Trends in the civilian costs of war

The analysis you comment on is crap. If you look at the cases included in Downes' analysis, you will find that very few 19th century conflicts are included. Notable in their omission is EVERY extra-systemic (colonial) war including both conquest and dealing with rebellions (e.g. the Sepoy Rebellion).

Regardless of the accuracy of the data, is this argument surprising? I'm surprised that you find it surprising! Okay, so we were told that all those 'smart bombs' would only kill 'bad guys' and news shows became trade shows for cross-haired destruction from above. Hands up all those who swallowed all that c**ptastic propaganda...

The most important question is also neglected: what separates collateral damage and war crimes? Eye of the beholder? Dresden: war crime or collateral damage? How about the bombing of Baghdad? At what point do unintended deaths caused by negligence or simply not caring about civilian life become a war crime?

... and since the figures seem drawn from official cources known for fluent and habitual lying, it means little. The increase in the number of collateral deaths is of course directly related to the flourishing of aerial bombing, which started in a very small way during World War I. It grew sharply in the next 20 years, markedly in Ethiopia (thanks to the italian air force) and Spain (thanks to the Nazi Luftwaffe: think Guiernica).

It's only in the past six months or so that the Pentagon has started admitting that it kills civilians in wholesale lots -- through aerial bombing. The usual pattern: first a bombing raid, then a Pentagon claim that a lot of Taliban have been killed, then a UN or NGO report from the scene -- the Pentagon claims do not follow US inspections of the dead -- that no, lots or most of the dead were blameless civilians. Blushing and stammering, we must hope, the Pentagon admits that the initial report wasn't, oh, exactly what's that word again? Oh yes, true. There seems no punishment or reproofs about such calamities and the consequent lies.

In 2002, the Pentagon tended to ignore these tiresome statements of claimed fact. This year, they've started admitting killing lots of civilians -- although still without visiting the scene. How this differs from lying is a mystery to me. As also is how any analyst following up such matters can come up with an authentic-sounding figure like 1688.

To their honor, Petraeus and McChrystal don't like this civilian-killing and have called for a sharp reining in of aerial bombing in Afghanistan. There's been some reining in, but at least two 500-pound bombs seem to have been dropped from US aircraft on civilian targets since the order went out, and nobody's saying exactly how many those bombs killed.

Nothing new about this. Illustration of the emptiness of numerical claims is easy to provide. When Bush I sent in the air force to present the sleeping residents of Panama City with a Christmas present in 1989, some 200 Panamanians died -- according to the official US estimate produced in the usual don't-count-the-corpses way. Every other estimate, several of them from people in Panama City, the people responsible for finding and burying the corpses, fits between 2000 and 5000, and each of them exceeds 1688. In one raid.

Nor will things necessarily change much. Presidential candidate McCain 12 months ago was proclaiming the Panamanian "war" a good one, and the sort of thing he'd support as president. Not a war at all, of course, and every person who died under that air raid was a collateral. Every single one. Did anybody care much? Was there an concomitant issue of medals? The event was in any case proclaimed a US military achievement.

I don't find it surprising at all. If for no other reason than 100 years ago, people didn't use 500lb bombs. Nor did they use millions of IEDs. You can aim a gun. It's a lot harder to aim an explosion, precision-guided or not.

If you ask me, it's yet another reason to stop the damn predator drone strikes against suspected al-qaeda targets in Pakistan. When you're killing one terrorist and 20 civilians, my guess is that you create more terrorists than you kill.

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.

Well, it does so, assuming a few things, mainly:

A) That the user desires it to do so and uses it in such a way

and

B) That the targets don't deliberately surround themselves with civilians for propaganda purposes. (That is, such that when they're targeted, they can crow about civilian deaths... and nary a mention will be made, of course, of the fact that using civilians as shields is a "war crime".)

My impression is that A holds true for US uses of precision munitions (and it makes sense, in that if one is going to just fling them about willy-nilly, there's no point in using $1M cruise missiles or $500K smart bombs rather than just just dropping a lot of very cheap 500# iron bombs).

My impression is that B is very often false for US opponents since 1973.

But the more important thing, as this purports to analyze the world, not just the US, is that none of the non-US conflicts I'm aware of (apart from those involving Israel) involve any significant use of precision munitions.

Given the problems with the dataset that others have mentioned, combined with the above, I don't think we can make any conclusion about the effect of PGMs on civilian deaths worldwide.

Hard to see how hard figures could be sensibly compared. After all, reporting standards vary wildly even in modern wars, and the biggest wars in the 19th century were civil wars, not "interstate" (presumably meaning wars between countries), so they get excluded.

Two huge wars of the 19th century would be excluded because they're civil wars: the Taiping Rebellion and the US Civil War.

The Taiping Rebellion resulted in 25,000,000 dead.

Precision guided ammunition - what good of it is if the 'intelligence' is wrong? I do not thing it is anything to do with technology which no doubt is impressive enough. It is that we do not know which are the guys we want to kill.

I think it is a basic error on part of Prof. Drezner.

What qualifies as collateral damage?

Do the >1 million Iraqis and Afghans who died as an indirect result of our invasions qualify?

A smart bomb might hit an electrical power station without other damage but that power station going offline may kill hundreds of innocent people as a result (due to hospitals, water, sanitation going offline...).

It is the height of arrogance that US military does not even have a vague idea of how many innocent civilians they killed as a result of their invasion.

No wonder we have terrorism.

Carpenter's results are driven by taking Downes' classification of whether civilians were intentionally targeted during the conflict and using that as her measure of whether there was "collateral damage" or not. In wars where civilians are targeted, she counts zero collateral damage. In wars where civilians are not targeted, she classifies all civilian dead as "collateral damage."

This obviously yields bizarre results. For instance, virtually all civilian dead in WWII are classified as not collateral damage in her measure, because the combatants intentionally targeted civilians. As a result, Carpenter's graph of "Average Unintentional Deaths Per Year" shows an average of about 100 civilian dead per year during the 1900-1944 period.

In the post-1990 period, few of conflicts in the data are coded as civilians having been targeted, so all of these civilian dead show up as "collateral damage."

Put another way, if Carpenter had used the first part of the 20th century as her point of comparison, she would have said that "the period since 1990 saw a 20 fold increase in collateral damage over the first half of the 20th century." Does that pass the giggle test? I think not.

The data could more properly be summarized as, "There has been a marked decline in the targeting of civilians in the post-1990 period, and as a consequence, overall civilian deaths in interstate war have been dramatically reduced, particularly in relation to the first half of the 20th century."

Right, if 1) in the past, it was common practice to deliberately target civilians, and 2) deliberately targeted civilians don't count as collateral damage, then 3)it stands to reason that collateral damage in past wars would be very low. Therefore, by that standard you would expect collateral damage have increased in direct proportion to adherence to the laws of war (Hague, Geneva). So this seemingly counterintuitive result could actually be an expression of exactly what you would expect.

As Dan once wrote, one of the joys of the blogosphere for academics is that it offers an opportunity to get instant peer feedback on new research ideas as they are being developed, prior to conceiving and executing path-dependent research projects themselves. This enhances the quality of research that ultimately results. So I'm delighted to see the thoughtful responses to my original post.

I hope readers understand that neither my post, nor Dan's description of it, treat these numbers drawn from Downes' data as a definitive "finding" on the topic. It's an exploratory analysis based on tweaking some currently available data that was not collected and coded with this particular research question in mind. Some of the critiques of the data itself are cogent - thought not all, and in Downes' defense, he gathered data that suited his own research question on international wars, not mine. I'm simply playing with it to see what it might suggest about my question, if anything. Doing so is helping me understand how you'd need to organize and code data to really answer my question.

A lot of the points raised here are useful ones. Some seem to be about my use of Downes' data: what would a dataset need to include and how it would need to be coded to really get at this question. Some of them are conceptual: what's the distinction between collateral damage and war crimes? Do we include indirect deaths? What about civil wars? And some are explanatory: if this relationship is corroborated across other datasets or new data not yet collected, what explains it? Aerial warfare? US negligence? The decline in war crimes?

I have many thoughts about these issues but they're too much for a comment thread, so I've written a post at Current Intelligence that takes them up further. Feel free to check it out and continue to push back.

http://www.terraplexic.org/current-intelligence/2009/11/19/casualty-counts.html

I'm looking at the Targeting Civilians appendix, and I don't see "Africa's World War." I realize Carpenter is focusing on interstate war, so the war crimes in Rwanda and Darfur are being left out. The war in the DRC (~1998-2003) involved many countries and left a few hundred thousand dead as a direct result of fighting – as most readers here know, millions more died of malnutrition and disease related to the war. I’m not sure how many deaths were classified as collateral damage or how many can be considered war crimes, but the data should be included.

Then you'll need a study about smart bomb fatalities.

Prof. Carpenter writes on terraplexic.org:

"...I'm with Drezner in thinking that the rise in absolute numbers is the surprising part - both because these numbers are only for international wars, which themselves are on the decline and because weapons are supposed to be getting more precise. I think that the commenters who argue that this data demonstrates a myth of precision targeting might be onto something, but I also agree that we can't know for sure until we do further analysis."

I don't believe that it is a surprising result. I think that it is a spurious result due to substantial bias in measurement of unintentional deaths.

a) For wars coded as having the intentional targeting of civilians, you measure zero unintentional deaths. That undercounts unintentional deaths. A nation that typically fights with a callous disregard of civilians will nevertheless also kill civilians in circumstances that would be considered "legal" collateral damage. These latter "legal" collateral damage deaths are ignored in your analysis.

b) For wars coded as not having the intentional targeting of civilians, you measure 100% of the dead as unintentional. This overcounts unintentional deaths, since there were undoubtedly a few intentional war crimes in many or most of the post-1990 wars. These intentional war crimes are treated as collateral damage in your analysis.

c) There are a lot more wars coded as having intentional targeting of civilians in the past than post-1990. Further, these wars saw lots civilian dead.

d) As a consequence, you've generally undercounted unintentional civilian deaths in the past, and (likely to a much lesser extent) overcounted unintentional deaths post-1990.

e) This means that your comparison of absolute numbers of collateral damage deaths over time is biased and unreliable.

Put another way, the measurement error in the variable of interest (unintentional deaths) is correlated with the partitioning variable, time. I'm afraid that the renders the results biased and unreliable.

I'd like to note that, if starting today all combatants would simply start purposely targeting civilians going forward, this measure would show zero collateral damage deaths going forward. We'd see a large increase in civilian deaths, but a complete cessation of collateral damage as measured in this analysis. Hardly seems meaningful.

[Crossposted to the relevant thread at terraplexic.org]