How We Fight

Colin H. Kahl

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2006

Summary:  Reports that U.S. troops may have killed 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq, last November have renewed fears that the U.S. military routinely violates the laws of war. But is the Haditha incident the exception or the rule? In fact, U.S. compliance with noncombatant immunity in Iraq has been relatively high by historical standards, and it has been improving since the beginning of the war.

Colin H. Kahl, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, conducted research at the Department of Defense from January 2005 to August 2006 on a fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations.

Since then, U.S. policy and practice have changed. An investigation into the underlying causes of the My Lai massacre, the Peers report (named after General William Peers, who headed the investigation), concluded that systematic shortcomings in the training of U.S. forces were partly to blame. In response to these findings, the Department of Defense adopted a directive in 1974 (reissued in 1979 and 1998) requiring that enlisted troops and officers alike receive instruction in the laws of war during basic training or in academies, at home stations and during field and mission-rehearsal exercises, and, once deployed, when being trained in the rules of engagement (ROE). The directive also dramatically elevated the role of judge advocates in advising on, monitoring, and enforcing compliance with the laws of war.

By the 1990s, it had became commonplace for U.S. military commanders and civilian leaders to emphasize their commitment to noncombatant immunity, and measures were put in place to minimize risks to civilians during the campaigns in the Gulf War and Kosovo. U.S. officials also referred to the norm during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In January 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said of the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan, "I can't imagine there's been a conflict in history where there has been less collateral damage, less unintended consequences." More recently, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, asserted that "no armed force in the world goes to greater effort than our armed force to protect civilians and to be very precise in the way we apply our power." Judging by three key markers -- the level of civilian casualties, the conduct of U.S. forces during operations, and the military's response to instances of noncompliance -- the actions of U.S. forces in Iraq have largely matched the rhetoric of their leaders.

CROSSFIRE

Drawing inferences from casualty data is a risky exercise. Especially in lengthy wars involving powerful armies and tenacious insurgents, large numbers of people, including civilians, are likely to be killed or wounded. This is, of course, the reason why war is hell, many wars seem morally suspect, and international laws were developed to protect civilians. Since accidents inevitably happen during conflicts and civilians often get caught in the crossfire, even full compliance with applicable norms cannot spare all noncombatants. That said, a very low (or very high) level of casualties relative to a war's scale is an indirect indicator of compliance (or noncompliance) with the laws of war.

There are numerous estimates of civilian casualties in Iraq, all of which are problematic. Some rely on questionable methodologies. Others are skewed by political agendas. All are plagued by incomplete data. The only group to systematically track Iraqi civilian deaths caused by violence since the beginning of the war and list the reported causes of death is the nonprofit organization Iraq Body Count (IBC). IBC's online database, which monitors media reports and reflects data from Iraqi morgues, suggests that 42,619 Iraqi civilians were killed by violence between March 19, 2003, and July 31, 2006. (This figure, which represents the midpoint between IBC's minimum estimate and its maximum one, is similar to that of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, which found, based on data from morgues in Baghdad and the Iraqi Health Ministry, that approximately 50,000 Iraqis -- including civilians, anticoalition forces, and Iraqi security forces -- had died through the end of June 2006, the vast majority from violent causes.) Some 6,434 Iraqi civilians were probably killed during the invasion; the rest have died in the "postwar" period that has followed. Of the civilian deaths recorded by IBC since President George W. Bush declared the end of major combat operations on May 1, 2003, about 2,558 appear to have been the result of U.S. attacks or crossfire between U.S. and anticoalition forces. That figure, however, is probably an underestimate, since it only includes 71 deaths from U.S. actions at checkpoints and during convoy operations (known as "escalation-of-force" incidents). The military's own accounting indicates that, on average, U.S. forces have killed about one Iraqi civilian a day in escalation-of-force events since the very beginning of the occupation. This information suggests that some of the entries in the IBC database that do not list a responsible party may actually represent deaths at the hands of U.S. troops. Taking into account the U.S. military's own estimate of deaths as a result of escalation-of-force incidents and adjusting for possible double counting, a more likely estimate of civilian deaths attributable to U.S. troops or crossfire is about 3,582. The remaining 32,603 deaths (90 percent of the total since the end of major combat) resulted from insurgent and terrorist attacks, sectarian fighting, and crime.

All sides have played a part in this unfolding tragedy. Insurgents and militias have placed civilians at risk by positioning their forces and arms caches in mosques and hospitals; using homes as shelters; firing mortars and rockets from yards, farms, and fields; and using ambulances, taxis, and other civilian vehicles to transport fighters and weapons. They have launched indiscriminate attacks that were certain to kill large numbers of noncombatants. And as the conflict has evolved, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias have increasingly targeted civilians, triggering a spiral of sectarian violence. Civilian deaths in Iraq are also an indictment of Washington's failure to develop and execute an effective strategy for postwar contingencies and are evidence that U.S. forces have sometimes engaged in activities that put Iraqi civilians at high risk.

Still, the casualty figures for Iraq are much lower than those for many U.S. military campaigns of the last century. The number of civilian deaths during major combat in March and April 2003, including those caused by aerial bombing, was not significantly higher than it was in the 1991 Gulf War, even though U.S. objectives in the more recent conflict were far more ambitious and required extensive operations in densely populated Iraqi cities. During World War II, U.S. and British forces regularly engaged in strategic bombing against German and Japanese cities, killing more than one million noncombatants. In a single day of firebombing over Tokyo, on March 9, 1945, some 85,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed -- more than eight times the total number of civilians killed by U.S. forces or crossfire in the first three and a half years of the Iraq war. All told, the number of civilian deaths per ton of air-delivered munitions during major combat in Iraq was about 19 times lower than that in Dresden and 162 times lower than that in Tokyo. Some might argue that improvements in precision-guided munitions account for much of this difference. But many civilian fatalities caused by strategic bombing during World War II were the result of intentional efforts to destroy enemy morale rather than incidental byproducts of strikes on military targets. The real cause of the drop is a drastic change in U.S. policy.

Consider also the contrast between the Iraq war and other significant U.S. counterinsurgency efforts, such as those in the Philippines in the early twentieth century and in South Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. In both of those campaigns, civilians were directly targeted to some degree. Approximately 200,000 civilians (out of a total population of 7.4 million) died during the Filipino insurrection of 1899-1902, and over 520,000 civilians (out of a population of 16 million) were killed in South Vietnam. Available data for deaths in the Philippines and South Vietnam are imprecise about the cause of death, and so for the sake of consistency they must be compared with estimates for Iraq that include all violent civilian deaths, not just those arising from engagements involving U.S. forces. (Note, too, that the data for the Philippines include deaths from all war-related causes, including malnutrition and disease, not just violence.) Still, the difference is revealing. After adjusting for population size, the data suggest that 17 times as many civilians died per month in the Philippines and 9 times as many died per month in South Vietnam as have died each month during the counterinsurgency period in Iraq thus far. Even if the estimates for Iraq are off by a factor of two or three, the conflict's casualty count is far lower than that in previous U.S. counterinsurgency campaigns.

CONDUCT BECOMING

From the outset of the war, the U.S. military has put in place several mechanisms to ensure compliance with the principles of distinction and proportionality. In the lead-up to the invasion, the Pentagon developed the "joint target list," an inventory of all potential targets for coalition forces, which was vetted by judge advocates and other legal advisers. Certain operations directed against Saddam Hussein's regime were deemed off-limits because they targeted civilians or risked producing disproportionate damage to civilians and civilian infrastructure. Starting in late 2002, the Pentagon also enlisted UN agencies and nongovernmental organizations to help draw up a "no-strike" list including thousands of schools, mosques, sensitive cultural sites, hospitals, water-treatment facilities, power plants, and other elements of civilian infrastructure. The list placed significant constraints on air and land operations. During the initial ground invasion, for example, the artillery batteries used by U.S. forces were programmed with a list of sites that could not be fired on without a manual override.