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Hello and welcome to the LawFair podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittis and this is the second of the

three podcasts I recorded down at the Milops conference in Singapore. It is, I know, the height

of vanity to record one's own speeches, to broadcast on one's own podcast, hosted on one's own blog.

I plead guilty, but I realized the other day that one person who had never been a guest on the

LawFair podcast was yours truly, and as long as I was recording other people's speeches at Milops,

I might as well record my own too. The speech is entitled, legislating for the wars we fight.

When Commander Adam asked me to give this talk, I asked him what he wanted me to talk about,

and he told me I fully expected, because it's the answer I always get, something about

Oantanamo-Havius and detention law, and I was all sort of ready to rumble, okay, I'll give

another talk about Oantanamo-Havius and detention law, which I speak a lot about and I'm really sick of.

I respect a bunch of other people in the room, and to my surprise, he responded with something that

was actually, it's actually very close to my heart. Nobody wanted me to talk about legislating

for the wars we fight. Now this is a subject that I was, I was taking back, I mentioned it,

because it was sort of a stab right in the heart, subject I've been thinking about a lot recently,

and I had been thinking about before, I actually wrote a sort of one and a half books on the subject,

and I was, I had been wondering in recent days, for reasons I will explain, whether the thesis

that I articulated in the first of those books needs at this point to be revisited,

and so it's actually a very good opportunity to sort of reflect a little bit on this subject,

...