Op-Ed: Civilian casualties are not inevitable. The military sets an acceptable number in advance
Iraqi officials report that a U.S. airstrike killed nearly 200 civilians in West Mosul on March 17. The U.S. military acknowledged that it had carried out a mission in the area, and is now investigating this strike as well as another in March, said to have killed dozens of civilians near the Syrian city of Raqqah.
When a missile meets its target, chemicals inside the weapon combine, causing gases to expand and exert pressure on the warhead, which shatters outward, turning into shrapnel behind a blast wave. This wave, faster than sound, compresses the surrounding air, pulverizes any nearby concrete, plaster, or bone, and creates a vacuum, sucking debris back to the zero point. The chemical interaction also produces heat, causing fire.
Although the ensuing civilian casualties may seem like unstoppable tragedies, they are not. Civilian casualties are not inevitable. They are a choice.
The U.S. military predicts how many people will die in its airstrikes by surveilling and estimating the population within a proposed blast radius. It also sets a limit on the number of innocent people each command is authorized to kill incidentally. This limit, called the Non-Combatant Cutoff Value, or NCV, is perhaps our starkest rule of engagement, and it varies region-by-region for political reasons.
Our policy for last year...was to tolerate the death of 112 Iraqi or Syrian civilians per American civilian.
In Afghanistan, civilian casualties caused by U.S. airstrikes are considered a liability in our relationship with that country’s government. The NCV for Afghanistan is therefore zero.
In Iraq and Syria, the calculus is different. The Pentagon believes Islamic State is a greater threat than the Taliban; the Iraqis have been requesting more aggressive support; the fighting is more urban.
Last year in Baghdad, I asked then-U.S. Army spokesman Col. Steve Warren what the NCV was for Iraq. That is: How many innocent Iraqis was his command authorized to kill incidentally in an airstrike?
“There are numbers — we don’t put those numbers out,†he told me, “and here’s why we don’t put ‘em out: because if the enemy understand, ‘oh if I have X number of civilians around a thing,’ its gonna be harder for… right? So that’s a piece of information that we protect.â€
The number, however, came out. It was first reported by Buzzfeed, and then the Associated Press, in December, when the Army issued its latest Rules of War Manual.
“According to senior defense officials,†the AP story ran, “military leaders planning operations against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria may authorize strikes where up to 10 civilians may be killed, if it is deemed necessary in order to get a critical military target.â€
That number yields some grim math. Last year, the coalition acknowledged 4,589 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. If the NCV was 10 throughout, then U.S. policy in 2016 was to tolerate the incidental killing of a maximum of 45,890 innocent Iraqis and Syrians in order to destroy Islamic State. For context, the common estimate for Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria is 40,000, and between Sept. 11, 2001, and 2016, foreign terrorists killed a total of 411 American civilians, worldwide.
Our policy for last year, then, was to tolerate the death of 112 Iraqi or Syrian civilians per American civilian.
That’s on paper. In practice, the military does not typically expect civilian casualties, and it engineers strikes to avoid them. I doubt the military anticipated, specifically, those 200 civilians who died in Mosul. We have killed far fewer noncombatant Iraqis than the NCV permits — a minimum of 2,831, according to Airwars, the preeminent independent monitoring group. (The U.S. has confirmed only 220 as of March). And in dozens of interviews with men and women responsible for such strikes, no one expressed a desire to kill civilians or the opinion that it is ever strategically advisable to do so. Recently embedded in a tactical operations center to observe airstrikes, I met targeteers and commanding officers who were mostly conscientious, within the parameters of their bloody business.
But what’s on paper matters. On paper is where we read about equal justice under the law, and facts submitted to a candid world, and unalienable rights.
The math, then, is troubling — especially under a president who, unlike the men and women he leads, has endorsed the intentional, rather than incidental, killing of noncombatants.
“The other thing with terrorists,†then-candidate Donald Trump said on “Fox and Friends†in December 2015, “is that you have to take out their families.â€
To do so would be a war crime. Whether or not the Trump administration has relaxed the rules of engagement, as some suspect, Airwars reported in March that we are, for the first time, causing more civilian casualties in the fight against Islamic State than our Russian counterparts. This monstrous fact will disturb the troops I met in December, who believe that we are always the good guys when it comes to civilian casualties. Or at least the better guys. But there are no good guys in this process. That we have an NCV greater than zero implies something ugly, if unsurprising, about the way we see ourselves in the world, how we value a foreign life against an American one. We value it less.
It is reasonable to care more for countrymen than foreigners. Devotion to family, neighbors and friends defines a life, and one does not love a stranger, a little girl in Mosul, as much as a daughter. But neither should we be willing to kill that little girl to achieve our aims. Arguably legal, our utilitarian position is neither brave nor morally ambitious for a superpower dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Nick McDonell’s most recent book, “The Civilization of Perpetual Movement,†was published in 2016.
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