about that?” And eventually the staff is like, “Look, I can't tell you exactly what to do. Here's the book. Here's your structure for thinking. Ultimately, you're the human out there making the decisions. Do your best. Follow the process. You'll probably be morally upstanding. You'll probably be okay.”
Capt Orton: Well, and these exercises also give you the benefit of having thought about it before so that when you're making that split-second decision, you have several weeks and/or months of arguing about things in the back of your head that can float up in the moment. You're like, “Oh yeah, bad” or…
Maj Smith: ‘‘Chance favours the prepared mind. ”
Capt Orton: Nice, good quote. So again, there's a lot of things happening in the world right now. What are some of the consequences when countries or states did not or do not follow these laws? What happens next?
Maj Smith: In theory, there is both individual and state liability. But without opening the hornet's nest of the utility of International Criminal Law, the Rome Statute and all the countries that are signatories to the Rome Statute would, at a minimum, subject individuals to individual liability before that internationally recognized tribunal. And if you are found to have violated some of these principles of IHL or LOAC, you could be found guilty of essentially committing what we call a war crime or a crime against humanity. And so in this case, a perfect example is excessive force or indiscriminate use of force.
Capt Orton: Right.
Maj Smith: But to turn it back to weapons law versus targeting, you could use legal weapons indiscriminately…
Capt Orton: Right. Yeah, of course.
Maj Smith: …or you could be found to have used an illegal weapon. I honestly think the latter is less likely than the former. There aren't that many illegal weapons floating around the battlespace. Possibly because I think there's actually not that much military utility to them. Like the moral and the operational have kind of aligned and using them in this way is effective, like back to expanding bullets or hollow points. It's not really useful in the modern battlespace. So we've probably made sure as, again, collectively as nations, that we can use the things we want to use and we agree that they're not too bad.
Capt Orton: Right and often there's an imperative to intervene in situations where people are using obviously illegal weapons, like let's say gas or something like that, where the reason why this all came up in the beginning was everybody agreed gas was super horrible for everyone and we don't like it. And so when somebody shows up with gas, everybody's like, “What are you doing, man? You're not supposed to do that.” And then there's motivation to take away.
Maj Smith: I mean, presumably, but I recall reading too that even the use of gas in World War I was, other than like maybe the first few times, ended up being of questionable utility. So now everybody's just suffering, but like the battlespace hasn't fundamentally changed, or you know, like who's advanced or like ground taken and held. So then it begs the question of, okay, like what's the point of this? Like, this is just terrible. Let's just go back to shooting and blowing each other up.
Capt Orton: So with all this being said, the Canadian Army is going through a lot of significant modernization efforts, and we are seeing some emergent technologies that are, I would say, probably relatively new to us. Lasers, microwave weapons, things like that, aren't just big bangs or rifles. How do we keep up on that? How do we stay on top of that?
Maj Smith: So, you're absolutely right. Not just the Army, but the CAF writ large, right? Cyber Command is a good example whose tempo moves way faster than even emerging disruptive hard technologies. Their tools come online, become stale very quickly. They have to go through this iterative process almost nonstop. So the speed of everything is increasing.
Capt Orton: Yes.
Maj Smith: And then the obligation on the institution to move in lockstep with that to ensure that end users have the tools they need to fulfill their mandate, that's a very real obligation. How do we keep up with that? Technical expertise is one, and again, lawyers play a very small role within this, but actually understanding what is being used, what is its true effect, what is its collateral effect? Microwaves are a great example. In principle, it's this, you know, magic power that melts adversarial, uncrewed systems out of the sky, regardless of whether they're being controlled by RF or fiber optic. Where am I using it? What are the collateral effects on, let's say, civilian infrastructure in the area, right? Because the same way I can't just level a building for no reason, I can't nuke the communication systems of a small city or something. And then similarly, what are the effects of humans who find themselves in front of it? So the intended use case, melt drones out of the sky. What if I turn it on advancing infantry?
Capt Orton: Yeah.
Maj Smith: Right? Like, not the intended use case, so I probably didn't anticipate that in my review. Though the good lawyer will say, like, “Don't turn this on people.”
Capt Orton: But they also have the ones that you use on people too. It doesn't melt them, but it makes them very uncomfortable.
Maj Smith: Right, but there's the making uncomfortable and then like boiling alive. And so there's at least one company in the U.S. right now who's in advanced stages who's making a giant microwave to just melt drones. And so if you were to turn that at the right distance at humans, like it would absolutely offend.
Capt Orton: Significant unnecessary suffering, for sure.
Maj Smith: Same way we can't put our pets in a microwave, right? We've all agreed on that. We probably shouldn't put humans in front of one.
Capt Orton: Yeah, definitely. And how do you keep up as a professional in that domain? Because, it goes without saying that an expertise in law is critical, but then you have to have that technical expertise or maintain that connection with the technical domain in order to properly be able to provide feedback, I would assume.
Maj Smith: That's a great question. And look, we are in the profession of arms. And so the same way anybody in a given trade has, in my opinion, a positive and moral obligation to understand the state of their art, so too should lawyers. Our ability to provide relevant advice is probably tied directly to our ability to understand the concept of operations and the challenges faced by a given commander or in this case, like, you know, client. So if they're talking to me about a system that I don't understand, one, I should probably tell them I don't understand and find out super quick what that system is. But I think the professional lawyers among us will proactively ensure that they understand the sort of decision space that their clients exist in. And the simple answer is, if we're not maintaining knowledge of the state-of-the-art, we are not maintaining the necessary professionalism in the profession of arms.
Capt Orton: Right. And at the end of the day, we're all on the modernization program. Like the world is moving forward and you got to move forward with it.
Maj Smith: Right. And like, go ask. As I keep saying, lawyers are one part of this process. I don't have to understand at a deep physical level exactly what's happening with a microwave, but I need to understand just enough and then understand who to go talk to, whether it's at DRDC or ADM(Mat) or some subject-matter expert and give them the old, “Explain it to me like I'm a five-year-old” and make sure that I have enough of an understanding from the data path packages provided to me to inform my legal advice.
Capt Orton: Yeah. Ultimately, I think great life advice in general. You got to stay curious. That's what it's all about.
Maj Smith: Absolutely. Absolutely.
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Capt Orton: All right. Well, thanks so much for being on the podcast and explaining all this stuff to us.
Maj Smith: It was my pleasure. Thank you.
Capt Orton: That was Major Michael Smith, a legal officer with the Directorate of International Operational Law. And I'm Captain Adam Orton with the Canadian Army Podcast. Orton out.
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