According to the Canadian 2007-documentary War made Easy, civilian casualties in war rose from 10% in 1WW to 90 in the Gulf War
Here are the figures:
1WW: 10% of the dead where civilians
2WW: 50%
Vietnam-War: 70%
Gulf-War: 90% (not shure if they where talking about the 1991-war or the 2003-war)
Have anyone an good explanation to this ?
Fresh from the Land of Duh, you don’t have armies facing each other across well-drawn battle lines anymore.
That’s pretty much my assumption as well. Armies used to march across “battlefields” right towards one another and civilans knew to stay out of the way.
With the advent of urbanised warfare, civilan casualties go way up as a result of proximity to conflict or because of “human shield” tactics.
Because 10 million soldiers died in WWI.
Yeah, and a lot of that was trench warfare with ye olde “no man’s land” in between.
Ugly sort of war, that. Not that any war is pretty, but it engenders a time of attrition followed by the inevitable “Pickett’s Charge” into heavily defended enemy lines that always results in massive casualties.
In two words: airplanes and bombs.
I wish I had time to look for the quote but I’m on my way out the door. The French writer/pilot Antoine de St. Exupery, who witnessed dogfights in WW1 and then bombers in WW2, wrote essays on how the airplane (which he loved with a passion in its peacetime use and flew military missions in [so he knew what he was speaking of]) was going to lead to more civilian casualties and more “detached” warfare. He talked of how a soldier in the trenches may be haunted forever by the memories of killing a single man in combat, but a pilot could kill thousands of people and sleep like a baby because he never saw their torment.
There have been other wars with high civilian casualties before the 20th century. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) killed 15 to 30% of the population of Germany. I don’t think any other war in history could match that.
That Gulf War number sounds sketchy for either war. If it includes deaths related to the deliberate destruction of Iraqi civilian infrastructure in the first war, it’s plausible.
I don’t think this is one single trend - the reason WW2 had more civilian casualties than WW1 is totally different from the reason the second gulf war, for example, had more than WW2, if that number is true (which I have my doubts).
WW1 is pretty unique in that the outdated military tactics combined with just enough technology to make the battlefield a very deadly place, but not enough technology to make civilian areas away from the battlefield as deadly.
WW2 was a total war with technology to bring the war everywhere, not just the battlefield.
Vietnam had relatively little in the way of set-piece battles and military-on-military fights. The tactics used were quite messy against civilians - somewhat similar to a one sided WW2.
The Gulf Wars were over very quickly with one side completely dominating the other. Not that many soldiers were killed on the battlefield because there were lots of surrenders and the fighting was over quickly. The use of smart bombs did reduce civilian casualties, but a good PR campaign by the government gave people the impression that the first gulf war was conducted primarily with smart weapons - there was plenty of carpet bombing and civilian deaths.
But you have to be careful about ratios. If in one war, 5 million cillians died along with 5 million soldiers, that doesn’t mean the war was less deadly to civilians than one in which 50,000 soldiers died as compared to 150,000 civilians, even though the latter has civilian deaths much higher as a percentage of total deaths.
In my mind, that argument is a fallacy, at least with regards to pilots I have known. They are keenly aware of the ordinance they are dropping onto “targets” that they cannot “see” with their own eyes, and all they can do is pray that the oxymoronic “military intelligence” with regards to prioritizing targets is accurate.
I don’t think that these modern pilots sleep soundly when they found out after the fact that they dropped a caseload of HE on a mistaken target. They know what these weapons can do, but, they have to follow orders as well.
Ah, humans and warfare. The more advanced it gets the more it stays the same.
It’s all killing people in the end.
WW1: Fighting largely confined to a narrow “front” occupied by national armies
WW2: Front sweeps repeatedly across European continent, with signficant actions against civilian partisans and ethic cleansing.
Vietnam: guerrila war where virtually entire civilian population is targeted by both sides.
Gulf War: Conventional forces collapse in few weeks, followed by long-term struggle between occupiers and irregular resistance.
So yeah, I’d say it’s entirely due to the nature of the wars being fought.
but why have it increased from 50% til 90% in the year 1945 to 2003? In WW2 and Vietnam-war they used dumb-bombs while they have uesd so-called smart-bombs since 1990
I don’t understand why you are hung up on the percentages.
He’s trying to handicap the next war and wants to beat the spread.
What definition of “civilian” are they using? If they mean “anybody who isn’t in uniform” then all wars fought against guerilla forces and insurgents are going to rack up big percentages of “civilians” killed vs “soldiers.”
Soldiers die on a much less massive scale than before. Because of this, civilian deaths become much higher as a percentage, but not necessarily in raw numbers.
In world war 2, Russia lost hundreds of thousands (a million? more?) soldiers counted alone, without even counting the German and French and Chinese and Japanese and British or anyone else. Civilians can die on a MASSIVE scale in wars like that, and they’re still just a small percentage of the total dead.
Wars today are fought with much fewer total casualties, meaning that even a small (compared to previous wars) number of civilian deaths can result in a higher percentage of civian to soldier casualties.
The problem is that even if military intelligence is accurate, and even if the smart bomb hits its target perfectly, civilians, often lots of them, are likely to die. That 2nd assistant to the hairdresser of the 3rd highest ranking AQ in Iraq might very well be sitting in that restaurant you just bombed. He wasn’t the only person in there.
Killing people is easy, but killing only a specific individual isn’t. Smart bombs are still bombs, not snipers.
More like 11 million.
A lot of people have the impression of WW1 being more brutal than WW2, but it’s just the images we have of both wars. WW2 was much more brutal in pretty much every respect.
I am well aware of that, and for the sake of the success of our Air Force and it’s missions, perhaps it’s a good thing that the pilots of fighter/bomber aircraft don’t actually get to see the carnage they inflict below them. But the pilots I’ve hung around during my stint in the military were always keen to point out the fact that having to use actual ordinance on actual “targets” weighs heavily on their minds, and hence they try to carry out their orders as precisely as technology allows for.
I think that was the point being made by Sampiro. It’s a hell of a lot easier on the psyche to drop a bomb that destroys a restaurant than for an individual to walk into a restaurant with an M60 and kill every person inside, men, women, children, waitstaff, cooks, etc., simply because one of them might be your target.
WWI, although fought with modern weapons, was essentially the last pre-modern war. Beginning with the Civil War in the U.S. and culminating in WWI, a bunch of new and more deadly weapons were introduced. But the basic concept of what a war was didn’t change all that much from Napoleonic times.
In WWI, unlike today, there was still a pretty strict dichotomy between town/city and “the country.” This means that armies basically marched out into a field and faced off against one another. Understandably, there aren’t many civilians in the middle of farm fields.