A State’s Right to Military Power: The International Legal Implications of Potential SDF Action
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION I. STRUCTURE OF THE UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES A. Federal Forces B. The National Guard C. State Defense Forces II. HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE AND CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY FOR SDFS A. History of SDFs Prior to the Constitution B. The Constitution C. Interpreting the Constitutional Grant of Power III. FOREIGN RELATIONS POWERS IN THE UNITED STATES A. International Relations Power and Preemption B. Declaring War and Engaging in War C. Categorizing Mexican Drug Cartels as Political Entities Capable of Provoking the Internationally Legal Use of Force by SDFs IV. INTERNATIONAL LAW V. ANALYSIS & CONCLUSION INTRODUCTION In the United States, governors and state-level leadership are responsible for providing the initial response to an attack on their citizens. (1) With this great responsibility, however, comes only a few resources. Governors rely on state police and the National Guard to respond to situations. (2) These forces are often ill-equipped to handle major incidents, much less catastrophes which often involve more than five hundred casualties. (3) Twenty-two states have groups of civilians, separate from the police and National Guard, whose training is similar to armed forces reserve components. (4) Today, these forces are called state defense forces (SDFs), and they originate from the state militias so important to the original American colonies' defense. (5) While the governors of states with SDFs may call on the SDFs to defend against invasion, (6) the SDFs' validity and the effect of any action or armed engagement by such a force has not been tested in international law. If an SDF mobilized and engaged another force, either a non-national actor or a nation itself, would the use of force be legal? (7) What if the force was used at or across a United States border, for instance, engaging the citizens or soldiers of Mexico? (8) These questions raise constitutional questions domestically (9) and legal use of force questions internationally. (10) Ultimately, because the Constitution and federal law authorize the use of SDFs, the United States could be held responsible for their acts under the international theory of attribution. (11) Because of this potential international legal responsibility, the United States should either (1) adopt strict limits with more specificity delineating exactly when and how SDFs should engage international forces, or (2) eliminate SDFs as an outdated historical relic no longer necessary for national protection. I. STRUCTURE OF THE UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES Understanding how SDFs fit within the United States' overall military structure clarifies analysis of the international legal effect of SDF actions. The United States' military structure is tiered, including dedicated federal forces, hybrid National Guard forces, and locally focused SDFs. (12) The SDFs are ultimately subject to national control, but their local character both makes them a potent tool for immediate state-level defense and colors the legality of their actions in international law. (13) A. Federal Forces The United States military is divided into five main branches, including the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Coast Guard. (14) All of these branches, except the Coast Guard, operate under the Department of Defense and report to their respective secretaries, but the Marine Corps reports to the Secretary of the Navy. (15) The Army, Navy, and Air Force secretaries report to the Secretary of Defense who, in turn, reports to the President as commander in chief. (16) The Coast Guard operates under the Department of Homeland Security. (17) However, after a declaration of war or when the President so directs, the Coast Guard operates under authority of the Department of the Navy. (18) When the Coast Guard operates as a component of the Department of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard's top officer, the Commandant, (19) reports directly to the Secretary of Homeland Security, (20) who, in turn, reports to the President as a member of the Cabinet. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".