Palmer, Michael T., and Michael Johnson

Abstract
As the world’s only superpower, the United States of America finds itself challenged by adversaries who know they cannot confront it directly, toe to toe, on traditional battlefields, or on or under the world’s oceans. In their attempts to follow Sun Tzu’s instruction to “subdue the enemy without fighting,” potential adversaries of the United States continuously assess and probe American strengths and weaknesses to identify vulnerabilities for military, political, and industrial exploitation. It is not fully appreciated, assessed, or addressed by American policy makers and warfighters how vulnerable the U.S. military is to the threat of “lawfare,” both international and domestic environmental.
The leading expert on lawfare, Brigadier General Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., U.S. Air Force (Ret.), defines it as the use or abuse of law and legal processes as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve military objectives. Both international environmental-protection political processes and American domestic environmental-protection laws and judicial processes offer tempting targets for exploitation by weaker adversaries willing to engage in political and legal lines of operations against superior U.S. military technologies and capabilities.
The authors believe that it is possible for a competitor or potential enemy to use systemic American vulnerabilities to wage a campaign of misinformation and legal challenges to reduce U.S. military and antisubmarine-warfare readiness. In particular, this article focuses on how adversaries could use environmental lawfare covertly to wage war against the use of active sonar during testing, training, and operations. Allowed to proceed unchecked heretofore, this use of undersea lawfare may already be providing potential adversaries an inexpensive way of reducing the antisubmarine-warfare capabilities of the U.S. Navy and its allies. This article is intended to stimulate action by warfighters and policy makers to identify, assess, and address this threat.
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