THE MILITARY IS THE ONLY WAY
DOD DIRECTIVE 2311.01 titled DOD LAW OF WAR PROGRAM—that, on page 15, changed the “Law of War” definition to read: “The treaties and customary international law binding on the United States that regulate: the resort to armed force; the conduct of hostilities and the protection of war victims in international and noninternational armed conflict; belligerent occupation; and the relationships between belligerent, neutral, and non-belligerent States”. With this new definition’s grave significance being its applying for the first time the “Law of War” to “noninternational armed conflict”, whose more commonly used phrase is “civil war”, and with it being directed against “States”—which is the most critical to understand word used in this directive for its use of “States” instead of “states”—as the lower case “states” applies to foreign countries, while the upper case “States” has a specific legal meaning under US law—and as evidenced in the U.S. Government Printing Office Style Manual-Chapter 3 Capitalization Rules that says about this word and its proper spelling in official documents: “A descriptive term used to denote a definite region, locality, or geographic feature is a proper name and is therefore capitalized…example lower 48 States”.
https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/dodd/231101p.pdf?ver=2020-07-02-143157-007