by Travis Normand
December 28, 2016

This is a great opinion piece that was posted on WashingtonPost.com. I highly recommend taking a moment to read it. You can find the entire piece at WashingtonPost.com, as I have reposted only a part of it below.

The emphasis on counting civilian casualties ends up helping the Islamic State
by Rachel E. VanLandingham and Geoffrey S. Corn
September 7, 2016
WashingtonPost.com

This emphasis on precise, casualty-averse warfare may be distorting the public’s understanding of war and law. The public accounting of every allegation of coalition-caused civilian casualties on the Islamic State battlefield, and the outcome of every civilian casualty investigation, is conditioning both domestic and international audiences to expect that international law demands analogously low levels of civilian casualties in all wars and that this level can be met while successfully prosecuting the conflict. This is wrong. It is also dangerous.

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The Pentagon should accompany its transparency initiatives with a much stronger reminder that the law of war often, even if unfortunately, permits civilian casualties when necessary to accomplish legitimate military objectives. And that it is almost always the Islamic State’s fault, not the coalition’s, when such casualties are inflicted. In an asymmetric war against an enemy that violates the law by hiding and fighting among civilians, these casualties are frequently a calculated price of attacks aimed at destroying enemy fighters and other military targets.

That is, civilian casualties often are the product of strikes conducted despite the knowledge that civilians are likely to be harmed. As long as coalition forces ensure that the law of war’s yardsticks are met — that the military advantage to be gained by a strike outweighs the potential harm to civilians, and that reasonable care has been taken in choice of weapons and tactics to minimize the effect on civilians — civilians may, and unfortunately will often be, killed and injured. That is the horrible essence of modern, lawful war, and a burden that our young warriors carry into battle. But the responsibility for the vast majority of this suffering lies at the feet of the illicit enemy.

Confusion regarding the law of war only incentivizes the Islamic State and similar groups to continue their illegal methods of fighting among civilians. In this vein, if the Pentagon continues to over-emphasize the rarity of civilian casualties during coalition airstrikes, it risks sending potentially delegitimizing shockwaves once airstrikes are used in close air support of ground forces retaking cities and villages, in which the Islamic State’s use of human shields and other illegal tactics will almost inevitably result in much higher civilian casualty numbers.

Read the entire original article HERE.