The watcher changed, not the gesture.
The watcher changed, not the gesture
Customary international humanitarian law prescribes no form for surrender. A person is protected once the intention to submit is clearly expressed, provided they abstain from hostile acts and do not attempt to escape — a raised white cloth, empty hands held above the head, a weapon thrown to the ground, a spoken word. The rule names no list. That openness is deliberate: it was written for a human recipient, who can read a gesture no one taught them in advance.
The openness is also the difficulty. For a machine an unenumerated repertoire is not easier to recognize but harder, because there is no closed set to be trained against — the law declines to close it. The white flag is therefore not the weak point. The weak point is the entire language of surrender, none of which was ever designed to be received by anything other than a person.
The gesture has not changed, and neither has the obligation. What changed is who is watching.
HF SIGNAL 01 does not replace the white flag and does not narrow the repertoire the law leaves open. It adds one channel that can be specified, tested and documented: a red field bearing a white disc, a white light pulsing at 7 Hz, a radio tone at 144.0 MHz. The message is the one the white flag has carried for centuries. What is new is that its detection can be measured, and its absence examined.
Reference values. 7 Hz is above the 3 Hz threshold associated with photosensitivity risk and requires independent photobiological assessment; 144.0 MHz is a documented reference value, not an allocation, and requires coordination with national authorities.
Surrender takes time. Hands have to be raised, the signal shown, the person seen. A human being grants that interval; a system deciding in fractions of a second may leave none. Where none is left, the question is not whether a signal was missed, but whether one could ever have been given.
We are not asking for a new rule. We are asking whether the existing one can still be performed — and that States verify and document the answer in the reviews they already conduct.