The Impermissibility of Collateral Damage

One of the most significant problems of Just War Theory is the non-combatant immunity tenet. This tenet works to protect civilians from the violence of warfare by distinguishing them from warring soldiers. Though the non-combatant immunity tenet has good intentions, it fails to effectively protect civilians. This failure stems from the term “collateral damage,” which seeks to separate intentional and unintentional civilian kills. Thus, when a military target is attacked and civilians are killed, these civilian deaths are labeled collateral damage. In cases such as these, it is not clear that we can firmly label the deaths of military personnel as intentional and the deaths of civilians unintentional. After all, the attack itself was absolutely intentional. If just War Theory is inadequate, it is because it does not place due responsibility on the attacker for what is often labeled “collateral damage.”
A noteworthy change in warfare has been the location in which wars are typically fought. The historical conception of the battlefield is generally inadequate for describing the location of modern battles as they are often fought in heavily populated areas or cities rather than on distant and unpopulated terrain. Furthermore, it is becoming much less common for soldiers to wear a standard uniform identifying them as the enemy. These two facts have increased the usage of the term collateral damage. If the wars are fought in populated areas and the enemy looks more like an ordinary citizen, can we honestly blame the soldiers for killing non-combatants? Traditionally, and even in the context of Just War Theory, we haven’t been able to blame these soldiers for such kills. As James Turner Johnson notes in Morality and Contemporary Warfare, “indirect, incidental harm to noncombatants as a result of military actions directed at an enemy’s armed forces, however, is not the same, either morally or legally, as harm caused by actions that directly and intentionally target noncombatants.” But when bombs are dropped on a military target located in a populated area, a calculation may be made regarding exactly who will be harmed by the attack. And generally, such a calculation will realize that civilians will be harmed or killed. With this calculation in mind, such kills seem much less incidental and unintentional. Twenty-first-century Just War Theory must require this calculation and curtail the use of collateral damage as an excuse.
This unintentional harming of non-combatants can also manifest itself more subtly. Marla Rose, in describing the often violent food-politics, notes in “Food Inc.” that “there was military(US) in Nicaragua, vigilante squads in Colombia, and, in Guatemala, the US-sponsored overthrow of Central America’s first democratically elected leader” in order to control the prices of U.S. imported produce (VegNews 41). Even if no civilians were killed in these attacks, their quality of life was still harmed. With such price control, the wages of foreign farmers are kept to a minimum, leading to a decline in living standards. This type of warfare, even when it doesn’t directly kill the innocent, is not merely collateral damage and is morally impermissible.
In working to diminish the usage of the term collateral damage, Just War Theory can further tighten the non-combatant immunity tenet. This tenet must be extended to question the permissibility of unintentional attacks that kill innocent civilians. Furthermore, it should consider how military attacks affect the quality of life for the civilians living in the attacked area or country. Just War Theory must reach further toward the ideal of peace, even if such an ideal is forever slightly out of reach.