A Robot Left in a Field Is a Mine the Law Cannot See: How the Fuze Distinction Exempts Armed Emplaced Systems from Every Obligation the Mine Regime Imposes, and the One-Line Amendment That Closes It

An armed robotic platform is emplaced to deny an approach. It is left there. It senses locally, decides locally, and engages what enters its arcs. It cannot be reached. Thirty days later somebody comes to collect it, or nobody does. The literature on autonomous weapons treats such a system as a weapon under human operation with the human removed, and asks how much control was retained. This paper argues that the framing is wrong, that the right body of law is one nobody has applied to it, and that the misfit produces a gap with consequences that outlast the conflict. The system is an emplaced device, and the law already has a developed regime for emplaced devices: Amended Protocol II to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, and the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention. That regime reasons from emplacement and aftermath rather than from operation and control. Its obligations are five and an emplaced robotic system escapes all of them: recording, to the exact location of every device; marking and protection of civilians; self-destruction within thirty days at ninety per cent reliability, with an independent backstop; detectability, by not less than eight grammes of iron; and clearance after the cessation of active hostilities, an obligation which persists even in respect of areas the emplacing party no longer controls. The escape turns on a fuze. A mine within these instruments is a device designed to be exploded by the presence, proximity or contact of a person or vehicle. An armed robotic platform is not exploded by presence; it observes presence, classifies it, and decides. That distinction is real, it is doing work nobody drafted it to do, and it is the whole of the reason a system which is emplaced, left, victim-triggered in operation and abandoned in fact falls outside a regime built for exactly that behaviour. The misfit runs the other way too. Where the analogy holds, the regime's obligations are cheap to meet: a self-deactivation timer, eight grammes of iron already present many times over, a line in a log. The one obligation the mine regime does not impose, that the device discriminate before it acts, is the one an armed robotic system can actually discharge, and the companion engineering paper prices it at under a watt-hour a day. The law asks less of these systems than they are capable of, because it asks nothing of them at all. The paper also argues that the obligation of constant care, and the duty to cancel or suspend an attack when circumstances change, presuppose a continuing capacity to reconsider which an emplaced offline system is defined by lacking. Stating that presupposition yields a design requirement rather than an aspiration: a system emplaced for longer than the circumstances can be relied on must be capable of being reached within that period. The paper closes with drafted amendment text extending Amended Protocol II to emplaced systems that are not mines, an answer to the consensus objection drawn from the Convention's own record - the anti-vehicle-mines protocol failed after stockpiles existed; Protocol IV succeeded before they did - and an assessment of what adoption would cost the states most likely to field such systems.