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Collateral Damage
| Wed Nov. 18, 2009 9:44 AM PST
Via Dan Drezner, Charli Carpenter tells us that although war crimes are down over the past couple of decades compared to historical averages, collateral damage is up. Way up:
But collateral damage is not only increasing as a percentage of all civilian deaths. The number of collateral damage victims is also increasing over time in absolute terms.
Between 1823 and 1900, 84 civilians per year on average were the victims of collateral damage. Since 1990, the number is 1688 per year — a twenty-fold increase.
This finding, if it holds up, is surprising for two reasons. First, the number of interstate wars has been trending downward for the last thirty years — so an increase in the absolute numbers of civilian collateral damage would not be expected. Second, this bump in collateral damage also took place during a revolution in precision-guided munitions — which, in theory, was supposed to reduce the likelihood of collateral damage.
Note that these figures are only for interstate wars, not civil wars or local insurgencies. And I wonder how much of it has to do, essentially, with reporting problems. Intentional killing of civilians is far more vigorously condemned today than it was in the 19th century, which provides both individual soldiers and the military at large with enormous incentives to categorize all civilian deaths as "collateral." Some of the decline in intentional murders is probably real — that widespread condemnation certainly has had some effect, after all — but probably not as much of it as we think.
Alternatively, this might just be an artifact of the time periods chosen for study. The 1990s and beyond might have been an era of precision-guided bombs, but precision guided or not, they're still bombs, and bombs do a lot of collateral damage. In the 19th century, it was all artillery and small arms, which are just fundamentally less likely to cause lots of collateral damage. Still, the post-90s number is up even compared to the 1945-1989 period, so there's probably more to it than just that.
Other ideas?
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Comments
How can anyone believe these
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed Nov. 18, 2009 10:30 AM PST.
How can anyone believe these studies? Nearly every day, someone says the US Air Force killed 25 innocent civilians and the Air Force denies it. So was it 25 or 0?
Kevin, One of the reason you
Submitted by buffpilot (not verified) on Wed Nov. 18, 2009 10:46 AM PST.
Kevin,
One of the reason you get so many collateral damage is that the targets routinely hide among civilians. It makes for good PR for your side when you can pull dead babies from the rubble. The fact that your local headquarters and communication net was in the basement is never mentioned and vigorously denied. The PLO/HAMAS does that all the time with teh Israeli's. Saddam placed large numbers in his command bunkers, even ones not used, and we see that widely in the fighting in Afghanistan were the Taliban regularly hide among civilians.
Most people miss two important point in war: If your a legit target in the middle of the desert your still a legit target in the children's hospital basement.
By placing civilians at risk by hiding amongst them or using them as human shields the person doing this is committing a war crime NOT the guys who blow up the target.
Plus there is a strong incentive to report high levels of civilians deaths by the evil US Air Force also. Especially if that is the only way to stop the bombing.
Islam will change
Most people miss two
Submitted by Ernst (not verified) on Thu Nov. 19, 2009 2:55 AM PST.
Most people miss two important point in war: If your a legit target in the middle of the desert your still a legit target in the children's hospital basement.
By placing civilians at risk by hiding amongst them or using them as human shields the person doing this is committing a war crime NOT the guys who blow up the target.
This is a truly vile way of reasoning. It completely absolves you from any responsibility from the form and timing of the hit. It still may be a legitimate target. But it's you that decides to use a large bomb that will certainly kill innocents instead of other ways to dispose of the real target.
The fact that bombing is the easy way to hit the target doesn't absolve from the fact that's it's you that chose to use a weapon that kills indiscriminately.
Yes, they are committing war crimes by using human shields. And you are committing war crimes by killing those human shields without trying not to.
Ernst, No the attacker is
Submitted by buffpilot (not verified) on Thu Nov. 19, 2009 7:07 AM PST.
Ernst,
No the attacker is not committing a war crime by any legal reasoning on the planet. And yes there are other factors to be considered when attacking the proverbial command post underneath the childrens hospital (for example can you use a smaller/more accurate weapons to hit the target? Get the same effects by blowing up the commlines? Cut power etc).
Another point, the attacker is in no way obligated to take greater risk to take the target either. The attacker in the above example is under no legal obligation to stage a infantry assault to take the command post when a 500 lb LGB will do.
But it doesn't change the simple fact that there are NO sanctuaries in war. Which is my main point. Getting collateral damage for use in propaganda is sometimes the purpose of placing there targets in with the civilians. They are trying to get the civilians, especially women/children, killed for the CNN effect.
Ernst - your gripe is with people who regularly hide among civilians, not the guys dropping the bombs.
Nice picture of a rack of 2000 lb JDAMs in a B-1 bombbay BTW>
Islam will change
What's good for M & M
Submitted by Milo Minderbinder (not verified) on Wed Nov. 18, 2009 10:52 AM PST.
What's good for M & M Enterprises will be good for the country.
Can't a shift in battlefield
Submitted by fluxisrad (not verified) on Wed Nov. 18, 2009 10:53 AM PST.
Can't a shift in battlefield types explain most of this? Right up until at least WW1, few civilians lived in or around battlefields (or remained in or around them) so artillery and small arms collateral damage was less likely. Nowadays urban or inhabited battlefield are more common; that makes collateral damage more likely, even from artillery and small arms fire. Plus air power makes it easier to target such areas without holding ground, and tends to delivers more powerful payloads to boot. Plus maybe the availability of precision-guided bombs makes the use of bombs more morally and legally rationalizable [note non-use of "justifiable"], and so more common than it otherwise would be.
Are You Certain About This?
Submitted by Model 62 on Wed Nov. 18, 2009 11:03 AM PST.
"And I wonder how much of it has to do, essentially, with reporting problems. Intentional killing of civilians is far more vigorously condemned today than it was in the 19th century..."
The condemnation may be more vigorous today because the practice of killing civilians is more vigorous today. "Total War" is a 20th Century invention, more or less, a strategic development that probably evolved in lockstep with technical developments of enemy-killing machinery. Compare the battles of the US Civil War. Horrific, sure, but the horror is mostly limited to the combatants.
Heck, civilian spectators showed up with picnic baskets to witness the spectacle of the First Battle of Bull Run.
bullshit. Total war has been
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu Nov. 19, 2009 8:59 PM PST.
bullshit. Total war has been practiced throughout history. Destroying your enemies entire culture, men women children, used to be routine.
collateral damage
Submitted by rbe (not verified) on Wed Nov. 18, 2009 11:14 AM PST.
Under collateral damage see Israel, USA, and other assorted war criminal-led states.
Hell, during the Civil War
Submitted by MuckrakerAP (not verified) on Wed Nov. 18, 2009 11:21 AM PST.
Hell, during the Civil War civilians watched battles like they were football games. A lot has changed since then.
Also, do the civilians killed at Hiroshima, Battle of Britain, Dresden, etc., during WWII represent "collateral damage?" In a way, it's hard to judge that because the civilians were actually the targets in the first place, not the collateral.
Considering those data points, it's hard to tell what these figures mean.
fuzzy distinctions.
Submitted by Omega Centauri (not verified) on Wed Nov. 18, 2009 2:36 PM PST.
Most of todays targets, don't wear uniforms are stay in well defined bases. Also they often live in families, husband and older kids active Jihadis, younger kids being trained for the future. If you blow up a house containing all of the above, who counts as a civilian and who counts as a legit target? Clearly the community that is hit will have a much broader definition of civilian than the attacker.
Then there is the perversity caused by have a precision guided weapon designed to minimize collateral damage. If you have intelligence about a target that is not 100% trustworthy, do you act on it? With precision weapons your threshold for action becomes much lower. I suspect that in the past most collateral damage was caused by weapons that missed their intended target by a country mile. Today, they are mainly about mistaken identity of the "we had intelligence that told us the bad guys were meeting there" sort.
And in WW2 the targetting of whole cities for bombing, rather than a few key industrial/military targets was mainly because we couldn't hit the small targets, but could take them out only via carpet bombing.
"And in WW2 the targetting
Submitted by Model 62 on Wed Nov. 18, 2009 3:18 PM PST.
"And in WW2 the targetting of whole cities for bombing, rather than a few key industrial/military targets was mainly because we couldn't hit the small targets, but could take them out only via carpet bombing."
Eh, no. Civilians were targeted, explicitly. Bomber Harris is notorious today because he is credited with the idea that deliberate bombing of civilians would break their will and lead to the collapse of the German war-fighting economy.
Most wars are not fought by the United States
Submitted by Paul Camp (not verified) on Wed Nov. 18, 2009 7:14 PM PST.
Yes, we have precision guided munitions. Pretty much nobody else does. Most wars these days are being fought by armies with souped up 19th century weaponry -- machine guns in every hand instead of just a few, antipersonnel mines scattered like seeds -- and many are being fought as essentially grudge matches where the winner wipes out the loser's entire population.
1823 is a bad cutoff date for comparison. Compare to the Thirty Years War would be more apt.
Well I really don't like
Submitted by Colm (not verified) on Thu Nov. 19, 2009 7:07 AM PST.
Well I really don't like Orwellian techno-babble such as "collateral" damage...basically, as the article states the issue is that modern warfare infllcits horrendous harm on non-combatants, even though this may not be a deliberate policy.
Possible reasons - off the top of head, how about: the increasing prevalence of guerilla-type conflicts where there's a blurring of lines between civilians / combatants; dramatically increased availability of weapons, and the arming of all sorts of irregular rag-tag, doped up, etc bands leading to a lot of conflicts resembling endless gang conflicts with all sides raping and pillaging civilians; the fact that over-hyping of "smart weapons" has obscured the fact that high-tech armies actually inflict a lot of poorly-targetted pain; armies such as the US are focused on minimizing their own casualities so they pund the heck out of positions to soften them up, causing a lot of damage; the 20 / 21st century penchant for total / existential/ pitiless wars of extermination
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