Knowing that there are civilians there, who could be hurt, is not the same as rounding up and killing civilians after the area has been occupied. That is what the Japanese army, Nazi German army, and sometimes the Soviet army did.
There are always civilian casualties – a munitions factory is clearly a military target, but if you bomb it, there are likely to be civilian workers who get hurt. Or if your submarine or mines sink a cargo ship. To use the current terminology, those are ‘collateral’ casualties – quite different from having the civilians as the primary targets.
To them, though, it doesn’t much matter – they are still dead. But it does matter in evaluating the actions of the commanders – the difference between war and war crimes.
This discussion is mostly too technical for me, but the general rule is plain – each advance in technology has led to more firepower being able to be deployed at a greater level of safety but, in general, with less precision. That’s going to increase civilian deaths, period, even if today’s conflicts were with uniformed military, which they aren’t. Air strikes, for instance, are terribly deadly to civilians because the people calling in the strikes are rarely positive and precise that they’re going to the right place. And as imaging technology gets effective at greater distances, it’s even more likely to result in shooting the wrong people. A trivial analogy is cell phones – compared to the telecommunications world of 25 years ago, the ability to get anyone on the line from anywhere at any time is inconceivably better, and with VOIP it’s starting to be substantially cheaper. But cell call quality and stability to a friend on his cell five miles away in nowhere near what you would always get with landlines spanning the same distance.
The same thing happened with tank warfare in the first half of the 20th Century – prior to that, armies would stake out trenches as far as possible into the middle of nowhere. With tanks, enemy forces could penetrate farther into rear areas, and then they had the guns to blow those areas to hell.
All of this said, I don’t think there’s as much moral difference between killing civilians and conscriptees as might appear at first blush. And if that’s so, then the moral distance between killing those people and killing uniformed volunteers who had no other serious economic opportunity than joining up is pretty minimal as well.
That’s of 2007, of course the numbers are higher since then. See the mention of 100,000 contractors? Look how high that amount jumps by 2008:
***Emphasis mine.
Twelve months later and another 50,000 mercenaries are in Iraq- that doesn’t count mercenaries in nearby countries.
I learned about all of this from a wonderful book that I recommend everyone read called Big Boy Rules.
So yes, any number of “civilian” deaths you see listed include these mercenaries. Remember those poor sons of bitches who were killed and hung from a bridge? The news outlets called them civilians but they were mercs.