Collateral damage

What if it's your home that's destroyed, your child that's killed?

Welcome back to our Substack Seminar on just-war principles!

If you are just joining us, I’d encourage you to look back on previous episodes, to gain a better sense of what we’re about and to learn the “ground rules” for this discussion. For the full experience, read up from the bottom of the segments listed here. But you don’t need to know everything, and you can always catch up later; we’re happy to have you join us right now!

Once again let me encourage readers (and listeners) to join in our discussion, asking your questions or making your arguments in the Comments section. I know from experience that this topic provokes lively and enlightening debates, and I’m waiting for our little Substack Seminar to reach what you might call a “critical mass.” As I explained last week, I’ve set aside the outline that I’d presented for our discussion, in hope of jump-starting those debates.

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Last week, in a discussion of proportionality— which is a key principle in the just conduct of war— I spoke about collateral damage. This week I want to dig a bit deeper into that subject, because it helps to illustrate what in my view is a vitally important aspect of just-war thinking— indeed it is the main reason why I have begun this Substack Seminar.

As I see it, the just-war tradition is not only a means of evaluating the moral conduct of nations that go to war. It is also a valuable source of practical guidance for an effective defense policy. Just-war thinking is not an abstract academic pursuit; rightly understood and applied, it is a very practical tool of foreign policy, a help to securing, preserving, and maintaining a just peace.

Nor should this surprise us, if we look at the question through the eyes of a Catholic Christian faith. Proper moral behavior— that is, following God’s law— is, again, not an abstract exercise. God’s law guides us to the best, healthiest way to live a good life. So it is not far-fetched to suggest that following God’s law— and the guidance of saints and scholars who have done their best to apply God’s law to questions of state— is also the best way for nations to flourish. So it is, I believe, with just-war reasoning.

Let me illustrate my point, then, by a closer examination of this concept of collateral damage.

What is collateral damage? For our purposes, it refers to the damage done in war to non-military targets. To be a bit more precise, it’s damage that is done neither accidentally nor intentionally. That is, the military forces involved knew that they would do this damage, but did not want to do it. They were attacking a legitimate military target, but could not bring off that attack without damage to surrounding neighborhoods or even innocent civilian bystanders.

What sort of collateral damage is morally acceptable? That is a difficult question to answer. We said, in our discussion of proportionality, that the damage must be proportional to the military value of the target. If the target has no real importance, then we might say that no collateral damage would be acceptable. If a target with no real strategic value cannot be attacked without harming civilians, better to leave it alone. On the other hand if the target is strategically critical, and a successful attack could bring the war to an end, then more collateral damage could be justified.

There is no simple formula for this sort of calculation, obviously: no straightforward way to measure civilian casualties against strategic military gains. But then the same could be said about military strategy generally. Leaving aside innocent civilians, how many of his own troops should a general be ready to sacrifice in order to secure a given military objective? We cannot answer that question, and in fact the Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that the responsibility for answering such questions lies with the political leaders who have the authority to make them. This is a heavy moral responsibility for those leaders. We can only hope they have been formed in just-war reasoning.

One demand that we can and should make of those leaders, however, is that they should always seek to avoid civilian casualties wherever possible. In theory, any military leader should readily agree to that goal. But in practice, the 20^th and 21^st centuries have seen a frightening trend in warfare: a steady and dramatic increase in the proportion of civilian casualties. Despite increasingly “smart” weapons, which (again, in theory) allow their users to aim very precisely at military targets, in practice non-combatants are being killed at a much higher rate.

Why is that? Maybe the “smart” weapons (or their users) are not as smart as advertised. But it may also be that military leaders are more and more willing to tolerate civilian casualties, in order to preserve the safety of their own forces. Who will blame a military officer if he risks the lives of a few civilians, who he does not know, to avoid risking the soldiers who depend on him? And yet here we are also dealing the principle of discrimination. Soldiers are dedicated to fighting; it is understood that their lives could be in danger. Not so for civilians— at least not in the conduct of a just war.

So again, what sort of collateral damage might be considered legitimate? Let me take an extreme case, a purely hypothetical (and probably impossible) case, to make my point:

Imagine that we learn a thoroughly evil man has produced a devastating weapon, and plans to use it to kill millions of people. Imagine further that we know, with absolute certainty, that he plans to launch this weapon tomorrow morning. The weapon is now stored in a warehouse. We could destroy it tonight, with a targeted missile strike, and save those millions of lives.

Now suppose there is just one man at that warehouse tonight: the security guard. He is entirely innocent of the evil plan; he thinks he is guarding some harmless consumer merchandise. In fact he is a wonderful man, a pillar of the community, who has led a blameless life. If we destroy the warehouse, we will kill him. Not intentionally, of course; if there were any way to spare his life, we would. But it’s not possible.

Should we launch that missile? I think most people would agree: Yes.

Just as an aside, it occurs to me that in old James-Bond movies, there is usually a climactic battle scene: a final attack on an isolated island where the villain, an evil genius, has built his fortress. There are no civilians— only good guys and bad guys— not even a possibility of collateral damage. That sort of simple black-and-white treatment can make for entertaining movies, with no complicated moral questions.

My own hypothetical example is no more realistic, of course. And in my case, the lone civilian casualty has no cause to complain. If his life has been blameless, he will be singing with the celestial choir. But what about his wife and children? Or, to make it personal, what if YOU were his wife or his child? Wouldn’t you have a different attitude toward the “collateral damage” in that scenario?

Whenever military action causes collateral damage, unless it is purely environmental damage, someone is hurt personally. For those victims, “collateral damage” is not an abstraction. If civilians are killed or wounded, they are someone’s children, someone’s husbands or wives or grandparents or friends. The military officers whose decisions led to that “collateral damage” may be able easily to write off the suffering; the victims cannot.

What can we expect of those victims? They are not likely to take their suffering lightly, nor to excuse the forces that caused them. They are far more likely to nurture resentments— and who can blame them? Maybe they did not support their own government’s policies; maybe they wanted to be neutral in the conflict. But isn’t it logical to suppose that after suffering from an enemy attack, they will be more likely to support their own government— that they will be less sympathetic toward the nation that attacked their homes, and more sympathetic toward the government that tried to ward off that attack? In some cases, the victims of “collateral damage” might be successfully recruited to join the fight against the forces that caused their suffering.

During the 1970s, the film Battle of Algiers became popular among Leftists in America, with its portrayal of the brutal French suppression of Algerian nationalists; the propaganda message of that film was that the brutality, which successfully suppressed terrorism in the short term, gave birth to a new generation of terrorists who forced the French withdrawal. In that case the damage was done not primarily to civilians but to terrorists (although innocent civilians were not immune), and the torture of terrorists was not “collateral damage” but wholly intentional. Still the point is that in the long run, what appeared to be a military success was actually a failure because of the resentments it created.

The same sad drama is being played out in Gaza today. In the war against Hamas— whose atrocious terrorism was undeniably a just cause for military action— Israel has produced an extraordinarily high number of civilian casualties. Some blame for that fact lies with the Hamas terrorists themselves, who use civilians as human shields. But how much of this “collateral damage” can be justified?

And how much will the suffering of civilians in Gaza cost Israel in the long run? The thousands of families whose homes have been destroyed will surely resent the Israel Defense Force. They will be more likely— not less— to support Hamas; after all Hamas is fighting the IDF. Israel may succeed in destroying Hamas and resettling the people of Gaza, and in the process produce a new generation of Palestinians who hate Israel, of young men who grow up determined to take back their land.

My point here is simply that collateral damage, if it is excessive, is likely to prolong fighting, to stiffen the resolve of the people who suffer from the undue violence. So a wise military leader will do his best to minimize the collateral damage. Because, again, fighting in accordance with just-war principles is sound military policy.

What is the goal of a just war? A just peace: a peace that will last. The proper goal is not to defeat an enemy people, but to defeat an unjust government. Ideally, when the war is over, we would like to be friendly with the people of the nation, to enjoy not just the absence of conflict but positive relations.

The alternative, actually, is to head down a dangerous path, viewing an entire nation— an entire people— as an evil to be eliminated. There’s a word for that.