For your example, maybe. If someone writes 8/3/2012, you don't know which is month/day. And if they shorten it to 08/03/12 you literally can't even conclusively determine the year, much less the month or day...
That's what we Europeans call a "petty answer to the disgrace that is Amarican military time" (not the be confused with regular Amarican time and dates, which don't allow overflow, as far as I'm aware). The date described above is clearly "the second of March, 2015" or 2015-03-02.