Without knowing more about where that 80% civilian death figure was derived, my questions to the board are: (1) About what percent of war related deaths in American conflicts since 1990 have been civilian? or (2) How many of that 80% are a result of African/third world nation conflicts? The answer may very well be in the linked article, it just gets deeply into statistics which I’m not great at deciphering.
On the one hand, in recent years (90’s forward) you have more legal oversight of wars and better weapons technology which tries to bring civilian casualties down, on the other hand, this seemingly leads to “combatants” feigning as civilians, thus blurring who is a combatant vs. civilian. There’s also third world conflicts where little effort is even made to make a distinction between civilians or combatants, or where civilians are the intended targets (ie, genocide).
What I’m trying to figure out is if this 80% number is derived more from third world, unregulated conflicts or do first world conflicts (US/UK v. Iraq, US v. Afghanistan, ect) cause the same percentage of civilian deaths, notwithstanding the legal oversight and advanced weapon systems involved.
I put this in GQ because the 80% has cites, I just can’t access them (they appear to require paid subscriptions; see below). So if someone can access the below cites, or someone has other sources or answers, I’d love to know.
*Three cites for that civilian death statistic:
13. Elmore-Meegan M, O’Riorden T. Africa on the precipice. An ominous but not yet hopeless future. JAMA 1993;270:629-31.
17. Garfield RM, Neugut AI. Epidemiologic analysis of warfare: a historic review. JAMA 1991;266:688-92.
20. Aboutanos MB, Baker SP. Wartime civilian injuries: epidemiology and intervention strategies. J Trauma 1997;43:719-26.
It’s hard to evaluate those statistics without seeing their source, but one thing that jumps out at me is that this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. The article is comparing two specific wars with “the 90s,” a period that included a wide variety of conflicts.
Just comparing WWI to WWII, it would seem that the number of civilian casualties would be much higher.
In WWI there was hardly any aerial bombing other than at the front lines, the front lines were largely static trench warfare, and most of the civilians had left that area.
In WWII you had massive aerial bombing of not only military sites but also whole cities, dams that flooded many villages, etc. Even semi-guided missiles at the end. Plus you had a highly mobile, fast moving (blitzkrieg) conflict, which frequently caught up lots of civilians before they had time to get out of the area. Defining where the front lines were from day to day was hard, so it was difficult to avoid them. And some of the combatants had as part of their goals rounding up and executing whole groups of the conquered population (Germany, Japan, & USSR, mainly) – those should count as civilian casualties, too.
The other obvious problem that leaps out at me is that the figures only mention the proportion of civilian deaths, not the total number of deaths. I’m not in any way convinced that his is a meaningful metric. Changes to the way wars are fought and the nature of the enemy means that military casualties are falling, which will lead to an increase in the relative rates of civilian casualties even if the absolute number is static, or even falling.
For example in the invasion of Italy in WWII there were (iirc) around 100, 000 soldiers killed and around 10, 000 civilians, giving civilian death toll of 10%. In contrast in the current Iraq war there have been around 40, 000 military personnel killed and 10, 000 civilians. So in order to occupy a comparable area of land the same number of civilians have died, but the number of military deaths are so low that the relative rate has skyrocketed.
So what exactly does this tell us? I would suggest that it’s not much. Does anybody think it would be better if the military deaths remained as high as they were 50 years ago even though it did nothing to reduce civilian casualties?
I’m thinking this is yet another example of damned lies and statistics.
And I agree with t-bonham, attempting to compare the world wars is extremely dubious. I would go even further and say that attempting to compare them to anything else in history is completely invalid. The wars were totally and utterly unlike anything before or since. WWI was anomalous in one direction because it was such a prolonged stalemate with such a high military death rate. WWII was anomalous in the other because of the deliberate, large scale slaughter of civilians by Japanese, Nazi and to a lesser extent Soviet forces.
More useful would be to use the civilian death rates in the Boer War or American Civil Wars as more “typical” wars and use that as a basis of comparison.
Thanks to everyone for the replies so far. It’s a pretty technical article (to me) and it’s pretty tough to get good statistics about civilian deaths in recent wars to see if the 80% is even accurate, much less which wars they are using to determine that figure. It’s shocking to me that 80% of all war related deaths in the 1990’s were civilians, but simply having less 1st world conflicts might be the reason.
Yea, it is only about the proportion of civilian deaths. So higher proportion does not mean more actual civilian bodies. That’s a very good point.
But what I’m having trouble with is, why is the proportion higher when military technology has increased and the law of armed conflict is much more mature? The only conclusion I can reach is that 1st World countries, with the better military technology and who adhere to the laws of armed conflict engage in less armed conflicts, while 3rd world countries engage in more armed conflicts with old technology and no pretense of following the laws of war.
I was seeing it as more of a general trend. But you make a good point. Which is why I desperately want to see what they base the proportions on (especially the 1990’s part).
The part about third world countries probably is true. However, with first world countries, three things are happening:
(1) The military are using tactics and technology to minimise their own casualties;
(2) The military are using much better and faster medical care to treat wounded personnel who would have died in earlier conflicts;
(3) The enemies that they are fighting don’t wear uniforms and mingle with the civilian population, so it’s harder to identify civilians before they get killed.
In technological wars, the factories supplying the front lines are staffed by civilians - as are th railroads, ports, and other infrastruture - but they are all legitimate targets. Heck, the places that package food for the military can be considered targets. Basically, any of the enemy country’s industry in some way is a legitimate target, anyone found in that target is a collateral target. Ain’t war grand?
Were the WWII merchant marine north Atlantic convoys any less of a target because the sailors were not formal members of the armed forces?
OTOH, most modern military campaigns are less of the traditional army-to-army fights, and more often a guerilla war; inducing cooperation of the locals or commandeering their supplies with demostrations you mean busines, or using them for human shields, is a standard tactic. Plus, recent wars have amply demonstrated - turning autonomous bands of thugs loose on the countryside with weapons results in random murder and rapes.
Back in the “good old days” war was a simple exercise between two groups of armed men to determine which warlord ended up owning the place. The opportunity, capability, and incentive for collateral damage was much more limited.
Using always accurate Wiki, here are some crude proportions on the First Gulf War:
Fatalities in First Gulf War
Coalition/American Military Deaths: 379
Iraqi Military Deaths: 20k-35k; USAF says between 20k-22k. I’ll use 27.5k.
Iraqi Civilian Deaths: 3.5k directly from bombing, 100k from “other effects”
Coalition/American Civilian Deaths: 3 (from Scud attacks)
Total Military : 27,879 (21%)
Total Civilian : 103,503 (79%)
Total Fatalities: 131,382 (100%)
That’s right on the money (assuming I’m even calculating it right, Proportion = civilian or military / total civilian + military).
It’s also not questioning whether the figures are accurate. 100k from “other effects” sounds rather broad and a little to clean of a number. One of the articles relied on for that 100k figure puts it at 83k (and that’s wildly disputed in the article as well). So, I guess it’s anywhere from 3.5k to 100k, which makes this all rather pointless.
Where are you getting 10,000 civilian deaths in Iraq from? Wikipedia summarizes two studies that say you are way off. This PDF lists several more studies; the lowest figure is still 4 times yours and doesn’t include the last two years.
You are also off by an order of magnitude on military deaths. That number is about 4,300.
So the total civilian death toll in Iraq is closer to 1000% than the 20% you claim.
In most of the modern wars one side is actually composed of civilians. If your side isn’t killing civilians then you’re not really doing much. When was the last time two nation states actually duked it out on a massive scale with conventional armies? The Second Congo War? Iran-Iraq? Even in those situations you need rebel groups and death squads and all that fun stuff.
Even the most conservative, low ball estimates have civilian deaths in Iraq way higher than 10,000 – more like 100,000, as a floor. I’ll just be lazy and link to a wiki table.
I would put all those (rebels, death squads, ect) as combatants and be counted as a military fatalities. But it’s probably subjective. This does raise an interesting point of what is a “military” fatality and what is a “civilian” fatality, because if everyone isn’t using the same criteria, it’s not comparing apples to apples.
I’ll also add that in my post regarding the First Gulf War, only 3.5k were directly caused by military bullets and bombs; the other 100k died of other reasons. Probably things like starvation, the elements, displacement, ect. They died because factories, electrical plants, housing, ect were purposely bombed (as md2000 points out are legit targets), but the majority of civilians did not die because the bomb killed them while they were inside, they died because the bomb destroyed something needed to help keep them alive. I’m sure this is the main reasons civilians have always died. As long as those are all legit targets (and I believe they are), civilians are always going to die indirectly because of it.
The reiterate on the reiterations, any hard number like 80% is heavily dependent upon your assumptions.
One thing to add is that I think we are better at counting today. In the invasion of Iraq, people were able to make reasonable estimates of how many more civilians died due to secondary effects of the war (such as reduced access to potable water, electricity, food or medical care). I don’t think we have similar estimates for previous conflicts such as English march, pillage and burn campaigns in the Hundred Year’s War.
Another point is that almost any all-out war nowadays is deliberately self-limited; the best example being the Korean War and the Falklands War, where nuclear restraint was used; and for various reasons the British chose not to extend the war to the mainland, and presumably the Argentinians thought the better of trying a Doolittle-style raid. In all cases, for optics and similar reasons, both sides avoided civilian casualties as much as they could.
The British even took a lot of heat for sinking the Belgrano because it was a sitting duck through Argentinian naval arrogance. The story goes that the Argentine high command had a screaming argument in the war room, the head admiral told the generals “You can’t tell me what to do” and ordered the ship out to sea even though the other forces knew it could not be defended.
However, none of the Arab-Isreali real wars involved mass bombing of civilian or even industrial targets which was certaily something the Israelis at least were capable of. The most vicious “real” war was probably the Iran-Iraq war, where both sides very quickly descended from modern warfare to about the level of WWI trench warefare, the technological level both sides could handle.
So real modern war recently does NOT seem to cause significant civilian casulaties. and pin-point bombing has only made that more so. It’s the vicious guerilla wars that result in uncontrolled human death, usuallyby military stupidity or from torture as gruesome as the best minds of that particular cause can dream up.