I don’t disagree with you at all on this issue. To me, though, accepting collateral damage as a given is a miserable solution imposed on the US by its military structure. Until that structure changes (if it does), with more soldiers in our armed forces, we’re trying to fix a pipe with a screwdriver. We just have the wrong tool.

But let’s not kid ourselves; the right tool will cost a lot more money.

collateral damage is acceptable

It’s just that the American public has no concept of this. Suppose the leader of a US insurrection in the US were hiding in a small apartment building in an American city. An army missile takes out him and the building. Result: 20 civilians killed.

Is that okay with Americans?

1. The West did, indeed, have a very, very brief period when the practice of abusing civilians was frowned upon. I’m not talking about theory or papal pronouncements, but actual practice. The 18th century in Europe was probably the golden age of cultural recoil from killing, raping, and otherwise harming civilians, and the cultural memory of the 30 Years War was still relatively fresh (fresh enough to inspire the idea of freedom of religion in the US Bill of Rights too, for that matter). Armies were small, usually made up of professional soldiers who were considered “the scum of the earth” (Wellington’s words, not mine), and wars were perceived to be fought between kings and armies of low-class butchers, not between peoples.

Napoleon changed all that with widespread conscription that turned the idea of “soldier” from hired butcher to guy next door. France became a nation at war instead of a government at war, and the notion caught on. Post-Napoleonic Europe recoiled from most non-colonial wars (Crimea and the Franco-Prussion Wars being exceptions), so the fruits of Napoleon really didn’t sink in until WWI, which was before the mass air bombing age, but was certainly quite brutal for the civilians caught up in it.

2. I believe the term “total war” was coined by Clausewitz, the patron saint of 19th and early 20th century warfare and, not surprisingly, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars. The cultural idea, or meme if you prefer, that war is about total populations and total effort springs from him and his experience of Napoleon.

3. The coming of the super-industrial age definintely gave rise to the idea that populations are fair game in war, but I would argue that the industrial rise simply crystalized a philosophical precept already well ensconsed in Western military thinking: fertilizer for the seed, if you will.

4. Theory of war evolved until, today, I think most military thinkers would tell you there are two ways to win a war: destroy the enemy’s ability to resist or destroy his will to resist. Or both, if it can be done. Oddly, the US has gravitated towards destroying the ability to resist, putting its resources into training, force-multiplying technology, and C3I (command, control, communication, intelligence). The Cold War forced this approach, since no one thought the US could fight and win a war of attrition and will with the Soviet Union on the end of a 4,000 mile supply line when our forces would be badly outnumbered. So, in fact, a great deal of our difficulty in dealing with the situations in Afghanistan and Iraq stem from the fact that our military is specifically designed to destroy ability and not will, and that requires an enemy with which one can come to grips.

5. Like you, I abhor the idea that it’s OK to drop a bomb on a house in a village, killing all the children and neighbors in a certain radius, in order to get some enemies who are meeting in that house. But I believe that the impetus to do this stems from more than cultural “acceptance” by some people. Frankly, it’s all we’ve got. We don’t have enough troops go after those individuals in all the houses where they meet.

So, I guess what I’m trying to get at with this overlong response is that it’s not just rationalization stemming from WWII bombing that makes civilian casualties more acceptable now than they used to be. Total war has a firm intellectual basis in Clausewitz. And as for today’s wars, it is both the concept that collateral damage is acceptable and the fact that there is little other choice that contribute to the US’s tactics.

Thanks for a great piece.

America, are YOU the problem?
http://crimesofthestate.blogspot.com/2007/10/america-are-you-problem.html

“How do you know they have these scary weapons?

We checked the receipts.” -Bill Hicks