517 José Miguel Alía Plana Rules of engagement and governance of agramante’s camp Christian theology. The SROEs respond to this structural, nominalist and categorical framework, with their “groups” and “series”. In a group devoted to “targeting”, we could find a series of ROEs related to the identification and designation of dual-use targets; or in a group called “mission accomplishment”, a series devoted to freedom of movement, indirect fire, etc. We return now to their content: these are written orders, with prohibitions and permissions with regard to possible actions.14 They are written up in accordance with “previous concepts” and “mandates”. The former define the instances that activate each ROE, underlined as follows: 1. Attack: aggression carried out against the units concerned, its components and persons under special protection, or its allies. 2. Hostile attempt: preparatory act that implies an immediate threat of use of force or violence. When the military operator verifies that he is in a situation defined in one of the previous concepts, he can choose which response to give, whether prohibition, mandate or authorisation, according to the circumstances.15 A possible ROE could have the following literal wording: “the use of force, including lethal force, against persons who attempt to impede the development of land operations in the area of coordinates XX-XX”. From the latter we can infer that the ROEs, just like language, have the capacity to perform, given that they create and define the enemy in a concrete place, with concrete frontiers, by means of enunciation and verbalisation. ALGORITHMS AND CYBERNETICS The ROEs are a tool for governing a system, formed by all possibilities that a unit has of insisting on an action of force; ranging from minimum violence to combat, as well as the various interactions of all such possibilities.16 They are an algorithm, a prescribed set of instructions or rules, ordained and finite, whose aim is to carry out an activity, by means of successive steps. 14 : Document MC 362/1 “NATO Rules of Engagement”, 30 June 2003, Part V, “Structure of the ROE and Procedures”, point 15. 15 : MILLER, E.S. Interoperability of Rules of Engagement in Multinational Maritime Operations. Alexandria: Center for Naval Analysis, 2003, p. 9. 16 : SAGEN, Scott D. Rules of Engagement, Security Studies, vol. 1, nº 1 (autumn 1991), p. 80. http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee
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