Apologies for running a fireside so quickly after the gap week, but with the end of the semester coming as the job market gets busier, I haven’t had time to finish the next post on shield walls just yet. That will come out next week for sure though, as it is close to done.
For today’s musing, I wanted to actually give something of a longer-form answer to a question a student asked me recently. To paraphrase, the former student noted the terrible civilian toll of modern warfare on civilian populations and asked, in essence if it is always this way, why such results are so common in American military history and then does any of that mean it must it always be this way? Is there no other way where civilians do not suffer terribly? And I think that is a grim but necessary question as people are trying to make sense of conflicts occurring not in open fields as the battles of old but in dense urban environments where there are lots of civilians.
And because this is bound to be a heated topic I want to remind y’all in the comments that you will be civil. There are many places to have screaming matches about today’s active conflicts, but what I would like to see instead of a sober discussion of what is and is not possible.
I think we have to begin by specifying that the norm that civilians are not supposed to be the subject of violence in war, that war is a matter between combatants only, is a relatively new one. For most of human history it was broadly assumed that ‘enemy civilians’ were fair targets for mass violence or enslavement. Indeed, for the oldest ‘first system‘ warfare, civilians were often the primary target as the goal was to force enemy groups to migrate away. We see the earliest sort of tentative steps to the idea that some ‘enemy civilians’ ought to be exempt from violence coming out of medieval Christianity and Islam, but these efforts had limited effects. Instead, as we’ve discussed standard military practice, particularly foraging, in this period turned armies into what were effectively roving catastrophes that unavoidably burned and pillaged when they moved through enemy territory.
In the early modern period in Europe, a sort of standard code emerged on how to treat ‘enemy’ urban areas. During a siege, at key points the city would be given a chance to surrender; if they did so, treatment was expected to be lenient and the commander of the besieging army was expected to keep his army in check. If they did not surrender and the besieging army was forced to take the city by storm, however, the norm was pillage, rape, and massacre, with the normal expectation being that the attacking general would only even attempt to get control of his troops after about three days. This ‘code’ obviously falls well short of the modern Laws of Armed Conflict (LOAC) and it was mostly a question of expediency: you wanted a fortified city to surrender quickly rather than force you to launch a bloody assault in which the initial waves of attackers could be sure to take extremely heavy losses (the Dutch term for that first wave was a verloren hoop, ‘lost heap’ (which becomes ‘forlorn hope’ in English) which gives a sense of the losses you are trying to avoid).
We really only start to see stronger norms protecting civilian populations emerge in the 1800s, but that too is a slow process of half-measures. In both World Wars, all sides engaged in the bombing of urban areas from the air. In the First, the Germans used Zeppelins and the Allies were developing bombers for the purpose and using them at war’s end. In the Second World War, German terror-bombing in Poland and Japanese terror-bombing in China came first, but were of course followed by far more extensive allied bombing as the weight of industrial might made itself known. There was some sense that this was wrong, but no one was going to desist over that. Curtis LeMay, the commander of US strategic bombing operations over Japan, remarked that if the United States had lost, he’d have been tried as a war criminal, though it is worth noting that of all of the German and Japanese leaders prosecuted for war crimes, none were charged with bombing civilian areas, despite there being many who could have been.
The modern infrastructure of the Laws of Armed Conflict to protect non-combatants is a product of the horrors of the Second World War, codified in the Fourth Geneva Convention in 1949. And even then, the protections are limited: belligerents are not to either intentionally target civilians nor to attack in ways that are indiscriminate. But civilian casualties are permitted due to ‘military necessity’ with the principle being that the damage done ought to be in proportion to the military objective.1 If that seems mealy-mouthed and half-hearted that’s because it is. But the challenge with laws to limit was is that if you make them too limiting, no one will follow them because it would lead surely to defeat and in that case norms would revert back to the slaughter and brutality of the olden days.
Still, as weak as these norms are, it should mean in theory that at least some armies are striving to limit civilian suffering and death as a result of war as much as reasonably practicable (which is not the same as ‘as much as possible.’)
That in turn collides with the reality of battle in urban spaces, which has changed meaningfully since the 1800s. Before the industrial revolution, only a small part of the population lived in dense cities, typically around 10-20% or so. Today more than half of all people globally live in cities and of course the world population is several times larger. Even as late as 1800, there were no cities on Earth very much larger than a million people; today there are more than eighty cities with five million people in them. That means the locus of population, production and infrastructure is in these cities, making them key military targets, while at the same time they become massive concrete warrens – extremely difficult terrain to have an army in.
Looking at battles in urban spaces over the past century or so – that is, in the age of Industrial Firepower – it seems to me we have to hold two difficult ideas in our heads at once. On the one hand, it seems quite clear that there is no way to do urban operations ‘clean.’ Even very scrupulous efforts in urban spaces to follow the LOAC end up with massive infrastructure damage to cities and significant civilian casualties in our age of industrial firepower. On the other hand there is a world of difference between the armies that try very hard to avoid civilian losses and those which do not, and a terrible spectrum between them. This is a case where the difference between ‘bad,’ ‘worse,’ and ‘worst’ is actually a very big and meaningful difference, even though ‘bad’ is still quite bad.
One way to think about this – simplistic, to be sure, but it will do for now – is a very simple metric I’m borrowing from Wesley Morgan: we can consider a ratio between civilian and military deaths in an urban operation. In taking Mosul (2016-2017), the anti-ISIS coalition killed an estimated 10,000 or so ISIS militants at the cost of around 8,000 civilians (numbers very approximate, of course), a ratio of about 1.35:1. In the Second Battle of Fallujah, the United States (and partners) figures it killed around 2,100 enemy militants and the Red Cross estimated 800 civilian deaths, a ratio of 2.6:1. On the other end, in the Battle of Berlin (1945), the Soviet Red Army killed an estimated 92,000 German soldiers and 125,000 civilians, a ratio of 0.736:1. In Mariupol (2022) the Russian Armed Forces claim to have killed 4,200 Ukrainian soldiers2 and while Russia claims there were only 3,000 civilian casualties, that number fairly clearly a lie as the AP identified more than ten thousand mass graves and estimates the true civilian toll around 25,000, a ratio of 0.168:1. At the absolute rock-bottom of this well of misery, the Imperial Japanese Army took Nanjing (1937), killing around 10,000 Chinese soldiers before butchering more than 200,000 Chinese civilians in a horrific massacre that even today some Japanese politicians like to pretend did not happen, a ratio of 0.05:1. We don’t know the military deaths from the Siege of Aleppo (2012-2016), but given that there were never estimated to be more than around 15,000 fighters in the city (many of whom will have survived) and an estimated 31,000 civilians died, it seems safe to assume the ratio there was also horrible, probably on the scale of the Mariupol ratio above.
The IDF claims that they are killing one Hamas soldier for every two civilians they kill in Gaza, a ratio of 0.5, which their spokespeople have claimed is ‘unprecedented in the modern history of warfare,’ but which looking at the figures above is not actually a particularly scrupulous or discriminating ratio – though of course one may well argue the vast differences in circumstances. It is still both far from the best and far from the worst performance for armies operating in civilian spaces.
At the same time, ‘least bad’ is not ‘good.’ The Battle of Fallujah, which in those examples has the highest rate of target-discrimination still destroyed much of the city, as you can see in images like this one. But most of the people in that city (population c. 250,000) survived and that makes a world of difference compared to some of the abject horror on that list above.
Where does the United States fit into all of this? While there is ample ground to criticize the US military’s policies towards civilians since 1900, on the whole the United States tends, compared to other major states involved in the same or similar wars, to be on the low end of causing civilian death and suffering, though with some pretty important ‘black marks’ on that record.3 Americans focus – rightly so – on the morality of strategic bombing in Europe and Japan, but the fact is the vast majority of civilians killed in Europe and Asia in WWII were not killed by bombs from the sky but by soldiers on the ground with guns intentionally murdering civilians. Strategic bombing over Germany killed an estimated 400,000 civilians, a terrible figure – but the German government today estimates that Soviet expulsions alone may have killed as many as two million civilians. Both the Nazis and the Red Army engaged in mass-atrocities on the Eastern Front at staggering scale (an estimated twenty million Soviet civilians were killed during the war). American strategic bombing over Japan killed approximately 400,000 civilians as well, but in contrast to an estimate that Japan caused between six and twenty million civilian deaths due to atrocities in the territory it controlled. I am no fan of strategic bombing, but while it did kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, it was not the primary driver of civilian casualties in WWII; intentional mass-murder on the ground was.
That is not to say American soldiers have never engaged in massacres. They have. But as militaries go, the United States military does not seem to be unusually massacre-prone, indeed if anything it appears to be somewhat unusually massacre-avoidant in the post-1900 period. I’ve written at length elsewhere on this topic, but there are certain institutional-culture patterns which produce what I’ve termed ‘atrocity-prone’ armies and the United States military has generally tried to avoid these patterns, whereas some other militaries – I discussed Russia in the link above – seem to embrace them. The United States has traditionally relied very heavily on firepower and that has driven a lot of the ‘collateral’ civilian casualties in modern American wars: soldiers can (if they choose) discriminate between civilians and combatants, but bombs and missiles cannot. But American soldiers, it seems, generally do try to make that distinction, again, not always and this should not be taken to minimize the horror of the times this was not true, resulting in American armies post-1900 generally coming in on the lower-end of the destructiveness scale – as hard as that can be to believe when looking at photos of flattened cities.
Must it be this way? I think there are three seemingly contradictory but true answers to this. On the one hand, yes – so long as we humans fight wars on this increasingly urbanized planet, we’re going to get military operations in dense urban areas in which terrible, gut-wrenching civilian suffering cannot be fully avoided. There is no way to fight ‘clean’ in an urban area. On the other hand, no – while civilian deaths cannot be entirely avoided, I think it’s clear from the statistics above that they can be reduced, that while one cannot fight clean in cities, it is possible to fight cleaner, to be merely bad instead of terrible. Carefully discriminate targeting, a preference for infantry operations over airpower (though of course, infantry need air and artillery support in modern warfare – this is a spectrum, not a binary), and an insistence both in regulations-as-implemented (read: discipline) and training that civilian casualties are to be avoided and failure to do so results in accountability can all keep the terrible toll lower, if not low.
But there is a deeper and more profound no here: we could choose not to war. As we’ve discussed at several points here, I think it is correct to say that both human society and human biology have been evolved for war. For hundreds of thousands of years, the humans that fought the most and the best thrived and passed those traits on to the next generation. But our genius and skill have now created a world in which peace is so profitable (because of industrial production) and war so destructive (because of industrial firepower) that to war is now a maladaptive trait. The advent of nuclear weapons has only intensified this fact by giving us the power to destroy ourselves; such that, as Bernard Brodie put it, “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establish has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.”4
War may never fully and entirely go away, but if we wish to survive as a species, we must tame our instinct for it. And here is where, when I close out the last lecture of my global military history survey, I point out to my students that, because we live in a democracy, it is we who must take to that task of taming our instinct for war.
No one will do it for us. And if we fail, no one will be left to do it after us.
On to recommendations:
For the Tolkien-minded, a fun treat, demographer Lyman Stone has attempted to work out a reasonable population estimate for Tolkien’s Middle Earth during the Third Age. It’s a fun exercise and the fact that figures broadly work out in terms of correlating army size to settlement size to settlement patterns to population once again brings home how effectively Tolkien seems to have grasped all of this even though I do not think that at any point did Tolkien sit down and ‘math out’ the population of these places. He just knew about how many soldiers a kingdom of about a given size might have in the Middle Ages and about how large its cities might be and so everything tends to fall within a fairly plausible range – a skill that some other creators in the fantasy space clearly lack.
I though this Twitter thread by Wesley Morgan (author of the excellent The Hardest Place) discussing the normal range of civilian casualties in urban combat was sobering but valuable reading. As I noted above, there are two kinds of errors here, the first assumes that nothing can be done to avoid civilian casualties in urban environments and the latter assumes that anything higher than zero indicates the intentional targeting of civilians. Morgan’s example – the Second Battle of Fallujah – does not represent ‘perfection’ because perfection in these kinds of messy operations is impossible, but it probably does represent an unusually careful effort at avoiding civilian losses. And on the one hand, civilian deaths were much lower there than in other urban battles…and on the other hand, depressingly, tragically a lot higher than zero.
I have a chapter in the now out Brill’s Companion to Diet and Logistics in Greek and Roman Warfare, ed. J. Donahue and L. Brice (2023). Alas, the book is not priced for mortals, so it won’t get a blog recommendation (I think it is very good, but I try to stick here to books that normal people can afford!), but, due to a generous funding grant Jeremy Armstrong’s excellent chapter on “Diet and Nutrition in the Roman Republican Army” is free to download at the link above, so check that out if you are interested. I may do a public-facing essay at some point covering some of the same ground as my chapter there, but in the meantime I’d note that a lot of my insight – such as it is – already made it into the series on foraging and logistics.
Finally on to the book recommendation, where I am going to recommend Christopher J. Fuhrmann’s Policing the Roman Empire: Soldiers, Administration and Public Order (2012). Fuhrmann’s book presents a series of illustrative studies detailing how Roman power actually worked on the ground in the provinces, particularly for common folk and how Roman governors and lesser authorities did – and failed to – keep their provinces ‘pacified and quiet.’5 While Fuhrmann does discuss the role of higher officials and indeed the emperors themselves in managing the provinces, his focus – in contrast to much of the historiography in provincial administration, which tends to focus on emperors and the senatorial elite who write our sources – is often on lower-level officials and the points of contact between imperial power and regular people.
The book is organized as a series of case studies rather than a single schematic description and I think it gains from this approach. The fact is, our evidence for Roman ‘order’ on the ground is patchy, thin and difficult. By approaching the question as a series of case studies, Fuhrmann can focus on where he does have evidence, but these studies also knit together really well to provide a good sense of the overall principles of the system and how it functioned. Fuhrmann can thus weave out of these case studies an overall thesis, namely that the Roman state was rather more involved in the maintenence of public order in the provinces than is sometimes assumed by scholars, but at the same time that role was mostly about sustaining and coopting existing systems of power and authority: the Romans kept order for Rome first and for the local elite second and for the common populace at best a long distant third, if at all.
This could easily make for a bewildering, confusing topic with a mess of different local officials, self-help regulations and soldiers, behaving both well and badly, but Fuhrmann is very good at keeping the volume readable and accessible. I think the non-specialist reader may have to run for Wikipedia at a couple of points, but only a couple: for the most part Fuhrmann defines his terms (he always translates his Greek and Latin) and gives enough context to figures readers might not know to allow even the non-specialist to understand the argument being made and the strength of the evidence supporting it.
- That, by the way, is what people mean when they mention ‘proportionality’ in international law. It does not mean your retaliation needs to be proportionate to the scale of an enemy attack. You can absolutely answer one enemy bullet with 10,000lbs of bombs. It is the potential military advantage secured which needs to be in proportion to the civilian losses, so blowing up a residential neighborhood to kill one common enemy soldier is a no-go, but blowing up the same neighborhood to take out an entire enemy brigade is probably permissible under the LOAC.
- The Ukrainian figure is much lower
- American bombing in Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War immediately spring to mind as a clear ‘black mark.’
- In The Absolute Weapon (1946).
- pacata atque quieta, a phrase from Ulpian that Fuhrmann features which is one of the best summations of how the Romans imagined ideal governance ought to function.
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I will say, that’s one of the more nuanced and respectful treatments of civilian casualties in modern war that I’ve seen anywhere. Thank you for that.
I always thought Ollie’s large eyes made him look perpetually perplexed. Percy, on the other hand, tends to look more suspicious or angry, but I’m sure that’s just fallacious anthropomorphism.
Ollie is a wide eyed optimistic. Percy is a world weary pessimist. But both are beautiful black cat.
Thank you for such a balanced essay
I think Fallujah is a good example of the limits of precision warfare in the sense that it can only limit casualties but not infrastructure damage. If you precisely hit every target, but the combatants are fighting in every building/block at one point or another, you will eventually precisely destroy the entire city. It does limit civilian casualties as you are limiting damage outside your intended target, but if every building at some point is a target, which is often the case in urban combat, then every building will still get leveled no matter how precise you are.
I Mosul as being the more realistic target unfortunately, as Fallujah 2 was done after intensive preparation with highly trained forces, against an opponent that was at least somewhat discriminatory on civilian casualties. It cannot be forgotten that there are at least two combatant parties to a battle, and the civilian casualties are the sum total of the actions of all combatant parties.
I have found the Urban Warfare Project by John Spencer to be quite informative about the challenges in urban warfare as it has increasingly gained attention.
I think the most salient point is the one you leave us with, that war is bad, and war is to be avoided. No matter what steps we take, war is about violence of action to defeat an enemy, an action distinguished from other political actions by direct imposition of violence. It is inherently ugly and destructive. So long as wars require killing, the methods of killing will be applied, and civilians was thus be killed. Were is easy enough to avoid unintentional killing, we would not have ‘friendly fire’ at all, so its clearly not a solved issue.
Regarding Stickmansam’s suggestion that if we could avoid unintentional killing “we would not have ‘friendly fire’” – let me pedantically point out that represents the (common) misunderstanding of the term “friendly fire..”
“Friendly” fire does *NOT* mean fire that accidentally kills people on one’s own side. It simply means fire that originates from friendly forces – in contradistinction to fire that originates from enemy forces. Which is which may not even be clear – eg a local commander, observing forward from his position and seeing artillery falling on the ground ahead might ask “Is that enemy fire or friendly fire?”
It’s just that civilians only ever hear about friendly fire when it’s a case of accidentally hitting one’s own forces.
End of rant. I just thought I’d vent a pet peeve of mine, since above The Pedant gives such an excellent explanation of what proportionality actually means in LOAC (also a pet peeve of mine). TGIF.
Do those casualty figures include the casualties from displacement, disruption of drinking water and food supplies, etc? Or only direction action – e.g. dropping a bomb on an apartment complex?
I feel like the first is much harder to prevent — you can drop leaflets saying “get out we’re going to blow this place up” but where are people supposed to go, and how do you try to get them food without just supplying your enemy?
It makes me really curious about the internal dynamics of situations like this. Historically, do groups lose the support of their civilians when they start placing military targets inside of civilian ones, or is the enemy consistently blamed when both are destroyed together? Does international law or norms expect anything from the “targeted” party in terms of attempting to protect its own civilians?
I can’t speak to the history or dynamics, but the law for the defending side protecting its civilians is basically
a) don’t use human shields (or civilian infrastructure as shields, or similar), and
b) soldiers need to be clearly and visibly distinguishable from civilians. Uniforming is ideal, but in the case of a spontaneous uprising or similar, at least try to get some identifying mark on ASAP (coloured armbands, say).
Which makes sense. Basically, you want to avoid mixing military with civilian as best you reasonably can, to make the enemy’s job of not killing your civilians as easy as it can reasonably be. It’s one of the very few cases in warfare where you probably *do* want to make your enemy’s job easier. At least, if you’re fighting even slightly clean – most modern urban warfare involves groups like Hamas on at least one side that prefer to blur the lines for strategic/tactical reasons, so clean fighting is right out the window there, but in cases like Ukraine it can work okay.
And one reason why the attackers only have to try limiting the civilian casualties is that unscrupulous defenders will then use civilians as shields — if necessary, by violence against the civilians.
Exactly.
Going by current conflicts the answers are; No. Yes. And No.
It’s one of the tricky cases where there’s a strong incentive to cheat *just a bit*, in the hope that you can eke out some kind of an advantage without having the enemy go full “Fuck it, just kill everyone”. (and of course, sometimes there’s even good reasons to blur the lines: You normally don’t want to put an anti-aircraft position next to a hospital (to avoid collateral damage), unless you think the enemy might be targeting hospitals anyway….)
Unless you’re a group who doesn’t care about the life of your people and your strategy is based entirely around trying to give your enemy bad PR. In that case, collateral damage is a goal, not an undesirable side effect.
No need to apologize for the firesides; some of your best content comes in fireside form (& that, to be clear, is saying something!)
I think there’s one aspect of modern war–especially urban war–that isn’t adequately addressed here: The use of civilian infrastructure to shield military targets. I’m leaving aside the difficulty in differentiating the two in an urban environment (a water treatment plant can serve both a military base and a neighborhood); what I’m talking about are things like the rumored construction of tunnels under schools and hospitals in Gaza, or the use of mosques to store weapons and ammunition in Iraq. It raises a question fundamental to the philosophy of the LOAC: How do you deal with the civilian casualties in such situations?
Countries that abide by the LOAC are also going to be those countries least inclined to support someone who’s bombing grade schools. Their enemies know this, and if said enemies are brutal enough it can make sense to them to use that as a means to break the will to fight. What I mean is, if Israel keeps bombing hospitals and schools the USA and Europe may say “Look, enough is enough, we’re out”, which puts Israel in a much harsher position. Or, Russia could stockpile arms in churches or around the elderly. The Eastern Orthodox people I’ve met were fairly devout, and blowing up a church–even if it’s been desecrated–is going to hit hard psychologically.
I think there’s no real argument against the idea that the horrors are the moral responsibility of the people using these human shields. But from a practical point, what is a country that’s trying to limit civilian casualties to do?
Further, does this illustrate that rules of war are mere fictions, and that following them is foolish? To be clear, I don’t think so–obviously it puts individual soldiers and combat units by limiting their capacity to fight back, but on the strategic scale it’s beneficial. The Status Quo Coalition would kick us out QUICK if we don’t play by the rules. Still, I have heard this argument made, and am curious as to your thoughts on this. And to be clear, I’m not talking just about not attacking civilians. The LOAC being public is sort of like a football team handing their playbook to the opposing team. Does that weaken our ability to win?
This kind of moral engineering is pretty common outside of war: i.e., the weaker side encouraging the stronger side to do something that appears morally reprehensible to a relevant audience. Civil disobedience can be fairly similar from a cop’s perspective. Labor relations can have a similar valence.
This approach is quite common, yes, and is… interestingly complicated. So often, power gravitates into the hands of those who are, when you get right down to it, willing to do incredibly ugly things to other human beings in order to keep it.
To get a situation where Bull Connor racks up horrifyingly bad public relations for the Deep South’s Jim Crow system by using attack dogs and firehoses on civil rights protestors and their children, you need some very specific preconditions to be in place.
In particular, you need to have a system in which a man like Bull Connor gets elected and feels both willing and authorized by society to use attack dogs and firehoses on protestors rather than accept the possibility that racial equality might become the law and custom of the land.
Removing the genteel fiction that such a man is ‘civilized’ in the way that we like to imagine ‘civilized’ meaning can, indeed, be a very powerful political tool. But is this because powerful men are manipulated to appear cruel, or because they are given an opportunity to choose between compromise and revealing the cruelty they were usually able to keep a mask over before?
On the other hand, this does become morally much more problematic when the strategem is done more intentionally and more ruthlessly. If I consistently put my defense headquarters under hospitals, then it is I, at least as much as my enemy, who is revealing my cruelty and depravity when those headquarters are destroyed.
I think this sort of calculus is much less common than is supposed. VC did not use human shields – they were partisans in a village-level war; farmers by day, soldiers by night, and their logistics in terms of food and shelter were their families. The idea that they should have donned red armbands and shot at their enemies only from the midst of open fields would have struck them as absurd.
The same is true of comparable fighters elsewhere in the world – in Afghanistan or Gaza or parts of Iraq or many of the current wars in Africa. Combatants and non-combatants are inextricably mixed, with the non-combatants providing much of the support that in a regular force is provided by the rear service troops.
Moreover, the demand that irregulars confine themselves to certain areas and deny themselves whatever advantages they can contrive in the face of much superior force is to ask them to fail politely.
“VC did not use human shields – they were partisans in a village-level war; farmers by day, soldiers by night, and their logistics in terms of food and shelter were their families.”
So how was the US to distinguish VC members (ok to shoot) from non-VC (not OK)? In a lot of cases, VC were part-time soldiers – they weren’t even soldiers every night, just the nights when they wanted to be.
Was it only OK to shoot them when they were actually attacking? What about when they stopped to reload?
Yes, I know the Geneva Conventions cover this to some extent, but you also have public relations – and most people haven’t read or thought about them, and have their own ideas about what they say and mean.
That’s all very well, but then the irregulars can’t really complain when their non-combatants get caught in the crossfire.
I’ll add, on the ‘human shields’ thing, does moving your family into a contested zone get you a free pass? Are they human shields? Or, as GJ argues below, fair game?
Think about the settler’s family on Native American or Australian or Canadian or … lands if Palestine/Israel is too hard.
In particular, you need to have a system in which a man like Bull Connor gets elected and feels both willing and authorized by society to use attack dogs and firehoses on protestors rather than accept the possibility that racial equality might become the law and custom of the land.
You also need to have a society where a lot of people *object* to dogs and firehoses being used on protestors, and where the laws in question are already somewhat controversial. I can imagine lots of situations where the public might be happy that protestors were being subjected to dogs and firehoses (or maybe quite incensed that they weren’t being treated *more* harshly, with lethal force).
The aim of (most) wars is to change the enemy’s mind. Part of this is avoiding war aims that are total, because they provoke total opposition. So demonstrating in action that one does not intend annihilation is sensible. Moreover, all wars have bystanders and interested third parties. The attitudes of these count – not just for oneself but to the enemy too, and not just for the present but for some time after. A reputation for ruthlessness can become a burden, not an asset.
That implies certain value judgments, though. They certainly hold true for the Status Quo Coalition (since liberty is a major virtue in most of these nations the idea of “We’ll wipe you off the face of the Earth” is dangerous), but it’s certainly not a universal. History presents many cases where ruthlessness has proven effective–Bret discusses a few. And the attitude is hardly relegated to the past–a religious war is possible, and in such a war ruthlessness may in fact be a way to win allies (since it shows you’re more committed to the cause). Secular ideologies can do this too–Sherman didn’t march to the Sea in order to convince Southern farmers how great the Union was, but to convince them how terrible the Union’s wrath was. And as I understand it, such ruthlessness isn’t uncommon in civil wars (you’ve got to be MUCH more angry to shoot your countrymen than to shoot foreigners).
But my question isn’t so much “Should we do this?” As part of the Status Quo Coalition the answer is “Hahaha, oh dear me no.” The issue is what to do if we fight an enemy that does this, and how to evaluate parties fighting enemies that do this. As you say, war is about changing minds, and if you can convince a nation they’re committing atrocities you can erode support on the home front. You can also keep people from allying with your enemies if you can make your enemy look ruthless. If Hamas is using human shields (I’m not saying they are or aren’t, merely using this as an example), the point is to keep Europe and the USA out of the conflict, or even turn them against Israel.
A simple metric like “Civilians killed per soldier killed” is not, I think, adequate to evaluate urban combat. I know that Bret knows this (he says as much a number of times), I just would like to see him expand on this aspect.
Ruthlessness absolutely can work, but it works by persuasion: (albeit violent one) usually by trying to persuade the enemy’s support structure that keeping on fighting isn’t worth it.
War is, ultimately, just about never won by killing all your enemies: It’s won by making your enemy think your terms are better than fighting, and killing them is one of those ways. (with the caveat of course that in any conflict there’s not one side but many, probably as many)
Irrelevant for this war, given that Hamas has openly declared total aims and not backtracked at any point.
Seems that Ollie prefers first system warfare too.
I really do think the “more profound no” is important. Even the best ratio of combatant to civilian deaths calculates to infinity in a needless or badly-managed war, because the deaths on the “good” side of the ratio are only “good” if you presume those enemy combatants needed to die and/or their deaths successfully achieved some larger purpose; otherwise they’re just more victims (as are the friendly casualties!).
I think that’s where a lot of (extremely justified) criticism of America comes from: we get in a lot of conflicts without clear justification or results. Sure, we achieved a historically good ratio in the second battle of Fallujah, but, uh, why did we invade Iraq again? Why did we end up sticking around long enough for there to be two battles of Fallujah worthy of the name? What good did we achieve through our efforts? I’m glad we don’t make as much of a habit intentional butchery as some, but our relative tactical restraint seems like the silver lining on a pretty big dark of strategic choices.
The neocon foreign policy figure Michael Ledeen was reported by his National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg to have summarized the mindset you’re describing in such a vivid and memorable way that Goldberg later canonized it as “the Ledeen Doctrine”:
As far as shocking callousness toward monstrous and barbaric evil, the idea that anyone (let alone a prominent US policy figure) could utter this sentiment out loud makes all the current bickering over insufficient condemnation of Hamas among pro-Palestinian college students look like the world’s tiniest molehill standing at the foot of Mount Everest.
I don’t know If I actually believe this qoute is accurate, I’m pretty sure the invasion of Iraq had more to do with 9/11 and the desire to find Bin Laden. Similarly with Iran. And Vietnam and Korea was about stopping the expansion of Soviet alligned countries and the fear that communism would be subversion convert ‘friendly’ states into enemies.
The fact that the current status order favours America means any anti-american society such as Russia or China has the desire to overthrow the current global order through violence in an attempt to make a multi-polar world.
And so America must take part in foreign wars to prevent this. A complete aversion to foreign wars would mean dictatorships would grow in boldness as they plunder their neighbours without worry of international actions other than sanctions.
So to some extent periodic foreign wars will be necessitated by the political climate in order to maintain our modern world of free trade and international war. Otherwise we return to international anarchy with every non-nuclear state attempting to grow or gain nukes to protect itself.
It also means that any state that objects to the numerous ways the US takes advantage of the rules it has crafted (eg control of international payments, sanctions against third parties, using US courts to seize assets while denying foreign court judgements …) needs to be brought into line. Guatemala? Panama? Grenada? These were hardly threats to world order. Nor did the loss of South Vietnam and Laos shift the world order much.
Since neither Iraq nor Iran had much if anything to do with 9/11 in any rational judgement, one has to look elsewhere. The drivers are complex, but an unthinking imperial reflex surely plays a part.
You’re kidding right? It’s not the US that gets a free pass these days. It’s Iran, China, Russia and of course Hamas.
I feel a lot depends on who is asked for the free pass. If I stopped people at random in Europe and North America and asked them for their opinions of Russia, China, Iran and Hamas, polling suggests that few people would sympathise with their governments, although I suppose some might sympathise with their subjects.
But if I asked in universities, newsrooms and other places vulnerable to intellectual fashions, I might get a different answer. Especially if I did not ask them in secret.
But if I asked in universities, newsrooms and other places vulnerable to intellectual fashions, I might get a different answer. Especially if I did not ask them in secret.
I’ll give you Hamas, but neither US progressives nor US conservatives are particularly pro Iran or pro China right now, and a certain wing of conservatives are probably the most likely to be pro Russia (which makes sense since Putin is more a man of the right than of the left).
Polling suggest that the most pro-China or at least, the least anti-China segment of the US population is “conservative Democrats”, not progressives.
Hector, not having seen the polls myself and judging things only from a distance, I am happy to take your judgement.
With the proviso that extremists of various descriptions are the most likely people to give any of those a pass, and you generally find more extremists as you go up the social scale.
*the desire to find Bin Laden.*
I don’t think that had anything to do with the decision invade Iraq.
Nearly nobody of importance believed that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden. Some claims were made; however, those were mostly another excuse.
I suspect the aftermath of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait had more to do with it. If I recall correctly the Iraqi’s were even firing on US planes which enforced the no-fly zones, Saddam had once even placed troops near the Kuwaiti border*, and attempts to remove Saddam via sponsoring coups failed. Then 9/11 happened and the US became, poorly enough for everybody involved, less ‘tolerant’ of such things and then the next act of the tragedy of incompetence and hubris began.
Though as I am only a layman when it comes to geopolitics I might have missed other important factors.
*I had checked it on Wikipedia to see whether I was misremembering anything and a quick reads suggests to me not:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_no-fly_zones_conflict
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vigilant_Warrior
Yeah, all the discussions from high ranks about any kind of connection at all were about things like them being part of the same broad category, or about how Saddam cheered when he found out about the 9/11 attacks, or about how Iraq might be the seed for a similar future attack, or that time Iraq tried to assassinate a US president. (Well, I think he was a former President by then, but still.)
If you want to see a contemporary discussion of why the US went after Iraq, https://erbosoft.com/ussclueless/essays/strategic_overview.htm is still the best one I’ve ever seen. It’s guesswork from a staunchly pro-war layman, but that gives him the ability to say a lot of things that Bush or Rumsfeld could never have gotten away with saying publicly. And I think it explains what we saw better than either the “We just wanted the oil!” theory, or the “It was purely humanitarian!” theory, or the “WMD!” theory.
(Note, I do not claim that he was right about all of the object-level issues underlying that decision. But I do think that this a very accurate discussion of what the US government was probably thinking at the time.)
@Alsadius
Hmm, interesting.
I do not know enough about the neoconservatives to assess how likely it is such things had been present in the Kool-Aid they were drinking.
However, it is indeed more plausible and explains more than certain other explanations I often hear.
@Tus 3 and also @Alsadius (I can’t tell if I’m missing something or if we hit the limit on threaded replies):
Our host linked a great article about what historians think right now about why we invaded:
https://tnsr.org/2023/06/why-did-the-united-states-invade-iraq-the-debate-at-20-years/
https://acoup.blog/2023/06/22/fireside-friday-june-23-2023-on-historical-judgement/
The historians seem divided on “take them at their public statements word it was about national security”(Al Quaeda and/or WMD, both of which proved to be false or unfounded to various degrees) or “it was really about extending American influence/hegemony.” You can see Prof Devereaux’s take and the description of the two positions (I think the “take them at their word” school is overly credulous about their contemporary and reflective statements).
Our host linked a great article about what historians think right now about why we invaded:
I remember having read it; however, it was rather boring and did not contain important new information so I had forgotten most of it.
Though Alsadius’ theory can explain why the US was obsessed with hegemony or security in the Middle East, instead of, say, being obsessed over North Korean WMD’s or with hegemony over Sub-Saharan Africa.
However, I admit that there exist many other theories which can explain that. Like Saddam’s hostility to Israel, which any US’ President has to support or risk angering certain interest groups, like those crazy evangelicals who believe that ‘the Jews need to own the Holy Land for Jesus to return’ or something; or fears that Saddam might use WMDs on Saudi Arabia’s oil fields creating another Oil Crisis.
to Roxana
Free pass from whom? Certainly not the most developed and influential parts of the world. I am pointing out that the US (like Britain before it) not only derives considerable material advantages from the current set-up – in some part at the expense of states with little leverage, but also uses its control to punish those who raise issues with this. This control sometimes spills over into armed force, where the US is more or less immune to retaliation. This is not upholding a neutral ‘order’. It’s nice to be hegemon, but the complaints of the hegemonised have a logic to them.
“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
This is a version of Kissinger’s doctrine of “do something powerful to show that you are powerful”, though I guess he did it more than once every 10 years.
*As far as shocking callousness toward monstrous and barbaric evil, the idea that anyone (let alone a prominent US policy figure) could utter this sentiment out loud makes all the current bickering over insufficient condemnation of Hamas among pro-Palestinian college students look like the world’s tiniest molehill standing at the foot of Mount Everest.*
Look, that somebody in the US government said something bad (assuming it ever actually had been said and not made up) about the USA does not mean it is correct. (Also is he even prominent in the first place? I have never even heard of that guy before.)
To give one example, there apparently was somebody in the US army who made the absurd claim that the idiot Bush Junior had launched his stupid Invasion of Iraq to seize Iraq’s oil. I could easily come up with a lengthy list of reasons how that makes no sense at all (for example, if one wanted Iraq’s oil installing a democratic government there would be one of the stupidest things one could do*); however, much easier is the following:
A look at the service contracts licensing results in Iraq (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Iraq#Service_contracts_licensing_results): China and Russia combined have received more of Iraq’s oil than US oil companies and the Netherlands and Malaysia combined have received nearly as much as US oil companies. Why would the US allow great powers who opposed the invasion of Iraq and unimportant mini-countries to get so much of Iraq’s oil, if they had invaded it so their own oil companies could have Iraq’s oil?
So no, I do not believe that claim at all.
For example, if the US had some compulsion to attack some small country every decade, why did they wait so long to bomb Serbia in the Yugoslav Wars? By being pretty open about their ‘ethnic cleansing’-thing Milošević was giving them an amazing excuse to launch a real intervention yet they had waited till after the Srebrenica massacre.
If I were to search for hidden reasons behind the Iraq War, I’d go for something else. Like hubris caused by the fall of the Soviet Union, whatever Kool-Aid the neoconservatives had been drinking, 9/11 making the US completely mad**, or maybe those Saddam-hating Iraqi exiles going ‘Saddam certainly has WMD’s, moreover the Iraqi population will welcome US forces as liberators***’ some of which later ended up having high positions in the provisional government of Iraq.
*To show how few sense that makes, apparently US oil companies had not even pushed for the invasion — in fact they lobbied to lift the sanctions on Iraq, which blocked potential profits.
Source: https://inthesetimes.com/article/what-the-iraq-war-teaches-us
**Or actually it is more complicated. I had once heard the claim that before 9/11 the US was worried about both terrorists and WMDs, afterwards it was worried about terrorists armed with WMDs. And it was known the Saddam had a WMD program before 1991.
***Another thing which Bush Junior seems to have believed without putting in the necessary work of doublechecking.
“The IDF claims that they are killing one Hamas soldier for every two civilians they kill in Gaza, a ratio of 0.5,…”
Yes, let’s just swallow whatever numbers the Israeli military feeds us and run with them. What a great idea.
At the very least, the real number is not going to be better for Israel than the one the IDF claims. So the point in the post, that this doesn’t actually reflect great precision or concern for civilian life, stands.
That “point” itself is the propaganda. It conveniently transforms the likely reality that the true ratio is horrifically small into some sanitized phrase such as “not actually a particularly scrupulous or discriminating ratio”.
That’s pretty much the opposite of how I read it. If the BEST the IDF can pretend is “We’re slightly worse than the USSR invading Berlin”, the reality is pretty horrific.
Part of the issue is that you’ve removed the number from the context. This wasn’t presented in isolation–it was part of a discussion of past combat, specifically about what’s considered acceptable and what’s not. 0.5 is clearly on the “unacceptable” side–the other things in that bin were recognized atrocities. There’s an entire paragraph demonstrating that anything lower than 1.0 is horrifying, and that matters here.
Part of the issue is that academic writing, especially on morally-charged topics, tends to be mild. “not a particularly scrupulous or discriminating ratio” can reasonably be translated to “Israel is committing war crimes” (with the caveat that Bret doesn’t discuss the alleged use of human shields on the Palestinian side). It would be more common, given the generally academic tone of this blog, to merely state “This places the current conflict between X conflict and Y conflict” without making a direct moral judgment.
This sort of thing gets scientists and academics into trouble all the time when communicating with the media–they speak different dialects, so what one side hears isn’t what the other side says.
Finally, part of the issue is rhetoric. We don’t know the real numbers; in such situations it’s common to use the numbers that argue against the point you’re making (and remember, Bret criticized Israel here). This is to avoid real or apparent cherry-picking of the data. If you give them their absolute best shot and they still fall below “USSR invading Berlin in WWII”, it’s quite strong evidence that they’re doing something badly wrong.
If you give them their absolute best shot and they still fall below “USSR invading Berlin in WWII”, it’s quite strong evidence that they’re doing something badly wrong.
Hamas has a deliberate policy of using civilians as human shields. Did Nazi Germany? If the answer is “no” (and I’ve never heard of them using human shields, at least not in Berlin in 1945), then the evidence becomes so weak as to be basically worthless.
The Nazis didn’t try to use civilians as human shields because there’d be no point. The Soviets would shoot right through them.
What they did do was grab children and senior citizens, hand them an old rifle, and tell them to gloriously die to defend the fatherland, and hang them if they tried to refuse.
Part of the issue is that you’ve removed the number from the context. This wasn’t presented in isolation–it was part of a discussion of past combat, specifically about what’s considered acceptable and what’s not. 0.5 is clearly on the “unacceptable” side–the other things in that bin were recognized atrocities. There’s an entire paragraph demonstrating that anything lower than 1.0 is horrifying, and that matters here.
That wasn’t really the sense I got from reading that passage, although of course it’s hard to read tone over the internet (and also, of course, people are going to vary in terms of their threshold for “horrifying). In the passage Bret says that a ratio of 0.5 is “far from the worst, far from the best” and that America’s ratio of military to civilian deaths in recent conflicts is unusually “good”.
Personally, since it’s fairly well known that the Soviet army in WWII was notorious for committing atrocities, I was surprised that the ratio of military to civilian deaths during the Battle of Berlin wasn’t lower- 0.736 seems surprisingly “good” or at least “not terrible”.
The behaviour of armies is tied in with war aims. If your aim is to take land but not people, then killing or driving off civilians will be a part of the tactical deal (see eg a lot of the US’ Indian wars). This reached its apogee with Germany in the east in WW II – killing Polish and Soviet civilians was an acknowledged aim, and the troops were instructed more or less directly to do so.
The Red Army had its share of atrocities, but it’s worth noting first that a much higher proportion of German POWs survived Soviet captivity than the reverse and second that atrocity was not official policy – officers tried to rein it in. From memoirs I have read, first-line troops were quite well-behaved; a lot of the worst behaviour was from the second line, mostly from western Russia and the Ukraine, who had been swept up from the occupied east. After three years of abuse, and crossing a few hundred kilometres marked by dead relatives and children hanging from trees, they were out for revenge.
Which makes for a third point – a slave uprising is a very ugly thing, best avoided by not making slaves. Caged people tend to be feral when they escape.
To say nothing of the other obvious elephant in the room if the points of comparison are “Red Army in Germany, 1945” versus “IDF in Gaza, 2023”: given the extent to which the state of Israel’s ideological raison d’être is grounded in its heritage as descendants of the victims of the Holocaust, and the frantically strained energy with which Nazism and the Holocaust get allegorically projected onto whatever enemy Israel happens to be fighting in order to justify whatever ethical shortcuts the IDF has decided to take in its approach to “enemy” civilians, shouldn’t any such defense of Israeli war efforts have to apply far more directly and potently to the war effort against the actual literal Third Reich, by people who’d actually literally just survived an intended Nazi genocide, who were fighting to stop the actual literal Holocaust in progress?
“Which makes for a third point – a slave uprising is a very ugly thing, best avoided by not making slaves. Caged people tend to be feral when they escape.”
Are they? These two slave revolts seemed to involve the deaths of dozens of free people and hundreds of rebellious slaves:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demerara_rebellion_of_1823
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacky%27s_War
Slaves were human beings, and might be expected to employ violence as strategically as other human beings. They were not animals, and rebellious ones were not feral any more than loyal ones were domesticated.
That is why they were potentially dangerous. Nobody worried about a rebellion of horses, however feral.
Slaves were human beings, and might be expected to employ violence as strategically as other human beings. They were not animals, and rebellious ones were not feral any more than loyal ones were domesticated.
People often commit violence for non-strategic reasons, though, including resentment and hatred.
GJ, that might be true, but I feel people asserting it to be especially true about escaping slaves, concentration camp inmates etc, ought to point to some evidence to that effect.
Until they do, I think it reasonable to assume that people fighting for their lives take a very practical view of violence. Sadism is a luxury good.
GJ, that might be true, but I feel people asserting it to be especially true about escaping slaves, concentration camp inmates etc, ought to point to some evidence to that effect.
I don’t know whether slave rebellions (which, NB, isn’t the same as “escaping slaves”, much less concentration camp inmates) are unusually violent compared to other wars. I do know, however, from the prevalence of torture and massacre throughout human history, that “employing violence as strategically as other human beings” still leaves room for a huge amount of unstrategic brutality, even if we discount the extra motives of revenge and payback that rebellious slaves would have.
Until they do, I think it reasonable to assume that people fighting for their lives take a very practical view of violence. Sadism is a luxury good.
The last few decades provide plenty of examples of people murdering perceived oppressors, whether they be colonial overlords (Algerian rebels vs. pieds noirs, arguably Hamas vs. Israelis), local rivals (Hutus vs. Tutsis, Hindus and Muslims in post-partition India), or ideological enemies (every communist regime ever). I see no reason why rebellious slaves would be any more restrained.
The Red Army had its share of atrocities, but it’s worth noting first that a much higher proportion of German POWs survived Soviet captivity than the reverse and second that atrocity was not official policy – officers tried to rein it in. From memoirs I have read, first-line troops were quite well-behaved; a lot of the worst behaviour was from the second line, mostly from western Russia and the Ukraine, who had been swept up from the occupied east.
I think that’s an excellent point about war aims dictating the strategy and the level of violence towards civilians. Of course the Soviets’ goal in Germany (minus the portion of East Prussia that they annexed) was about ideology (and to an extent about geopolitical aggrandizement), not about land, so eliminating the Germans as a people wouldn’t really have furthered those ideological goals.
I also agree that any attempts to equate or elide the basic differences between the Nazi and Soviet sides is too silly for words and I also wasn’t suggesting that the atrocities were official policy.
“The last few decades provide plenty of examples of people murdering perceived oppressors, whether they be colonial overlords (Algerian rebels vs. pieds noirs, arguably Hamas vs. Israelis), local rivals (Hutus vs. Tutsis, Hindus and Muslims in post-partition India), or ideological enemies (every communist regime ever). I see no reason why rebellious slaves would be any more restrained.”
GJ, to take these four examples in reverse order:
1) Communist governments were not taking revenge for oppression committed against them. Pol Pots family were court officials, Maos were landholders, Lenin was a lawyer. Only Stalin came from the wrong side of the tracks, and I doubt he purged his own Party because they had mistreated him. Putin (to stretch a point) is a former KGB agent and his whole lifelong experience of sadistic oppression is of being the sadistic oppressor. That is why he is so keen on it.
2) Indian Muslims and Hindus in 1947 might perhaps be described as having been oppressed by the British. If so, it is noticeable that when the oppression ended they responded with genocidal violence, not against the former oppressors, but against whichever ethic group was the local powerless minority.
3) Rwandan Hutus had been the ruling group for decades when they massacred Rwandan Tutsis; shortly before being overthrown by Rwandan Tutsis who committed many fewer murders against their former oppressors.
4) Algerian rebels might indeed be said to have been killing oppressors when they killed Frenchmen during the rebellion. They also killed a lot more Algerian non-rebels during the rebellion. Algerians in France, surrounded by Frenchmen, during the rebellion and after victory, killed almost no one for being French. The French themselves killed and tortured far more Algerians than vice versa during the war.
I don’t see how this list demonstrates that the rebellious oppressed are especially likely to visit especially impressive bloodshed on the former oppressor in the event of rebellion. So I don’t see how it supports the contention that slave revolts were especially likely to have bloody, except in the sense of being bloodily suppressed by the slave-owners. I don’t see how this shows that “Caged people tend to be feral when they escape.”
I can’t help but feel this trope exists mostly so that people whose favourite rebel group is keen on murder rape and torture can claim that the murder rape and torture they commit is proof of how oppressed they are.
Pol Pots family were court officials, Maos were landholders, Lenin was a lawyer. Only Stalin came from the wrong side of the tracks, and I doubt he purged his own Party because they had mistreated him
The Old Bolsheviks themselves were mostly professional-class (with some exceptions like Stalin, Rykov, Tomsky etc.) but the second-generation Soviet officials were largely of peasant origin, and the leaders and party elites in the post-WWII Warsaw Pact states (including Ulbricht, Gottwald, Husak, Tito etc.) were largely of industril working class or artisan-class origin.
Of course the Warsaw Pact states also instituted communism with a whole lot less mass deaths than the Soviets did, which is consistent with the point you’re making. My suspicion is that working class leaders are going to be somewhat more pragmatic and less given to ideological extremism than professional-class ones.
If so, it is noticeable that when the oppression ended they responded with genocidal violence, not against the former oppressors, but against whichever ethic group was the local powerless minority.
I think that’s way too simplistic. There were (and are) lots of axes of oppression in South Asia, colonialism was just one of them. In a lot of the subcontinent there were situtions where Hindus and Muslims (and Sikhs in areas where that was relevant) absolutely did perceive the other group(s) as local elites/oppressors. Although I definitely agree that you can’t reduce religious animosities either then or now to simple economic oppression.
Tutsis in Rwanda were the historical elite/ruling group, but that was mostly over 1959.
Haiti? The original jacquerie? The Ulster revolt of 1641? Pugachev’s Revolt? History is studded with these episodes, and it is simplistic to attribute the violence to the motives and policies of the ‘leaders’, who often were figureheads. A lot of violence is not rational (most murders are committed in moments of rage, not out of calculation). Revenge is a perfectly understandable and human emotion – if one has been starved, whipped, seen one’s family torn apart, one’s children sold or abused – all with the complicit acquiescence of some whole group, the desire to payback is quite understandable.
It’s a tribute to many oppressed people that they do not indulge in it to the extent that their oppressors fear they would (know what they themselves have done). But a good many do – fear of retribution is not groundless.
“A lot of violence is not rational (most murders are committed in moments of rage, not out of calculation).”
PeterT, most murders are committed after an escalation spiral in which two men quarrelled and neither wished to back down in the face of the other.
The higher-ranking person is generally the most likely to resort to violence rather than back down, because backing down to an inferior makes you look weaker than before, but backing down to a clear superior only reconfirms what everyone already knew.
Masters threatened by slaves suddenly looked far weaker than before, and therefore had great reason to deploy any amount of violence to re-establish the old hierarchy.
Slaves who overthrow their masters already looked strong, and had less need to demonstrate the strength that everyone already knew they had because they just used it.
Do you have statistics on that claim about murders?
Although the bloated self-esteem of murderers and other criminals does indeed argue that their (delusional view of) high status is a factor.
Mary, I’m afraid I’m going from How the Mind Works (Steven Pinker) and Ghettoside (Jill Leovy). And I think Codes of the Underworld – How Criminals Communicate (Diego Gambetta) and The Goodness Paradox (Richard Wrangham).
We still need stats.
On the stats on murder, I had in mind your average developed country (so not the US, which is much more violent than most developed countries). According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, around three quarters of homicides are committed by family or acquaintances, and over half of these arise from a quarrel. Alcohol or drugs are quite often involved. In Australia, where hand-guns are very rare, the most common cause of death is a stab wound.
So your typical murder here – or in the UK or western Europe – is some person getting enraged with a family member or friend, snatching up a knife and stabbing them.
His point is that Israel killings are “not that bad”, which is entirely unsupported when using already pretty bad “best case” estimate. Funnily it really stood in contrast when he just criticizes Russian Mariupol numbers just few line above
You are absolutely correct. Bret is making basic errors (assuming they were unintentional).
If he wants to assess Israel on its self-reported ratio (0.5), then he should be comparing it to Russia’s self-reported ratio for Mariupol (1.4).
Only if one believes that Israel and Russia are both equally (un)trustworthy regarding published war statistics, and that Israel should be (dis)believed as much as Russia. I don’t think that position is sound.
Russia’s 1.4:1 casualty ratio is ridiculously high, and Ukrainian / third-party reporting heavily contests it, to the point of AP asserting 0.168:1.
Israel still has every incentive to inflate their precision ratio the most out of everyone, so when it gives a low ratio estimate of 0.5:1 it’s extremely unlikely to be higher than that. But, if their number is closer to reality, then the actual true ratio might still be higher than 0.168:1. It will not be known until reliable third-party reporting comes out, which might end up never happening.
There’s no available numbers that are objective and reliable. Your choices are basically IDF numbers, Hamas numbers, or people-throwing-at-a-dartboard numbers. Best you can do there is make it clear which set of numbers you’re using, what the biases on those numbers are (if it’s not already clear), and let people conclude things accordingly.
And even then, I don’t think Hamas publishes any civilian vs military breakdowns – they just publish totals. So even if we were to say (for sake of argument) that Hamas numbers are more reliable generally than IDF numbers are, you’d still need to use the IDF numbers for this specific question, just because no alternatives exist at all.
The Gaza Health Ministry numbers for past incidents can be compared to the counts made by UN observers afterwards and there is no significant discrepancy. The Health Ministry is reliant on international health organizations and these people have reported no fraud. Journalists are on the ground and at places the Health Ministry has reported very high casualties, they have observed the nearby hospitals and morgues overflowing with patients and recently deceased individuals one would expect.
The evidence universally that the “Hamas” numbers are medical staff doing the best they can. It’s extremely sad that we allow people to treat medical professionals risking their lives to provide healthcare in a warzone to be treated as untrustworthy for no reason except that they help people on the “wrong side”.
You’ll notice that I didn’t claim fraud, and my argument doesn’t require fraud. So far as I’m aware, Hamas literally does not say “X people died, and Y of them were combatants” – they just give the X. We cannot use that to determine a ratio, because there simply is not enough information to do so.
And yes, every locally-run organization in Gaza can be referred to as “Hamas” – it’s a dictatorship that sees itself as being in a permanent state of war, those are not typically prone to letting random people they don’t control manage their public relations efforts. I’m sure that the individual doctors are mostly good people, just like everywhere else, but we’re not getting reports from doctors directly – we’re getting them from a Hamas-run bureaucracy. Even if this is a topic where they typically choose not to lie, this will introduce potential bias, and that should be noted. (As far as I can tell, they’re usually fairly honest with numbers, and any deceit that may exist is in the composition of those numbers, not the raw numbers themselves. But that’s just my impression, and I’m not going to swear to it on a stack of Bibles or anything.)
But yeah, Israeli sources should be marked as such, and Hamas sources should be marked as such. Not because you want to discredit anyone or ignore anything, but just because it’s good practice to be very clear about where you got your data. People can infer as needed from that information.
I have read arguments based on how Palestinian ID cards work (not controlled by Hamas) about why the overall death counts (not cause of death or military versus civilian) should be considered accurate. I summarized them in another forum here:
https://tildes.net/~news/1bwx/israel_hamas_war_megathread_november_6_to_november_15#comment-b4vr
Not an expert, corrections welcome, etc.
“But yeah, Israeli sources should be marked as such, and Hamas sources ”
And once again, you use perjorative phrasing.
The Palestinian numbers, i.e. the numbers the evidence suggests are essentially accurate, you call by the name of a militant political organization that does not seem to be influencing the numbers. The Israeli numbers which come from a militant organization and show obvious signs of political influence, you dont refer to as the numbers of either the militant organization or the political organization. (That is to say you dont say “the IDF numbers” or ‘the Likud numbers”.) This is not objective and it’s not good practice.
If your goal is actually to say where the numbers are coming from, your choice of words is accomplishing the opposite. You should perhaps take a more critical eye at what you think is objective assessment on your part.
The cornerstone of Alsadius’ argument seems to be that while it is known that there are organizations which can be called ‘Israeli’ but which are independent of the IDF and the government. But that Hamas does not tolerate such independence from organizations within Gaza.
If his argument were to be true, it would have some weight. There have been plenty of states throughout history that didn’t tolerate NGOs of reasonable size and would take control of them in one way or another, such that they could not do anything independent of their cause.
Whether his argument is true, I am not qualified to comment on.
Simon, looking at Freedom House, I note it gives Israel a rating of 77 (about the same as Bulgaria and a good deal better than eg Mexico) and Gaza a rating of 11 (marginally worse than Iran and Cuba).
So I think it fair to conclude that NGOs in Israel are freer to report whatever they think is true than NGOs in Gaza.
Put another way: the current Israeli PM is on trial for corruption. Whatever that says about Israeli politics, it surely demonstrates an independent judiciary. (I might compare the United States, where a sitting president would be untouchable by the courts until his term ended.)
Well, there is Medecins San Frontiers, which reported that “On 6 December, Al-Aqsa hospital received more dead patients than injured (115 in 24 hours).
Nasser hospital, Khan Younis, received 5,166 wounded, and 1,468 patients who were declared dead on arrival since 7 October. Seventy per cent of the dead were women and children.
MSF is entirely independent of both Hamas and the IDF, and its numbers come from its medical personnel in Gaza.
That can be used for totals, but not for breakdowns (unless there’s a lot more detail available than you’ve quoted). After all, combatants will go to the hospital when wounded, just like non-combatants.
Also, anyone who has people on the ground in Gaza is at least somewhat vulnerable to Hamas intimidation. I don’t want to overstate this point, because it’d be easy to turn that into radical skepticism towards any numbers I dislike, but it’s worth noting. I’ve certainly run across stories of third parties in the area biting their tongues until they’d safely left. It’s going to be more reliable than Hamas numbers, but it’s not a gold standard (because tbh, nothing here will be a gold standard.)
I don’t actually think this is true. With some basic assumptions, you should be able to estimate the share of total deaths that are civilians from the share of total total deaths that are expected to be women and children (who are almost entirely civilians).
So let’s assume that when a civilian dies in an airstrike, the probability that the civilian is a man, a woman, or a child matches that group’s share of the overall civilians population.
47.3% of Gazans are children ( https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206479861/israel-gaza-hamas-children-population-war-palestinians ) and of the remaining 52.7% half should be women, so ~73.6% of Gazans are women and children. The total population of gaza is 2.375 million (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip), while 30,000-40,000 are reported to be Hamas fighters (https://www.axios.com/2023/10/21/palestine-hamas-military-power). If we assume there are 40,000 Hamas fighters, all of whom are adult men, then the breakdown of the Gazan population is roughly this: ~47.3% children, ~26.4% women, ~24.7 civilian men, ~1.7% combatant men.
So as a percentage of civilians in the strip women and children are (47.3+26.4)/(47.3+26.4+24.7)=75%. We know the percentage of casualties that are women and children: 69% as of Nov 25th (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-death-toll.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare).
Using those two numbers we can estimate the percentage of total casualties that are civilians using this equation:
(percentage of casualties that are women and children)/(fraction of total civilians that are women and children)=(percentage of total casualties that are civilians)
So: 69/0.75=92% of casualties are likely to be civilians.
To get the estimated civilian to combatant ratio: 92/(100-92)=11.5 civilians killed per combatant killed. Or a ratio of about 0.09 combatants per civilian killed.
Obviously this isn’t a perfect estimate due to the assumption, but it’s almost certainly better than IDF estimates, which seem to assume that all military aged men are combatants.
I too assume the real number is likely worse than the official IDF figure. All countries in war fudge the numbers in their favor. Which means if the official IDF figure is already disappointing…well…then the real number might be even more so.
” All countries in war fudge the numbers in their favor.”
Fudging numbers is common. What is uncommon is a government whose political and military leadership is so openly and frequently boasting about devastating a populace, complete with Biblical references to Amalek. And there’s an overwhelming amount of information coming out of the region every day, covering everything from how Israel picks its targets to how many journalists have been killed.
Well, you’ve been so diligent about presenting the Russian figures for Mariupol with a critical eye, rejecting them out of hand and taking the much higher Ukrainian estimates for your ratio. Why don’t you amend your blog post and apply the same level of diligence in analyzing the IDF figures for Gaza? Surely you can do better than “The IDF said so, I guess.”
One wouldn’t be able to tell from reading this blog, but the whole Israel-Palestine thing has being showing up in the news quite a bit lately.
You might want to re-read this part of the original post:
> And because this is bound to be a heated topic I want to remind y’all in the comments that *you will be civil*. There are many places to have screaming matches about today’s active conflicts, but what I would like to see instead of a sober discussion of what is and is not possible.
I don’t mean to get too snippy here, but you’re coming on extremely strong.
Here are some estimates from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor as of Dec 11:
24141 total dead
9420 children
4910 women
22420 civilians
The resulting ratio about 0.0768
What combatant count are you assuming there? Quick math implies 1700 or so, but that seems extremely low to me.
I think the floor on civilian casualties in modern warfare is set by the necessity of using artillery in modern combined-arms warfare. Someone with a direct-fire weapon can hold fire if there is a civilian in the crosshairs, but rockets or shells fired indirectly are going to impose random casualties over a substantial area. And since we now fight wars in cities, that’s going to mean a lot of civilian casualties. At best, we could hope that someone trying to defend a city will first evacuate most of its population to the rear. Some combatants do that, some don’t, and the evacuation will never be perfect.
And there’s no getting around the need for artillery, because of the essentially rock-paper-scissors dynamic of combined-arms warfare. Tanks (usually) beat artillery, artillery beats infantry, and infantry beats tanks. The only way to win is to bring all three, ideally matching each against the appropriate target. Fighting a war without artillery is like playing rock-paper-scissors with a promise to never play “rock” – the guy with the full set of options has a huge advantage.
So, definitely you can tell your infantry “no atrocities!”, if you’re in a strong enough position you can probably tell your commanders “if in doubt, don’t make artillery your first choice”, and possibly you can convince the enemy to evacuate their civilians.
At least we don’t do foraging any more.
As observed in the current Ukraine conflict, small armed drones can substitute for indirect fire against dispersed infantry to some extent, and they do have the ability to call the strike off at the last second.
It will be interesting to see what effect the use of drones will have on the “cost-effectiveness” of war — if you can use targetted drone strikes instead of artillery against enemy positions, you could potentially take control of a city with much less damage to its physical structure.
“don’t do foraging” – the Russian interdiction of Ukraine grain exports is kind of an indirect form of foraging — stopping food from getting to innocent bystanders in, e.g., Africa.
No, foraging is about getting food for your army. It’s not the same as a blockade.
Except it looks like China and Spain are the main beneficiaries.
/ Volume of agricultural exports from Ukraine secured by the Black Sea Grain Initiative from August 1, 2022 to July 17, 2023, by country (in million metric tons)
It looks like Africa is getting 9% of that grain. China is getting 27% and Spain is getting 20%.
It’s even more simple and sad: a city is probably the best defensive terrain a modern army can fight in. It’s like an above-ground network of tunnels and caves that covers several square kilometers. You can’t really take one without fire support. A single fortified house can resist for sixty days and still not be taken unless you can encircle it and starve out the defenders or level it with explosives.
Foraging sounds absolutely abysmal to live through if you’re on the receiving end. I never realised that’s wht it referred to until I read the article (I had assumed it meant, like, gathering wild chestnuts or acorns or whatever) and I’d assumed that premodern armies carried their food with them.
And even if you can be scrupulous about your artillery targeting, the fact that you are wrecking infrastructure is likely to kill people anyway (exposure, water, etc. etc.)
Concerning LeMay’s quote, it is interesting that Admiral Dönitz was not sentenced at Nuremberg for unrestricted submarine warfare as he showed that the Allied had done the same in the Pacific War
I’m just waiting patiently for the shield wall post.
I would like to remark that it was a well written article, and would like to ask if anyone supposes the prospective future of warfare in space will heighten or decrease the amount of civilian casualties?
Kind of impossible to predict. If space habitats and colonies become a thing, then they are likely to exist in extremely hostile environments where an enemy willing to destroy them could do so easily. I’m reminded of a quote from Kim Stanley Robinson’s book, Red Mars, about the failure of colonial rebellion on Mars, which at this time in the narrative is not significantly terraformed, so there’s effectively no atmosphere:
“It was not hard to destroy Martian towns. No harder than breaking a window, or popping a balloon.”
This bitter reflection by the Martian protagonist captures the big reason why I say it’s impossible to predict military to civilian casualty ratios.
It’s just too easy for habitats are simply destroyed or depressurized by overwhelmingly powerful weapons brought to the war zone by spaceships. The attacker has a strong incentive not to ship in infantry apart from occupation troops for any habitats that surrender fast enough, because the logistical footprint of sustained infantry combat is made ruinously expensive by the costs of space travel. Furthermore, unlike on the surface of the Earth, there is a very distinct period of approaching a target through total vacuum, where it will usually be visible for a long time, before there is any possibility of combat truly beginning. Barring treachery and strategems, the enemy will always be very aware that you are coming.
These factors combine to give the defender very large advantages unless space travel is extremely cheap and spaceships are very, very large.
(e.g. the Trade Federation in Star Wars has a fleet of battleships so large it actually can transport the millions and millions of troops necessary to occupy a whole planet, and its troops are robots that fold up neatly, don’t eat, and use weapons that don’t seem to consume ammunition, so it doesn’t need much resupply. But Star Wars is a rather fantastic take on science fiction.)
…
Now, the reason I say unpredictable is that I don’t think we can know in advance whether the wars are going to be fought at one or the other of two extremes. At the one end, warfare is very total and the civilian population is very likely to be destroyed by attacks on their vulnerable habitats. At the other end, warfare is sort of chivalrous and deliberate efforts are made to fight on ‘neutral ground’ or in spaces that are not so vulnerable to collateral damage. After which the losing side surrenders “to prevent a needless effusion of oxygen,” so to speak, because they really, really don’t want the winning side to feel motivated to punch a hole in their habitat and let the air out.
You could see either outcome, and you might see both in different wars, depending on the political attitude of the opposing sides.
CJ Cherryh’s “Downbelow Station” is about such a war in space, where until recently the war had been limited, but the losing side has decided to change that.
Any space station (which are the cities of this setting) is extremely vulnerable to starship weapons, and have been treated as open cities. There is no mention of any fixed space defenses, and little mention of large infantry battles on station, though armored marines and boarding actions do happen. Civilian starships can be raided for supplies and recruits, but not otherwise damaged. That’s the theory, in practice it varys from warship to warship.
But the Earth Company fleet is losing, and shifts to destroying stations via sabotage, and rendering the titular Downbelow Station ungovernable by flooding it with refugees who may include covert saboteurs.
The idea there is to create a “scorched space” zone difficult for the enemy to operate through, while the EC fleet does a coup in the Sol system to provide resources to rebuild.
“But the Earth Company fleet is losing, and shifts to destroying stations via sabotage”
Why not just destroy them from a distance, if they are extremely vulnerable to starship weapons?
(I would really like to like her books, but for some reason it never seems to work. I wish I knew why.)
Denialbility and internal morale. Blowing up stations full of people makes them look like total monsters, while evacuating stations ruined by unknown saboteurs doesn’t. Some of the EC fleet thinks they are still the good guys, even if forced into extreme actions. Indeed, a critical plot point is when Captain Mallory of the Norway defects to the Alliance because she can’t stomach the depths Admiral Mazian is sinking to.
Cherryh can be heavy going because she is very light on exposition, leaving you to read between the lines.
In my experience, everyone seems to like a different random subset of Cherryh’s works, with little predictability. The best bet is probably the Chanur books, starting with Pride of Chanur. But her writing does tend to have a certain feel: low-trust, low-information, claustrophobic, scared. Male POV characters probably have less power and agency than female ones.
Though the fifth Chanur book was surprisingly hilarious at points, and the sequel to Cyteen felt like fix-it slice-of-life fanfic for much of its length. (I don’t say that in a bad way, I liked _Regenesis_, but it was so _weird_ for a Cherryh novel. People just being nice and friendly without deep plots. Poor traumatized Justin trying to learn that he was suddenly in a kinder and gentler genre.)
On the other hand, the actual population density of space is generally liable to be tiny, and the bulk of actual space combat proper involves a very high ratio of metal to human (or “crewium”, to go by the terminology of one tiny science-fictional community). Largely automated combat platforms destroying largely automated transport infrastructure and largely automated surveillance assets doe not make for much bloodshed, grisly though the Kessler syndrome may be.
Gundam loves it’s action sequences in depressurizign space colonies.
Almost certainly heighten.
First off any space combat scenario in the foreseeable future will be closer to urban combat than anything, given that all space habitats need to be built by humans and there’s no need to provide wide, sprawling spaces; it will be a lot more economical and probably safer to provide tighter quarters. So more corners to clear, more places for people to hide, more ambushes, more of what makes urban combat so much more difficult in the first place.
Second is that a space habitat is fragile in ways that a terrestrial city simply is not. No matter how many explosives you set off in a modern city, you’re not going to blow away the entire atmosphere; but that’s a very real concern in the closed, pressurized environments of space.
Finally if we’re in space and mining asteroids, every single one of them is a potential WMD. Even if fired by accident, it would be all too easy for one to land near a grounded (Mars or Luna-based) habitat and wipe out the entire thing. And that’s assuming that no combatant is doing that intentionally!
For my money, the fact that the US military literally measured success in Vietnam in terms of dead Vietnamese bodies should be counted as a “black mark” as well. You can argue that US military planners did not *intend* to incentivize the murder of civilians but they plainly did so, intentionally or not.
Were individual soldiers rewarded for racking up bodies? I genuinely don’t know, but I always thought that was more of a PR measure than anything.
If not, then there’d be much less of a conflict of interest there. The people who want the high ratios aren’t in a position to kill civilians to achieve those ratios, and the people in a position to kill civilians don’t have much reason to care about the ratios.
It was still a sub-optimal practice, obviously. But the scale of the problem would vary a lot based on the details.
Officers definitely got promoted based on body counts. Admittedly there may not have been much in it for the individual conscripts beyond being told “good job” by their commanders. Appy Christian’s book Working Class War paints a picture of individual soldiers initially quite enthusiastic about racking up kills early in the war but gradually concluding it wasn’t worth the risk of getting killed themselves, which strikes me as plausible.
Yeah, that sounds pretty believable to me. Thanks.
The body counts reported during the Vietnam war were almost entirely fraudulent. It’s been well documented that the numbers got inflated at every step in the reporting chain. To the point that the reported numbers bore little to no resemblance to what was actually happening.
I’d also posit that there is nothing inherently wrong in using that as a metric of success in a guerilla war where capturing territory is meaningless. The problem was in the execution
That sounds to me more like the US command looking at the war and saying “we need some way to measure progress”.
In something like Vietnam (at least in the counter-insurgency parts) there’s not much you can actually measure. Ground taken? You have all the ground already. Popularity? Some people like you, others don’t – but almost nobody is going to give you an honest opinion.
Bodies are generally hard to cover up, and they are discrete (at least they usually are if killed by infantry).
It is a case of counting what you can count, instead of what actually counts. So it’s not great. But when your real goal is what budget you get (men and money) for next year, you might persuade some people that it’s worth pursuing – especially if you have a sense (not really measurable in a way that you can put in a presentation that ends up in congressional documents) that you really do have the other side on the ropes.
Also – how many of those dead civilians were actually fighters? It’s really hard to tell with guerillas. They don’t have uniforms or even armbands. If they don’t have a weapon in their hand or aren’t actually carrying a bomb when you find the body, you have no idea. So that’s another civilian casualty – when he was actually carrying a message for the local group.
I might have been better to count destroyed weapons. A confiscated AK would usually indicate one enemy casualty, or at least a properly spooked one. And if that AK came from a civilian that just liked to carry it around that would still have been a somewhat justified casualty.
So the body-count metrics were terrible strategy, but I would note that the intent was to count enemy *combatants* not civilians. However, in practice the various bad incentives in the system often led to the counting of any military aged males as combatants (a thing the IDF is also doing in Gaza and the US did in Pakistan during our drone campaign; if you are a male between the ages of 16 and 45, I would not count on being able to claim non-combatant status under any circumstances as a practical matter, even though I find these ‘simplifications’ abhorrent.)
That’s not a defense of the system, which was bad as both strategy and morality, but simply noting that it was *trying* to count combatants, not to encourage the mass killing of civilians.
I am not sure what your point is here—my comment was mostly the result of my surprise that you mentioned US bombing campaigns in Laos and Cambodia, but not the Vietnam war itself, as black marks on the US record of being generally above-average at avoiding civilian casualties. Given your focus on the supposed good intentions of US war planners re: Vietnam, I am now half-wondering if you cited Laos and Cambodia due to some evidence, unknown to me, that the intent really was to kill civilians in those campaigns.
I realize many scholars believe the bombing campaign in Cambodia in particular helped destabilize the country and increase support for the Khmer Rouge, ultimately leading to the Cambodian genocide. In that sense you can argue the combing campaign in Cambodia was much worse than the part of the Vietnam war that actually happened in Vietnam. Even so, the latter still looks to me like a rather significant exception to the thesis that America has been “somewhat unusually massacre-avoidant” post-1900 (something that *does* seem true of say, the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Note that I’m not arguing the American military in Vietnam is in any way a candidate for the worst-behaved post-1900 military, just that it seems depressingly average in that regard.
(CW: the next and last bit of this comment is going to be unavoidably graphic.)
A final point, I’m very skeptical that the effects of the American body-count based strategy were in any way limited to men between the ages of 16 and 45. It is my understanding that a major hypothesis about why the body count figures were exaggerated is that they tended to count individual severed body parts, in spite of the fact that a severed arm and severed leg might well have come from the same person. Given that, it seems the incentive was not just to produce dead bodies of men aged 16 to 45, but also dead bodies so mangled that the age and sex could not be determined.
“I realize many scholars believe the bombing campaign in Cambodia in particular helped destabilize the country and increase support for the Khmer Rouge, ultimately leading to the Cambodian genocide. ”
I’m sure they do. That way they can blame the genocidal communist mass murder on Nixon for bombing the genocidal communist mass murderers, rather than on the genocidal communist mass murderers who committed the genocidal communist mass murder.
It’s a matter of fairly uncontested historical record that Pol Pot was at the very least openly tolerated by the US as a regional counterweight against Vietnam, and a matter of slightly less-uncontested but still credible historical record that the US went much further in directly supporting him as a proxy, all avowed ideological opposition to “communism” notwithstanding.
Similarly, the much-ballyhooed “war on terror” doesn’t somehow absolve the US of culpability for supporting the rise of far-right Islamist militants like Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan as proxies against the Soviets, nor do the 1991 and 2003 wars against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq erase US culpability for having supported him in his war against Iran during the 1980s, an invasion whose sheer murderous brutality makes the later invasion of Kuwait look like an afternoon tea party by comparison.
The blame for the murders is Pol Pot’s, because he committed them.
It’s a matter of fairly uncontested historical record that Pol Pot was at the very least openly tolerated by the US as a regional counterweight against Vietnam, and a matter of slightly less-uncontested but still credible historical record that the US went much further in directly supporting him as a proxy, all avowed ideological opposition to “communism” notwithstanding.
That’s true, but in fairness to the US, the North Vietnamese *also* gave Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge a fair amount of assistance during the Cambodian civil war in the early 1970s, although they fell out by the mid 1970s. There’s plenty of blame to go around for what happened in Cambodia (although the most blame should rest with China since they were the biggest material patron and ideological inspiration for the Cambodian regime).
To their credit, the Vietnamese Communists did bring down Pol Pot and end the nightmare in 1979, so I certainly think that they come out of the thing looking better than the US (which as you point out continued recognizing Pol Pot as the legitimate government right up through the 1980s). The whole story is a sad one though and underscores the kind of nasty compromises that people make in geopolitical conflicts, on all sides.
Most of the blame belongs to POL POT.
“Most of the blame belongs to POL POT.”
I agree, of course.
“It’s a matter of fairly uncontested historical record that Pol Pot was at the very least openly tolerated by the US as a regional counterweight against Vietnam”
If critics are going to blame the US for Khmer Rouge actions because it tolerated them, and are also going to blame the US for Khmer Rouge actions because it bombed them, other people might be forgiven for not tacking critics of the US seriously.
Mind, it’s entirely possible for a system that tries to count combatant to still incentivize the murder of civilians: Perverse incentives are a thing after all.
Reuters has a graph of the demographics of Palestinian deaths in the first 3 weeks of the Gaza fighting; looking at the excess of the “male, fighting age” figures, it looks more like 12 civilians to each combatant (assuming the excess is purely due to being combatants). These are Hamas Health Ministry figures, of course.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestinians-have-died-gaza-war-how-will-counting-continue-2023-12-06/
I’ve seen some analysis of those that suggest Hamas might be shading the numbers pretty hard, for whatever that’s worth. I can’t find the link offhand, but it was listing cases where there had been claims that only like 10/600 deaths were male on a given day, or where the number of kids killed increased by more than the total number of people killed.
Still, the two claims provide a useful bracketing effect. We can be pretty sure that the actual ratio is at least as bad as Israel admits to, and at least as good as Hamas claims. That puts it somewhere between Berlin 1945 and Mariupol 2022, give or take.
It’s messed up how people say stuff like “Hama Health Ministry figures” as if we have any reason to doubt the Gaza Health Ministry. We can compare their figures from past conflicts to the assessments that UN observers made after the conflict and see that there is no major difference. They are heavily dependent on international humanitarian assistance meaning there are plenty of doctors outside the conflict who have observed their procedures and they dont report thumbs on the scales. Foreign journalists were able to view hospitals and morgues after instances where the Health Ministry reported very high numbers and dead and have reported that what they see is in line with what you would expect. We have every reason to trust that their figures are essentially accurate, there will be mistakes due to wartime conditions but they aren’t faking it. The sad truth is that their numbers are probably an undercount because the worse the violence gets, the more deaths you will see that are never reported the morgues or hospitals.
It seems like a sad reflection of the hidden biases in play that Palestinian medical staff and humanitarian organizations are presumed to be untrustworthy even when it’s extremely easy to check if they are in fact trustworthy.
There are only two real problems with the Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers.
One is that, by their own admission, they make no effort to differentiate between civilian and combatant casualties. This isn’t necessarily deception on their part; Hamas fighters often wear civilian clothing and the administrative capacity to quickly identify military personnel may simply be absent. But it does mean you’re not getting the whole story.
The other is that in a handful of specific cases, such as the Al-Ahli hospital strike in October, they have released numbers that seem at odds with available visual evidence. This doesn’t seem to be a common occurrence, but it does suggest the organization is not completely immune to distortions, whether due to political pressure, accounting errors or something else.
I think it’s worth looking at their figures, but preferably alongside estimates by other parties; they seem to usually do good work, but they’re not the whole story either.
The question is, of course, whether the occurrence that is not common is lying, or being caught lying.
What apparently happened in the Al-Ahli case was an early journalistic mistranslation of a doctor’s reference to 500 casualties (i.e. including wounded) as 500 killed, which then got repeated enough times to supersede the initial statement.
Even so, it’s hard to believe that there were 500 casualties. The missile hit a parking lot, and only 3 cars were actually properly destroyed in the blast – more had their windows broken or were burned somewhat, but it was still pretty small overall. And I have difficulty believing that there’d be anywhere close to 500 people in the area of effect at all. Again, it was a parking lot – if it’d been a crowded market, 500 in the blast radius would be believable. But the only group I’ve heard of that’d be there in any numbers were a group sleeping on the grass nearby, and it was a grassy patch that might have slept like 40-50, tops. Add a few walking around nearby, and the reported casualties are still about an order of magnitude too high.
It’s messed up how people say stuff like “Hama Health Ministry figures” as if we have any reason to doubt the Gaza Health Ministry.
You don’t think the fact that they’re a mouthpiece of an explicitly genocidal organisation is a reason to doubt them?
They are not and you should examine your own biases if you think that was a remotely acceptable thing to assume. There is plenty of evidence freely available that could have allowed you to evaluate the accuracy of these figures before jumping to such saying such vicious things about people risking their lives to provide medical care in a warzone, many of whom aren’t even from the area.
The big question is how able the Gaza Health Ministry is to maintain independence from Hamas. Does it have the means to resist being used as a propaganda outlet?
History has provided examples in loosely similar situations where the answer would have been “yes.” And examples where the answer would have been “no.”
They are quite literally run by Hamas, as are other governmental organizations in Gaza, idk why you feel the need to deny that
In Dutch, “Hoop” can mean “hope” as well as “heap”, and “Verloren Hoop” clearly uses the first meaning – “lost hope”, “forlorn hope”.
My understanding is that a forlorn hope was a screen of musketeers thrown out ahead of the formed troops (pike and shot, guns and horse) to delay, possibly even disrupt, the enemy advance (source – C Oman on renaissance warfare). A storming column was something else. But happy to be corrected.
That may be another usage, but I’ve always heard it used in the context of the first group through the breach or over the walls in a siege. Wikipedia does use it more generically, though:
> A forlorn hope is a band of soldiers or other combatants chosen to take the vanguard in a military operation, such as a suicidal assault through the kill zone of a defended position, or the first men to climb a scaling ladder against a defended fortification, or a rearguard, to be expended to save a retreating army, where the risk of casualties is high.
“We really only start to see stronger norms protecting civilian populations emerge in the 1800s, but that too is a slow process of half-measures.”
I was under the impression that war (at least in Europe, between European powers) started to become less horrific for civilian populations in the 1700s (and then swung back to a more “old-fashioned” way of warfare–in which entire populations were targeted–in the mid-1900s, and with late-1900s Cold War planning taking that to a very horrifying theoretical extreme).
Am I completely off base in this impression?
I saw a Twitter thread a while back saying yes, that did happen, from some other historian I was following because OGH retweeted him often in a positive context
As I understand it, those 18th century imperialists tended to define “conquest” in such a way that it only really counted if you could recruit the conquered people to fight for you in the next war. I imagine that sort of thing gives you quite the reason to distinguish between the people fighting for you, against you, and not fighting at all.
That was just before they invented nationalism.
There was a general impression that the ‘cabinet warfare’ of the C18 was much better in its treatment of civilians than the wars of the C17. I think this impression derived from elite civilian accounts and the absence of strong popular movements – the religious passions that animated much of the C17, plus the relative internal peace within Britain and France. More recent historiography tends to correct this – foraging, sieges and the sack of cities and the inevitable diseases and dislocations that attended armies all had major impacts. And deliberate seizure of food and destruction of shelter remained a tactic to deny an area to an enemy.
16th and 17th-century warfare wasn’t brutal because of religious reasons — secular wars didn’t tend to be notably better in terms of how civilians were treated. Rather, it was because state capacity was sufficient to maintain quite big armies, but not sufficient to ensure they were always paid or to bring in food supplies from central magazines, meaning that armies often resorted to plundering the locals to make up the shortfall. By the 18th century this had started to change, although not so much that having an invading army march past wouldn’t often be an unpleasant experience.
At the high level this is true – but there was also the kleine krieg – the little war of partisans of one side or the other (or several), where religious animosity tipped the scales of other social cleavages over into outright war. There were a lot of little massacres.
The little war was a feature of most conflicts of this period, secular as well as religious, and I’ve not seen any evidence that it was more brutal in religious conflicts than in secular ones. Also, it wasn’t about “religious animosity tipping the scales of other social cleavages over into outright war,” it was more about bands of soldiers plundering the surrounding territory and bands of peasants trying to stop them.
One thing that becomes more and more important as the 18th century goes on is the introduction of the potato: Far less likely to be destroyed or stolen by a passing army. It’s usually pointed out as one of the reason the Revolutionary Wars didn’t cause the same demographic disaster as the 30-years war.
On a tangent, this is why I’m generally sceptical of Stephen Pinker-style attempts to use deaths by violence to prove we’re all getting more moral. Even setting aside the difficulty of getting accurate stats for any time before about 1800 (and even after 1800 in many places), advances in fields like agriculture and medicine can reduce casualties from war and violent crime for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with moral improvement.
Middle Earth does not appear to be anywhere near the Malthusian limit. The history mentions population declines due to plagues and makes it clear that the population did not rebound afterwards. After the fall of Arnor the orcs were driven out by an expedition from Gondor, Lindon and Rivendell such that not one orc remained west of the misty mountains. At least some of the cultivated farmlands of Eriador should have been safe for recolonization, the virtually defenseless hobbits prosper, yet 1000 years later the land is still mostly empty. The Dunlandings to the south live in marginal hill country but haven’t migrated north. It seems that populations in middle earth barely grow above replacement level even at times of nutritional abundance.
Middle earth appears to be vastly richer then per-industrial earth societies. The small town of Bree has an inn with stables packed full of horses. Bill Ferny doesn’t seem very wealthy but owns a pony and cares so little he neglects it. Gondor at it’s nadir of power and population builds a 30 mile long wall with gate houses and fortresses. When hobbits steal vegetables from farmers it’s seen as a cheeky act of young scamps, not taking food out of the mouth of the farmer’s children. Frodo can afford a gardener and the halflings have a word for such a profession despite being a small pastoral population. The hobbits can bicker about the ownership of umbrellas and portraits. Literacy is common. Farmer Maggot has a high brick wall completely surrounding his fields. Heck, he’s described as a farmer in the first place and it doesn’t seem like the hobbits disrespect him for being a farmer it just seems like most halflings aren’t farmers.
I think the evidence suggests that farm yields are just way higher then in pre-modern earth. They have the surplus to support a much more urbanized population then pre-modern earth (although they dont necessarily do so, it seems the Rohirrim chose not to do so and thanks to low birth rates they can afford to do so). Tiny populations like Breeland can support specialist workers. Farming productivity might even go up as population density increases thanks to economies of scale. This could help explain why Arnor’s population never rebounded, the farmers are better off staying in Gondor where farming tools are plentiful then moving to the empty lands of Eriador. The wealth might also explain the social harmony, the poor aren’t that much worse off then the rich and equipping a small number of nobles for war doesn’t require taxing everyone else to the brink of starvation. You can’t be elevated like the Knights of Dol Amaroth just by having the money to afford armor and a horse, they have to earn it.
TBH I think the only somewhat-plausible explanation for Middle Earth’s (lack of) population density is that Sauron has put some kind of curse on the area reducing the fertility rate. That would explain why the population remains so low even a thousand years after the big die-offs, and also why everyone seems to rich by pre-modern standards (because Sauron’s curse is preventing them from butting against the land’s carrying capacity).
From the linked blog, “between the First Age and TA 3019, the population of elves declined by 85%… They should have been slowly growing through the ages, but instead they have shrunk dramatically as thousands leave for Valinor.”
Based on his estimates, the “thousands” should be “millions”.
For the rest, “[the estimate] doesn’t account for the real problem of general structural pressures for depopulation: marauding orcs, plagues, bandits and highwaymen making life miserable in the absence of a functional state, etc.”
Frodo et al. travel most of the length of Eriador, and there don’t seem to be “marauding orcs, plagues, bandits and highwaymen,” at least not in sufficient numbers to prevent populations from expanding outwards. Aragon makes them all travel in secret for fear of the Black Riders; he never gives any indication that other sentient beings, or even wild animals, might waylay them.
An uninhabited land can support only a small number of raiders. If you are only traveling through the area you have a good chance you won’t even see any threats.
But if you try to settle the same area it will only take one troll to come within a klick and they will follow you chimney smoke to home and eat your whole family. It’s like trying to settle in Jurassic Park.
If the threat is human raiding parties that are mostly after food and valuables they require a large population to make raiding worth it and they have incentive to not hurt the population too much. The settled population should have an advantage in numbers and should be able to protect themselves to some degree.
If the threat is trolls, then a small farming village is probably not capable of wielding large enough fighting force to keep the threat at bay. A troll can subsist on deers and other game and only treat humans as a rare delicacy, no need to let humans to grow in numbers.
If the threat is human raiding parties that are mostly after food and valuables they require a large population to make raiding worth it and they have incentive to not hurt the population too much. The settled population should have an advantage in numbers and should be able to protect themselves to some degree.
Historically, settled societies have tended to outcompete nomadic ones in most places where large-scale agriculture is possible, so I don’t think human raiding parties would be enough to keep such a huge area depopulated.
If the threat is trolls, then a small farming village is probably not capable of wielding large enough fighting force to keep the threat at bay. A troll can subsist on deers and other game and only treat humans as a rare delicacy, no need to let humans to grow in numbers.
I think you’re overestimating how dangerous trolls are. Yes, they’re big and tough and difficult to kill, but Sauron has trolls at both the siege of Minas Tirith and the battle at the Black Gates, and the opposing human forces manage to win anyway (or, in the latter case, to stave off defeat long enough for Frodo to destroy the Ring). In terms of danger, I’d guess they’re maybe around the level of a bear — yes, if you try to fight one on your own, it’s going to end very badly for you, but at the same time, I’m not aware of any large tracts of land that remained uninhabited for thousands of years because people were too scared of bear attacks to move there.
I’m not aware of any large tracts of land that remained uninhabited for thousands of years because people were too scared of bear attacks to move there.
That’s true, but now imagine that bears are sapient, move in groups, and have a taste for human. Also worth noting is that there is some level of habitation in Eriador, just not a whole lot.
The largest group of trolls we see in Eriador is three and that’s a big enough number for them to spend most of their time bickering. Eriador still has the Elves and Dunedain rangers in it and they have responded to major incursions in the past. A village with a pallisade around it isn’t going to be in very much danger, particularly if it’s close to the Elvish settlements. I wouldn’t want to homestead right outside of Moria or Agmar but at the very least the banks of the Brandywine and Lond Daer should be more then safe enough for prospective colonists.
By the late Third Age, the only Elvish settlements we know of in Eriador are Rivendell (in very hilly or mountainous territory, not great for settlement _anyway_) and the Grey Havens (long avoided by humans fearful of being too close to elves; there was some earlier population that refused to cross the Baranduin into ‘elvish’ lands.) Late humans were often fearful of elves rather than seeing them as potential protectors. (See Rohan or even Gondor attitudes toward Lothlorien. Lake-town was unusually symbiotic.)
I’m not sure a palisade would be very protective against a night attack by a group of Hobbit-style trolls, who were very big and strong, and more or less human-intelligent.
Rangers took action against trolls but also lost to them; Aragorn’s father or grandfather was killed by trolls.
The three bickering trolls also said they’d eaten “a village and a half” since they came down from the mountains.
The demographic void of Eriador is certainly extreme, but repeated raiding by supernaturally evil non-human threats, whittling down small communities until none were left, still feels like the best explanation.
The three bickering trolls also said they’d eaten “a village and a half” since they came down from the mountains.
Given the context of that statement, I think a little bit of exaggeration is fairly likely.
But also, quite a few of the main characters travel around Eriador — Frodo and the other hobbits; Strider; Gandalf; Glorfindel; Boromir on his way from Gondor; and probably others as well. None of them mention trolls as a potential danger. Obviously there are cases of troll attacks, as shown by the ones in The Hobbit and the death of Aragorn’s father and grandfather, but nothing to suggest that these are some kind of ever-present threat enough to leave an entire country practically uninhabited for over a thousand years.
Come to think of it, trolls in Middle Earth mostly seem to be mountain-dwelling creatures, perhaps because they need to go back to their caves by dawn lest they be turned into stone. So I could buy that the Misty Mountains and their immediate environs are too dangerous to settle in. Once you get beyond about half a night’s journey from them, however, the chance of encountering a troll should reduce dramatically.
My impression is that, for most of history, once an army was inside a city, the battle was basically over (although by no means did this mean the killing would stop), unless there were further fortified sections inside the city. Now, however, when an army gets inside a city, that’s only the start of the (long and bloody) battle.
When and why did cities shift from being the “prize” you got after breaking through the enemy’s hard defenses, to effectively being nothing but hard defenses?
I suspect there are two factors to this:
First, modern industrial firepower made the city wall obsolete. Concealment is almost as important as cover on the modern battlefield, because someone has to know where you are to shoot at you. Thus, there isn’t a city wall with a line of people holding it anymore, because any such wall would be reduced to rubble (and the defenders on it dismembered) by artillery in short order. As a result, there’s no demarcation of “This is the city.” It just slowly gets more urbanized until it’s obviously and undeniably now a city.
And more importantly, we started building large portions of our urban cores out of the same materials as our hard defenses. Detached homes may be made largely of wood and plaster, which is still vulnerable to fire, but once you are building big things, it’s glass, steel, concrete, and maybe brick or stone. A concrete apartment block might have thinner walls than a bunker, but it’s basically made out of bunker material. Similarly, many of the defensive fortresses in the first world war (to go back a bit farther) were built primarily out of brick. This makes every window a potential defensive loophole. Ironically that’s actually “too obvious”, so the experienced people instead find a way to punch a fist-sized hole in the wall somewhere else because people look at windows.
Got it in one.
The City Wall was a massively important defensive structure. When Artillery and air power made it utterly obsolete, the whole paradigm changed.
Because the most common reason for sieges to succeed was the morale of the defenders failed, so they gave up..
If a medieval city absolutely insisted on fighting over every single house and street, though, it’d be fairly similar to modern warfare in difficulty.
Isn’t that what happened in the third Punic War?
At first glance, there would seem to be a contradiction here. On the one hand, “the defenders’ morale often failed, so they gave up and the enemy got in.” On the other hand, “the devastation of a sack after a fortified location fell would result in horrible pillaging and the death of most of the people inside.”
I don’t see how both those things can be true at the same time. If you know the enemy is going to kill you when they break in after a siege, then while the cohesion of your army might break down, your individual soldiers still have a pretty strong incentive to go down fighting if they can’t negotiate a surrender en masse.
I think there must be something else going on. Probably the biggest factor, I’m guessing, is that medieval buildings not specifically designed as defensible strongpoints generally weren’t very defensible in the long run. Without modern firepower (e.g. machine guns) making deadly effective ambushes possible, and with all the buildings being susceptible to destruction by fire as soon as the attackers got tired of trying to force their way in and up a staircase or whatever… The defenders’ ability to actually stop an attacking army, to present them with an obstacle they cannot overcome, is very limited. Especially now that they are no longer defending a linear front surrounding the town with a cleared space that makes them harder to outflank.
If you give up and allow them in, you get better treatment than if they have to batter their way in by force. So if your morale cracks and you think you’ve had it, you would try to surrender and get better terms.
Or at least, that’s how I read it.
IIRC, in Mesoamerica cities did not have a single external wall, but were divided into districts, each with their own defences. So a city there might well be taken district by district.
But in the Old World, if you can get through the city wall you should be able to take the rest of the city relatively easy. So if the defenders morale cracks at all, it will probably be immediately after the wall does.
The exceptions tends to be if there’s a fortified citadel or castle: “X army took the city but the citadel held out for another three months” was fairly common.
Sometimes natural divisions in the city can also help, like during the sack of Prague in 1648, when the swedish forces managed to storm the “little side” but not get over the river.
How often did the fallback citadel of a fallen city, or the inner keep of a breached castle, achieve some sort of victory, and what would that look like? Attackers giving up? Allies finally coming to the rescue? Negotiating decent surrender terms despite such a hard siege?
@Mindstalko:
Any of these things can happen, in the case of Prague it was the fact that peace was signed with the swedes only in possession of parts of the city. In some other cases reinforcements showed up, in some cases a better deal was struck etc. etc.
I think the issue is that the change in weapons also changed what is advantageous battlefield. For a modern army with automatic weapons, scattering your defenders over many houses provides an advantage, and every house has to be cleared since even a single man can flank and slaughter a whole squad; but for a medieval or earlier army that division provides a disadvantage compared to concentrating their fighters, so if a medieval city absolutely insisted on fighting to the last man, they would not be “fighting over every single house and street” but rather they would group up and take the battle at a single location of their choice – possibly in a single most suitable building, possibly in a single most suitable street.
When and why did cities shift from being the “prize” you got after breaking through the enemy’s hard defenses, to effectively being nothing but hard defenses?
The why is probably related to the size of cities.
Medieval and ancient cities were mostly extremely small geographically. Where they were larger, Carthage, Rome, Byzantium, Tenotchitlan etc. fighting did occur inside cities.
The when was the late 19th century when technology and especially hydrocarbon exploitation led to cities growing in number, population and especially geographic size.
The most infamous intra city battle would be Stalingrad in the mid 20th century.
Another factor, I suspect, is the tactics of close order fighting with edged weapons or indeed with Napoleonic firearms. The ability to form ranks like that amongst buildings is severely impeded, whereas 20th century dispersed order is not.
Which makes an excellent segue to next weeks shield wall topic….
Not…exactly. THAT was moistly a refusal to accept surrenders, but given Hasdrubel had Roman prisoners tortured to death on the walls, I…can’t entirely blame the Romans, particularly when they DID eventually relent.
Damn it, that was intended as a reply to Bullseye. Not sure how that ahppened.
Or alternatively, the fact that genocide has to be without even the flimsiest pretext is WHY it’s seen as so severe- which is why there’s more war crimes that cover lesser acts that are still considered criminal just without being considered genocide.
I think the change in the nature of urban warfare follows from what Bret dubbed the “second” and “third” systems of warfare, or what others call “traditional” and “modern.” The traditional system relies on large masses of men in relatively close array, fighting along a relatively well-defined front, i.e., in the case of a siege, the city wall itself. Once the front is breached, the close array is difficult to reform, and generally scatters and is either slaughtered or escapes. So the city will not be defended if the attackers penetrate the wall.
The modern system depends on stealth and speed, typically with smaller groups operating independently (although modern telecommunications permit more coordination than a pre-modern army could have maintained). Modern firepower renders fixed fortifications or even well-defined fronts impossible to maintain. So the attackers easily penetrate the city in spots, but the fight isn’t over, as the scattered groups of defenders move speedily and stealthily through the urban environment, contesting each building.
That can’t be quite true judging by the relatively static front in Ukraine right now. Not every modern war is a US vs. Iraq curb stomp battle.
True. The stalemate in Ukraine demands some rethinking, which will have to be done by people with more knowledge and insight than I have. Maybe Bret will favor us with his thoughts sometime as to why neither side has apparently been able to execute the “modern system” effectively.
One explanation I seen is that neither side has been able to get and exploit air superiority, so close air support and interdiction are much harder to do.
The sheer quantity of land mines in the field is well documented and definitely a major factor restricting maneuver.
Disposable drones have made aerial observation of rear areas comprehensive, where even twenty years ago it was patchy and very expensive. It is therefore more difficult for a massed armored assault to achieve surprise in Ukraine than ever before.
But your premise that the modern system means no well defined fronts isn’t accurate. Instead, the modern system uses defense in depth to keep fronts generally stable plus or minus a few miles, and this involves fortifications even if they’re considered disposable speed bumps in case of a major assault. We can see this at work in e.g. Robotyne where Ukraine methodically dismantled a section of the Russian front line only to be stopped at prepared fallback positions.
Right now both sides lack the quantity of artillery munitions to execute the modern system effectively. WW1 or WW2 tactics would breach the stalemate if they were combined with WW1/WW2/ColdWar levels of munition production, but for various reasons the current global production capacity is delivering just a tiny fraction (perhaps 10%?) of what that doctrine would expect to fire per day.
Both sides do not really have the capabilities to deploy modern firepower. Both sides together shoot less than twenty thousand artillery rounds a day. That’s less then the theoretical maximum ten M-777 Howitzers could put out.
Part of the reason for that might be, drone survilance making it necerssary to move more often after firing, to not get killed by counter-artillery.
But the main reason is lack of ammunition, or at least the inability to move ammounition up to the front.
If Russia began this war without enough artillery rounds to implement “modern system warfare”, then no one has enough rounds to do so.
They had enough for some months of it, which was sure to be plenty for a quick 3-day war. The abundance seems to have run out around June-July 2022, though, between sheer usage levels and the HIMARS strikes on ammo dumps.
If Russia was able to implement “modern system warfare” for some months at the start of the war, and Ukraine was not, “modern system warfare” must have failed to give Russia the ability to reach their highest priority target – Kyiv – even though it was only a few dozen km from their starting point.
And this would have been the case in the face of an allegedly inferior form of warfare.
I feel there is a more general way of looking at this: To advance in the face of an enemy that wishes to stop you, you must have considerably superior power where it matters. If neither side has much more power than the other, significant advances are unlikely.
(And since the United States is afraid of what the Russians might do if they lose, it will never back anyone against them to the point where they are strong enough to inflict defeat on them.)
@ad9
Yes, the Russians have, or had, the kind of stocks necerssary. But they have logistics problems. Not enough trucks, active partisan warfare in their rear, and MLRS and drone strikes by the Ukrainians on depots close to the front.
The Ukrainians lack the ammunition (and the guns, and planes etc) for modern warfare, the Russians lack the ability to move enough ammunition to the front.
But yes, everybody lacks the stocks, for a long modern war.
Plenty of historical armies didn’t really need much organization to fight. I think a significant reason is that in a historical context, it pays to invest your defence fully into the main settlement fortifications. This means that getting through the walls in the first place implies having already defeated the defenders; in modern urban warfare there is, on account of the greater firepower involved, no concentrated line of defence where the attackers can decisively defeat the enemy.
In addition to what others have said:
(1) The greater destructiveness of modern weapons. In the olden days, unless you (deliberately or accidentally) burnt down the city, even savage street fighting would still leave you a more-or-less intact city as a prize. Now, with artillery, bombs, rockets, and the like, it will leave you a smouldering pile of rubble.
(2) Cities today are just much bigger. A good-sized medieval city of 10,000 or so people would still be pretty small, meaning that a defence in depth strategy would run into the problem of there not being all that much depth in the first place. Conversely, a big modern city of a million offers a huge area to fall back in and defend, if you’re so minded.
“(1) The greater destructiveness of modern weapons. In the olden days, unless you (deliberately or accidentally) burnt down the city, even savage street fighting would still leave you a more-or-less intact city as a prize. Now, with artillery, bombs, rockets, and the like, it will leave you a smouldering pile of rubble.”
You are quoting the offensive weapons available.
How about weapons the DEFENDERS are able and willing to use?
Two examples of urban battles:
Paris, May 1871
The attackers lost 1060 men as dead or missing, about 6500 wounded. The Parisians… about 8500 confirmed dead, disputed higher numbers of 15 000 to 30 000. About 43 000 kept alive captives, of whom 25 executed later. However, many, allegedly most of the 10 000…15 000 men killed during the fighting were killed after capture. Despite massive propaganda of the losers, there do not seem to be very many allegations of winners killing or raping women.
Manila, 1945
The attackers lost 1010 dead and about 5500 wounded. The defenders, 17 000 men, clearly defined combatants that time, fell almost all.
And this time, about 100 000 civilians killed. Mostly by defenders – which the defenders admit – but about 40 000 by attackers. Most of the building damage seems to have been done by attackers´ weapons, not defenders.
What was the reason for light destruction of Paris?
The attackers had artillery. They had demolished Brussels back in 17th century.
But apparently they did not need to demolish Paris… while moving across Paris took a week, it does not seem to have bogged down. The attackers outflanked barricades by taking upper stories of buildings in front and firing down, and making holes in walls. No barricade and no building seems to have been able to resist over a few hours or inflict heavy losses on defenders. What was the reason? Poor defensive arms?
There have been a number of partial answers given. I think a key one which hasn’t been addressed is different: a premodern siege is almost always going to be a situation where the attackers have a decisive advantage over the defenders in the open field. If the two forces are approximately equal, you generally want to force the situation quickly before lots of people are starving and crops are stolen or burnt.
Harlech Castle provides a nice example, holding out for months or years on several occasions with a garrison of <100 against enemy forces in the thousands. It fell to storm in the Wars of the Roses with 44 prisoners being taken by an attacking army of roughly ten thousand – even accounting for casualties in the siege, it seems clear that the defenders were outnumbered by something close to 100:1.
When you have effective fortifications in place, that sort of strength advantage is largely neutralised – right up until the point your fortifications fall. Once the attackers are are able to bring their full force to bear, it's going to be pretty quickly settled from that point on.
But then there’s concentric fortification, where the attackers break through, then have to do it all over again…
“Water (weighing roughly one kilogram per liter)”, from the free chapter, is probably the most extreme display of pedantry I have ever seen 😀
“roughly one kilogram per liter”
Roughly?
Roughly. Both temperature and mineral content affect the density of water. Not by very much, but still.
Isotopic ratios affect weight even in pure water. A liter of water with high concentrations of O18 is going to weigh more than a liter of water with high concentrations of O16. This actually has useful applications–the different weights mean that plants and animals take them up at different rates, they evaporate at different rates, etc., so we can use them as a sort of paleothermometer. Same thing with hydrogen, but the effect is lower so it’s not as useful.
I’m well aware of the effects of temperature, solute concentrtation etc. on density, but I still find “roughly” to be an amusing way of describing it.
If I was going to mention the density of water in a general purpose article I’d either 1) go into details about temperature, solute concentrations etc. and how they affect density, or else 2) assume the “standard” conditions and just say “density of one”, to a reasonable approximation.
Depending on any impurities – it won’t be distilled. That’s the pedantry bit.
The gram is no longer defined in terms of water density, and as we’ve gotten better at measuring our numbers for water density have moved away from the fixed value of a kilogram and a meter.
The civilian death toll in Fallujah is higher than what you’re saying – the official numbers (e.g. from Iraq Body Count) are low counts; Iraq-wide, the figure is around twice as high as what’s been confirmed in media reports (again, IBC), and Fallujah was apparently especially hard to sample.
Bret also unsurprisingly chooses a very high estimate for the number of enemy fighters killed. Almost two times higher than the estimate given by West Point, in fact.
Not true: Luftwaffe general Alexander Loehr was charged for bombing Belgrade in 1941 (among his other crimes) and executed by Yugoslavia post-war.
Not true, for a pedant you’re remarkably careless about closely reading sources: 25,000 is a Ukrainian estimate, the authors of that AP story estimated up to three times higher (ie, 75,000) with no evidence whatsoever. Now let’s dig into this.
The AP claimed to identify 10,300 new graves from March through December in and around Mariupol using satellite imagery of cemeteries in the city and its suburbs. Note that “mass graves” evokes images of massive burial pits where bodies are unceremoniously dumped. As the AP says, what they counted analyzing Mariupol cemeteries was “roughly one grave for every six square meters” which makes it clear they’re talking about regular burial plots in city cemeteries. Is 10,300 new graves in 9 months a lot or not?
Now is a good moment to realize that before the war Mariupol was a city with 480,000 residents, a city larger than Miami, Minneapolis or New Orleans, and approaching the size of Atlanta. To estimate civilian casualties, we need to subtract natural deaths. How many residents of Atlanta die a natural death on average every 9 months? In Ukraine the average death rate was 18.5 per 1000 in 2022. This works out to 18.5*480000*9/12 = approx 6,700 natural deaths in average 9 months in Mariupol.
Of course, significant numbers of people have fled Mariupol, 140,000 according to Ukrainian sources. On the other hand, that should raise the natural death rate: most people fleeing are younger people who can more easily to up and leave, older people tend to stay and tough it out or are unable to move for health reasons. Thus, because the remaining population skews older, it will correspond to a higher rate of natural deaths. Assuming 20% higher death rate, one can estimate 18.5*1.2*340000*9/12 = approx. 5,600 natural deaths.
Altogether, one can estimate 5-7,000 natural deaths in a city the size of Mariupol in the average 9-month period. Adding in the fact that a significant proportion of the soldiers fallen in the battle (up to 4,000) would have been buried in the city (Ukraine and Russia do exchange bodies but rarely) and the 10,300 new graves yield up to 5,000 civilian casualties in the battle (10,300 – 5000 natural deaths – buried soldiers). This results in a 0.7-1:1 combatant:civilian ratio. It stands to sense that the Russian army of 2022 with modern technology (or at least 1970s technology) was able to do a better or at least not worse job than the Soviet army of 1945.
Finally, a word about a massive American urban battle that you didn’t mention: the battle of Manila in WW2. In this battle the US stormed the city of Manila in the Philippines occupied by the Japanese. It was one of the most intense urban battles of the war, most of the city was levelled by artillery fire and airstrikes. Over 100,000 civilians died. The Japanese garrison of 15-20,000 in desperate frenzy went on a rampage massacring civilians but still up to 40% died from American shelling and bombing. The resulting ratio is not very complimentary to American tactics but testifies to the enduring difficulty of fight against an enemy dug-in in urban terrain.
“It stands to sense that the Russian army of 2022 with modern technology (or at least 1970s technology) was able to do a better or at least not worse job than the Soviet army of 1945.”
Only if they wish to. For all I know they might want to go out of their way to kill as many civilians as possible. They do have a reputation for going out of their way to target hospitals, after all.
There is no law of nature that says an attacker must want to minimise civilian casualties, instead of maximising them. Hamas, for example, were certainly not trying to minimise civilian casualties when they attacked Israel a few weeks ago.
The Soviet Union in 1945 was under the control of Joseph Stalin, one of the worst mass-murderers in history. I don’t expect that Putin is overly concerned with civilian casualties, but I find it hard to believe he’s more bloodthirsty than Stalin.
Perhaps not, but the question is how much effort they will go to to avoid civilian casualties, and the answer in both cases might be none.
And anyway, Putin explicitly admires Stalin as do, according to polling, the great majority of Russians. Do you expect people who admire “one of the worst mass-murderers in history” to make efforts to avoid civilian casualties?
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/16/stalins-approval-rating-among-russians-hits-record-high-poll-a65245
Perhaps not, but the question is how much effort they will go to to avoid civilian casualties, and the answer in both cases might be none.
If that’s the question, I’m not sure why you didn’t raise it originally, rather than suggesting that Russia might be going out of its way to deliberately maximise civilian casualties.
GJ, my apologies if I expressed myself in a way that caused confusion.
To be explicit: StonewallJs argument implicitly assumed that Stalin and Putin wished equally to avoid civilian casualties in their urban assaults. There is no logical requirement to make that assumption. It is possible to desire to minimise such casualties, or maximise them, and to have such desires with much, little, or no intensity.
Stalin and Putin may therefore have had different desires with different levels of intensity.
If that’s the question, I’m not sure why you didn’t raise it originally, rather than suggesting that Russia might be going out of its way to deliberately maximise civilian casualties
Except that the issue here isn’t about the relative merits of Stalin and Putin in general, it’s about the Battle of Berlin vs. the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
One of Russia’s war aims (at least if you take the quasi state propaganda stuff seriously) is to destroy or at least weaken the identity of Ukrainians as a nation, so it makes total sense for them to try to maximize civilian deaths.
One of Russia’s war aims (at least if you take the quasi state propaganda stuff seriously) is to destroy or at least weaken the identity of Ukrainians as a nation, so it makes total sense for them to try to maximize civilian deaths.
I don’t see why wanting you to weaken Ukrainian national identity would lead to wanting to maximise civilian deaths. If anything, it should be the other way around — you’re going to be more resistant to seeing yourself as Russian if the Russian army has just murdered your grandmother.
“This results in a 0.7-1:1 combatant:civilian ratio. It stands to sense that the Russian army of 2022 with modern technology (or at least 1970s technology) was able to do a better or at least not worse job than the Soviet army of 1945.”
I wrote above that this argument presumes that the leaders of those armies were possessed of a desire to prevent civilian deaths, and I see no need to make this assumption. It might be true, but then again it might not be.
It subsequently occurs to me that Berlin in 1945 had been bombed by the RAF for five years, starting with 500 and 1000 pound bombs, and ending with 4000, 8000 and 12000 pound high-capacity blast bombs. Consequently, the city was full of shelters intended to resist such firepower. I doubt Mariupol was.
I wrote above that this argument presumes that the leaders of those armies were possessed of a desire to prevent civilian deaths, and I see no need to make this assumption. It might be true, but then again it might not be.
Not necessarily. Even if the leaders just didn’t really care one way or the other (which personally I think is the most likely option), it might well still be the case that more-accurate modern weapons cause less collateral damage than 1945 weapons.
It might be, depending on circumstances. Then again, it might not be. For example, if modern artillery fires from greater distances, the CEP for each gun might be larger than in 1945.
We should not assume something to be true just because it *might* be true.
True, we can’t just assume it’s true, but StonewallJ’s post above makes an apparently plausible case that it is.
The genocide scholar Dirk Moses’ recent book is essentially a no-holds-barred assault on the modern international legal concept of “genocide” for precisely these sorts of reasons: the bar for what technically “counts” as genocide was intentionally set so high in the wake of WWII (by states like the US, UK, and USSR who all had ample cause to fear the consistent and rigorous enforcement of a meaningful regime of international humanitarian law) that as long as a state dedicates the slightest pro forma effort toward concocting even the flimsiest security pretext, it can wreak just about any amount of death and horror it wants on just about any number of people it wants, while still avoiding repercussions for “the crime of crimes.”
A bit like bribery/corruption laws in US domestic politics, where a politician essentially has to get caught on microphone saying “thank you for this bag of cash, good sir, I am now exercising the power of my office as a direct and unalloyed quid pro quo” before they start to run the risk of being convicted of anything.
The lower you set the bar for genocide, the less objectionable it becomes. They only invented the word in the first place to describe acts that seemed much more objectionable than usual.
Put another way: What exactly do you think the US was doing around 1945 that seemed as objectionable as the Holocaust?
Well there was Jim Crow, lynchings and the internment of Japanese Americans, all objectionable but not in quite the same class as systematic mass murder according to ethnicity, religion, sexual preference and mental health.
Well Moses goes into this in quite some detail, how the concept of genocide in international law functions as the lodestone of a modern-day “language of transgression” to demarcate between that which does or doesn’t “shock the conscience of humanity,” and because of how narrowly it’s defined in international law (a substantially more narrow definition than the framework originally sketched out by Rafael Lemkin, whose work drew heavily on European colonial cases like the indigenous peoples of North America) ends up as a kind of blank-check legitimization for the vast majority of atrocities inflicted by modern states against their subject populations, particularly during internal rebellions and/or foreign invasions where it becomes trivially easy for any perpetrator to maintain their “security” pretext with a straight face. Or, put another way: why should an atrocity need to be “as objectionable as the Holocaust” before we should feel any imperative to get off our collective butts and prevent it?
Incidentally, Moses (much of whose scholarly background deals with modern German interpretations of Nazism) may be best known these days for igniting a debate over modern German Holocaust memory culture with an essay called “the German Catechism” that depicts it as having been perverted into a kind of modern secularized Christ-sacrifice narrative, enabling even the most blatantly Nazi-adjacent far-right actors like AfD to find redemption in the baptismal waters of a ritualistic philosemitism that in practice seems to boil down to unquestioning support for the state of Israel.
> Why should an atrocity need to be “as objectionable as the Holocaust” before we should feel any imperative to get off our collective butts and prevent it?
One issue is that the Holocaust itself wasn’t really sufficient grounds for anyone to intervene – if Japan hadn’t attacked USA, perhaps USA would still have gotten involved for various geopolitical reasons, but not solely because of Germany having extermination camps; similarly, I’m quite certain that 1939 Danzig hadn’t triggered WW2 for whatever reason and Hitler would start implementing genocide without invading more neighbours, the surrounding countries would let him do it, they would not start a world war over that.
So comparison with Holocaust is relevant because the world’s reaction to other genocides of 20th century seem to support that
*this* is approximately the level when the “international community” considers that intervening – i.e. sending their soldiers to kill and die – becomes an option, and if something is not comparable to Holocaust, then it might invoke a harshly worded letter of concern combined with some economic sanctions, but not physical intervention which could prevent it from happening.
Hard to know. The reputation of Germany with the US population crashed after Kristallnacht, to the point that the Soviet Union ranked much higher. Also, around 90% of Jews had left Germany and Austria by 1939 (sadly, most to Belgium, France and the Netherlands). So genocide was not possible without war.
On the one hand, much European imperialism in Africa was explicitly motivated by a desire to stop the slave trade, so there were precedents for intervening in other countries to stop atrocities.
On the other hand, going to war with Germany would be a lot harder and bring far fewer benefits (since you couldn’t really just annexe it the same as you could some sultanate in Africa).
My guess is that an alt-Holocaust committed without WW2 would result in Germany becoming a pariah, but not in actual military intervention.
My guess is that an alt-Holocaust committed without WW2 would result in Germany becoming a pariah, but not in actual military intervention.
Well, France still had not recovered from losing over one million soldiers in WWI. So, I am pretty sure you are right that nobody would invade Germany over it.
Though Germany might still suffer League of Nations’ sanctions like had happened with Italy when it invaded Ethiopia. (Despite that the politicians in France and Britain preferred to ally with Italy against Germany, this outraged the population so much that they were instead forced to sanction Italy.)
The US was still in the end stage of genociding the Native populations in 1945. The genocide of native american groups was a centuries long process that is, in some ways, still ongoing today. But today there is at least some (I stress the word some) more care of the victims. In 1945, there was little consideration at all, the natives had all just been pushed into a position so marginal that they barely featured in political thought.
True dat, mostly. The law of genocide was written by the victors, who never thought it could be applied to anything they wanted to do. However, genocide is defined in terms of intent, and encompasses a wide variety of acts. The problem is proving intent. The ICC has a fairly strong case against Putin and Maria [I forget her surname] with the kidnapping of Ukrainian kids, even though this is one of the less heinous war crimes the Russians have committed in Ukraine. However, the Russian side has pretty much admitted to genocidal intent, consistent with their theory that Ukrainians and Russians are the same people.
The kidnapping of the Ukrainian kids is genocide according to the legal definition, since it was for the same motive as Germanization. Which goes to show how absurdly the definition was written.
Genocide is often both more and less extensive than people think and in odd ways.
Few genocides are carried out by actively murdering all the targeted populations and most are carried out by denying them land and resources required to survive. Most genocides are induced in famine, disease, and displacement, with only a fraction of the dead being at the hands of direct violence from the genociders, largely to ensure the victims cannot secure the resources they need to prevent their death and mass displacement.
Couple typos.
laws to limit was is that – I assume “wars”.
I though this Twitter thread – thought.
This was a fascinating read, but one thing early on caught my eye that I wanted to bring up:
“We see the earliest sort of tentative steps to the idea that some ‘enemy civilians’ ought to be exempt from violence coming out of medieval Christianity and Islam, but these efforts had limited effects.”
I’m pretty sure the Indian epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana mention the concept of righteous war, or Dharma Yuddha, earlier than these religions, and the rules of warfare deemed righteous include not attacking noncombatants, human and animal, rules against pillaging, against attacking enemies using weaker weapons, in or insensate enemies.
Of course, many of these get broken, repeatedly, during the 18 day war of the Mahabharata, but the fact that attention is paid to these violations makes clear that the concept of not attacking noncombatants was expected to be followed.
Whether such rules were followed in actual battle in the subcontinent in periods where these epics were being composed, I do not know, though.
Brill has misspelled your name, BD, on their online ad for the logistics book.
Totally offtopic question for anyone! I’ve started reading the classic Rosemary Sutcliff novel “The Eagle of the Ninth” to my son. I thought it was pretty much settled now that the Ninth Legion didn’t actually disappear in Britain, and was more likely to have been quietly disbanded rather than wiped out. Wikipedia seems to think that there’s still an active debate over it though. Are there serious historians who still think the Ninth Legion was destroyed by enemy action in the British Isles?
Bonus question: she has “pilums” as the plural for “pilum”. Should I stick to “pilums” when reading to a 10 year old, or change it to “pila”?
“Pilums” is fine, it’s just the more Anglicised version of the plural.
Thanks! It’s weird. “Pilums” looks wrong when I see it written down. But when I actually say it out loud in English, “pila” sounds wrong.
> the Dutch term for that first wave was a verloren hoop, ‘lost heap’ (which becomes ‘forlorn hope’ in English) which gives a sense of the losses you are trying to avoid
Dutch person here: The word hoop has multiple meanings. One of them is ‘heap’, but the one I more strongly associate with the phrase is ‘hope’. The first wave are people who, by virtue of being there, might as well lose hope.
> it is worth noting that of all of the German and Japanese leaders prosecuted for war crimes, none were charged with bombing civilian areas, despite there being many who could have been
I imagine the hypocrisy might be too strong for that to be politically feasible? If you try to put the people who in 5 years ago ordered London to be bombed on trial, while not putting on trial the people who just a few months ago organized raids to cause firestorms all over Germany… well that makes so little sense it would put the other trials in question imo.
Not just the public relations issues, they also seem to have cared about legal precedent. See e.g. Karl Dönitz, who got off on charges of unrestricted submarine warfare by pointing out the Allied practice of the same.
“The modern infrastructure of the Laws of Armed Conflict to protect non-combatants is a product of the horrors of the Second World War”
I find myself wondering when was the last time a Ukrainian, Syrian, Israeli, or Yemeni was meaningfully protected by these laws, and what form this protection took.
Obviously, the laws of armed conflict do not provide protection from enemies who do not follow them. This is not a valid criticism of the laws themselves.
Furthermore, there is a difference between saying “the laws to protect X” and saying “the laws succeed in protecting X.” A fire extinguisher is “a device to extinguish fires,” but if a building burns down despite the presence of a fire extinguisher, the fault is not necessarily due to the extinguisher itself.
No, but if no building could be demonstrated to have benefited from the existence of a fire extinguisher, people might start to wonder what was the point of them.
Ukraine and Russia swap prisoners of war. Not all of them, not as many as the Ukrainians at least would like, but fairly regularly. Why aren’t one or both sides crucifying (Romans) or impaling (Vlad Dracula) prisoners on a large scale? Because the society norms, as expressed in the Laws of Armed Conflict, have changed.
The EU and other major supplies have imposed sanctions on the Syria government because of the treatment of civilian populations during the civil war. The atrocities haven’t stopped, but there’s a reasonable case that there are less of them. Why doesn’t the Syrian Assad regime just ask their Russian allies for massive amounts of chemical weapons (which are very effective against civilians)? Because of the consequences of ignoring the Laws of Armed Conflict.
Most societies have laws against murder. That murders still occur doesn’t make those laws ineffective.
“Ukraine and Russia swap prisoners of war. Not all of them, not as many as the Ukrainians at least would like, but fairly regularly. Why aren’t one or both sides crucifying (Romans) or impaling (Vlad Dracula) prisoners on a large scale?”
Because then they couldn’t swap them for their own people afterwards.
Russia is well aware that they have a massive demographic advantage over Ukraine, which means more available troops. Killing prisoners instead of holding them or swapping them would very much be to the advantage of Russia. Yet they don’t.
In WW2, it was Japan, the country with the most demographic disadvantage, that pioneered mistreatment of POWs as a deliberate strategy. The reasoning was that precisely because Japan was at a disadvantage, it had to incentivize its own troops to fight to the death, which meant ensuring the Allies would not be willing to treat POWs well, which meant openly and brazenly either massacring Allied POWs or doing extermination through labor. (Nazi Germany of course did the same, but for different reasons – namely, it figured it had all but won the war in the Eastern Front so might as well get an early start on Generalplan Ost.)
On the other hand, turning down the opportunity to get back Russian POWs might be bad for their soldiers’ morale, since they might feel that their leaders don’t really care about them.
Whatever the theoretical motives for prisoner exchanges, it is an empirical fact that the Russians do want to conduct some, and they can’t exchange prisoners they have killed.
They CAN exchange prisoners they have tortured and there seems to be plenty of testimony to the effect that they have.
Now, are any of our guardians of international law going to go as far as asking them not to?
@ad9, why do you think the EU, the USA, and other states are shipping vast amounts of weapons and providing training to Ukraine? It’s because Russia has disobeyed international law in invading Ukraine AND among other things is disobeying the laws of armed conflict, eg by torturing prisoners.
Torture of POWs and maltreatment of Ukrainian civilians isn’t the only reason, or the most important reason, why other states are supporting Ukraine but it’s definitely there.
So yeah, our guardians of international law are asking the Russians not to. And backing the requests up with action.
My apologies scifihugh: Ukraine was a bad example. Aid is being given for other reasons, which makes it hard to see if mistreatment of prisoners has much international cost.
I should have pointed to Sudan or Yemen or Burma as places where wars are currently occurring with mistreatment of prisoners, and no obvious complaint from the rest of the world.
An important factor in the ratios achieved is also the number of civilians remaining in the city (relative to the number of soldiers). For example the US in Fallujah got a low ratio, but the city was largely evacuated (down to 35k apparently with around 4k militants)
As the civilians in Gaza for the most part cannot/will not evacuate, it would seem reasonable that the IDF following the Fallujah playbook would likely lead to far higher casualties.
Whether this then places an onus on the IDF to go door-to-door and accept 10x casualties is valid question, but it does not necessarily indicate that it is taking less care than the US did.
All the articles and evidence about how the IDF uses shoddy intelligence deliberately and vastly more permissive ROE tells us that they take less care than the US did in Fallujah.
Like they are literally using AI to fast track targets now.
If an enemy chooses to attack a more militarily powerful state then hole up in a highly urbanized are there will be many civilian casualties. What’s interesting is it’s not the aggressor who takes the blame.
Israel started it’s agression in 1948. Had Israelis been willing to peacefully coexist with Palestinians, Hamas would never even have been created (1987). Nothing but Israel’s own hostility compels them to the war crimes they’re comitting.
If we are going to play this game, Islam started its aggression against Christians, Jews, animists etc, in the 7th century. It’s a silly game.
If we are not going to play this game, the current war started when Hamas, the entity which demonstrably rules Gaza, planned and carried out a surprise attack on Israel, not in response to any recent event, with the apparent aim of raiding Israeli territory and killing, torturing, raping or taking hostage as many people as possible.
If you wish to support this action, I will not stop you. But to do so and then complain about the response sounds a little bit like those WW2 Nazi propagandists who complained it wasn’t fair the nasty RAF dropped more bombs than the Luftwaffe.
No, Israel’s agression has been ongoing. Thousands of new illegal settlements in the West Bank, Gaza blockaded, dozens of children and more adults killed yearly. Hamas named their operation “Al-Aqsa flood”, after clashes at the mosque.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/report-israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/
https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties
https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rpal20/collections/GazaTwoDecades
How much truth there is to Oct 7 allegations beyond taking captives and killing, I don’t know, it doesn’t excuse Israel’s own crimes.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231205-israels-fake-news-factory-implodes-over-7-october-rape-story/
I don’t see it so much as a matter of fairness, as a matter of “those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.” I wish for peaceful justice to Palestine, but Israel and the USA seem intent on denying them that.
Also, the Arab Nationalists running those countries included both Muslim and Christian Arabs, so I doubt they actually defined ethnicity by religion.
That’s a really interesting point. Now I’m really curious whether nationalists in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya and the Maghreb considered Jews to be part of the broadly “Arab” nation or not. You might well be right.
It wasn’t Israel who rejected the 1947 partition plan, it was the Arab states and the Arab population of Palestine.
It wasn’t Skinner_Was_Right who rejected the 2023 partition plan to divide ownership of Hector_St_Clare’s house between Hector_St_Clare and Skinner_Was_Right — it was Hector_St_Clare and the Hector_St_Clare-aligned population of Hector_St_Clare’s house.
Property rights derive from government allocation and decisions, that’s correct. If I owned a house and a legitimate state authority, for rational and intelligible reasons, decided to decree that I had to partition it with you, and if I resisted, then you’d absolutely be correct to treat me like any other violent criminal.
Ah, there’s that Western political tradition of freedom and democracy we’ve all heard so much about as standing in Manichean opposition to nefarious and repressive non-Western autocracies like China or Russia or Iran: governments derive their just power from “rational and intelligible reasons” no matter what the governed say or think about it, and when a form of government becomes destructive to some incomprehensible tangle of jargony academic postcolonial/CRT buzzwords like “inalienable rights” or “the consent of the governed,” it is the right of the people to submit to “government allocation and decisions” or else be treated “like any other violent criminal.”
So yes, absolutely, I’m glad we’re in agreement that all resistance to the just and lawful partition of Hector_St_Clare house was illegitimate and criminal, the clear animus having been the Hectorian residents’ deplorable affinity for an unrelated atrocity previously committed against Skinner_Was_Right in a distant and unrelated neighborhood, a neighborhood whose residents have since proven their newfound love for the Skinnerian people by unquestioningly supporting the Skinnerian colonization of the Hector_St_Clare house. True, large portions of the Hectorian population may have initially fled the house around the time of the Downstairs Bedroom Massacre by Skinnerian militias, but these Hectorian refugees revealed their true motivation to be nothing more than savage and genocidal anti-Skinnerian bigotry when they sought shelter in the houses of sympathetic neighbors who were organizing an armed incursion to expel the Skinnerians altogether in defiance of the partition plan, and should thus be considered voluntary emigrants from the former Hector_St_Clare house, granted permanent residence in the neighbors’ houses, and forever barred from returning even to the ever-smaller scattering of rooms that’ve since been partially allocated to the remaining Hectorian population — rooms which, by the way, are all an integral part of Skinner_Was_Right’s eternal and undivided home as allocated to Skinner_Was_Right by G-d and will never under any circumstances be ceded to the actual legal ownership of Hector_St_Clare, who never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity to accept Skinner_Was_Right’s generous repeated offers for an opaque and shifting patchwork of conditional easements/leases/sublets to be administered under full Skinnerian authority.
(Let’s also not forget about the other large subset of the Hectorian population that got shoved into the small utility cellar and locked inside for years, some of whom recently managed to burst through the locked interior cellar door to launch a vicious and unprovoked attack against the Skinnerian residents of the nearby rooms, thus constituting an intolerable security threat to Skinnerian sovereignty that must be exterminated at any cost, ideally by boarding up the cellar door and flooding the cellar with rat poison until those who haven’t already been killed smash through the tiny exterior cellar window and permanently relocate to tents on the nextdoor neighbor’s front lawn.)
So, Hector_St_Clare, should according to your ‘house’ analogy Israel be treated as a criminal till it gets rid of its illegal settlements in the West Bank? After all, Israel had not been given the West Bank in the 1947 partition plan.
Also, @Roadent, you do know that the British only had Palestine because they had stolen it from the Ottomans in WWI? And that Israel originated not as a project of Middle-Eastern Jews but of European Jews* who went there because of the Belfour Declaration?
*Though the amount of MENA Jews in Israel later greatly increased as a result of Israel’s enemies deciding to expel their Jewish populations, despite them having nothing to do with Israel. (Because giving your arch-enemy free manpower is such a brilliant strategy.)
*However, in practice the various bad incentives in the system often led to the counting of any military aged males as combatants*
Colombia is another example. Apparently, they had introduced in 2002 extra incentives to fight the guerrillas in the military. This led to ‘false positives’, like soldiers killing civilians and planting weapons on them in the hopes of earning vacation time or extra money.
Or at least that was what I had read here: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/how-not-build-state-evidence-colombia
According to the authors of the study this policy of body-counting weakened the justice system, possibly deliberately undermined by officers attacking civilians, and might even have led to an increase in guerrilla attacks. However, I do not know how high the quality of their data and methodology is.
Mandatory Palestine belonged to the UK, not the local Palestinian people. The local Palestinians had as much right to the land as the local Jews, whereupon the UN split the land on mostly ethnic lines.
Does Pakistan have a right to invade and annex the entirety of India because the British Raj was rightfully Pakistani? Does India have a right to invade Pakistan for the same reason?
Moreover, if Pakistan launches a full-scale invasion of India, and gets beaten back, does India have a right to counter-invade? Are you going to condemn General MacArthur for his invasion of North Korea in September 1950? Are you going to condemn the Allies for invading Germany in 1945? If Israel managed to achieve a casualty ratio higher than 0.736:1, would you still consider them more in the wrong than the USSR was for assaulting Berlin in April 1945?
So, Hector_St_Clare, should according to your ‘house’ analogy Israel be treated as a criminal till it gets rid of its illegal settlements in the West Bank? After all, Israel had not been given the West Bank in the 1947 partition plan.
I think that would be fair, yes. I oppose the settlements and as you point out they’re illegal and illegitimate.
Ah, there’s that Western political tradition of freedom and democracy we’ve all heard so much about as standing
1) I’m not “western”. (I live in a western country and speak English, but that’s about it, my roots and identity are certainly not western).
2) I didn’t say anything about freedom or democracy, for or against them, nor did I say anything about “autocracy” (which is a stupidly and wildly overused term in American discourse today anyway: Russia probably qualifies as an autocracy in the traditional sense, but I certainly don’t think China or Iran does).
I think Israel has a right to exist based on nationalist and ethnic self determination grounds, not on the grounds of freedom, democracy, or appeals to the Bible. (I think a Palestinian state ought to exist too, but the reason one doesn’t stems first and foremost from the refusal of Arab countries to accept the 1947 partition).
It’s a tongue-in-cheek reference to US founding-era rhetoric about the absolute right to resist unjust/tyrannical authority, including violent resistance if necessary… but to make the point more seriously, there genuinely is a fundamental tension between the modern liberal democratic political-philosophical tradition as premised on the legitimacy of revolutionary emancipation from the tyranny of the ancien régime, versus the all-too-common impulse to defend the legitimacy of political/economic regimes whose foundations were laid under conditions of open tyranny and/or minority rule, from domestic “democratic” political systems originally established under minority rule by wealthy white men, to international laws and institutions originally established by Western colonial powers exercising brute tyrannical domination over the vast majority of the rest of the world.
To put it more concretely, the original 1947 UN partition plan for Mandatory Palestine passed the General Assembly by a vote of 33 to 13 out of 57 total member states (a grand total of three of which were in sub-Saharan Africa, one of those three being the openly minoritarian white supremacist regime in South Africa). How well do you think the plan would’ve fared in the present-day General Assembly with its 193 member states, the same body that just voted 153 to 10 for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza?
To put it more concretely, the original 1947 UN partition plan for Mandatory Palestine passed the General Assembly by a vote of 33 to 13 out of 57 total member states (a grand total of three of which were in sub-Saharan Africa, one of those three being the openly minoritarian white supremacist regime in South Africa). How well do you think the plan would’ve fared in the present-day General Assembly with its 193 member states, the same body that just voted 153 to 10 for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza?
You raise a good point here that the UN in 1947 wasn’t really representative of world opinion. You could go even further, outside of the fact that decolonization in Africa and Southeast Asia hadn’t happened yet, there were even many *European* countries at the time, like Austria and Hungary, that weren’t represented in the UN. It is worth pointing out though that support for the partition plan wasn’t just a “western” or “conservative” position at the time. The Soviet Union also voted for partition, as did Czechoslovakia and Poland. (Czechoslovakia was ruled by the Communists at the time but was not yet a one-party state as it would later become).
I don’t know how the partition plan would fare today, but I would not necessarily conflate “supporting a cease fire” or “opposing the West Bank occupation” with “opposing the existence of a Jewish nation state”. I mean, at this point I would vote for a cease-fire too, at least until Israel figures out a way to pursue its goals with less deaths and destruction. Israel’s response has now exceeded any reasonable level of retaliation and should stop. I just think that’s a separate question from whether Israel should *exist*, especially if you mean “the territory envisioned in the 1947 partition”. At this point, the 1947 partition plan would be a major step back for Israel territorially and a major step forward for Palestinians, so yes, I think you might be surprised how much support it would get.
At least as I see it, postwar European support for Zionism on both sides of the Iron Curtain is far less exculpatory than anyone involved would necessarily like to pretend, including the Zionists themselves: a truth & reconciliation style process aimed at mass-scale re-integration and restitution for displaced European Jews within Europe itself would’ve cost both the US and the USSR massive amounts of political capital in alienating the local European populations they were just then trying to integrate as seamlessly as possible into their new Cold War power blocs (if anything a much costlier proposition for the USSR, given the undeniably massive Holocaust culpability of local anti-Semitic reactionary nationalists in places like Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, and the Baltics) so exporting the messy, bloody aftermath of Europe’s “Jewish Question” to a faraway land outside of Europe was the most politically expedient way forward for all concerned, Palestinians not included of course.
If anything, judging from the pigheadedness with which modern German Holocaust memory culture has been recently doubling down on the insistence that anti-Semitism in Germany is reducible in practice to “imported anti-Semitism” from anti-Zionist foreign migrants, Europe’s bad habit of conveniently letting itself off the hook for its own internal anti-Semitism problem by dumping both the blame and the consequences onto non-Europeans is stronger now than ever.
*Though the amount of MENA Jews in Israel later greatly increased as a result of Israel’s enemies deciding to expel their Jewish populations, despite them having nothing to do with Israel. (Because giving your arch-enemy free manpower is such a brilliant strategy.)”
It was a totally reasonable strategy if your goal is to have an ethnically homogeneous country- it’s just unreasonable (and unfair) to tell an ethnic minority to leave and also simultaneously challenge their ability to have a country of their own to go to.
That reminds me, my opinion on it was that Israel should not have been created in the first place. Back when after WWI Britain was allowing Zionist migration into Palestine it already was known that the large majority of the population there did not want a ‘Jewish Homeland’ on their soil; so even then already it should have been known it was a stupid and unjust idea.
However, now it is clearly way too late. Undoing the partition and allowing the displaced Palestinians to return to the land which had been taken from them would be like trying to undo the Greco-Turkish Population Exchanges after WWI, or something.
Though, I would prefer if Israel were to be pressured into behaving much better. However, the political situation does not seem very favourable for that here in NATO.
It was a totally reasonable strategy if your goal is to have an ethnically homogeneous country- it’s just unreasonable (and unfair) to tell an ethnic minority to leave and also simultaneously challenge their ability to have a country of their own to go to.
That seems surprisingly blasé about the ethnic-cleansing of innocent people who had been living there for centuries and only had the bad luck of sharing the religion of their governments enemies…
Also, the Arab Nationalists running those countries included both Muslim and Christian Arabs, so I doubt they actually defined ethnicity by religion.
But it wasn’t their property. On an individual level, much of what was allocated to the Jews was Jewish-owned, and much of the rest was trackless desert. On a state level, it was all a British mandate.
It’s not like there was an Arab-run country called Palestine that was being expected to hand over half its land to random invaders.
@Skinner_was_Right:
Oh, I have zero doubt that a *big* part of the motivation of Poles and Czechs in voting for the Partition Plan is so that Jews would emigrate and that they could have the ethnically homogeneous nation-states that meant so much to them. I’m sure they did see the formation of Israel as a great win-win situation for both sides (not so much for the Palestinians, as you say). You also correctly note that there was plenty of blame to go around for the Holocaust (including for that matter the United States, which could have welcomed more Jewish immigration than it did).
I’d just say in response:
1) people have, all the time, complicated mixtures of motivations for all sorts of actions that they take, including here. That doesn’t have any bearing (in my mind) on whether the decision is the right one or not- one doesn’t have to have purely and solely humanitarian considerations in mind at all times. I’m sure that if someone today came up with the idea of carving a homeland for the Roma people somewhere in India or Pakistan, the Eastern European countries would be beyond delighted with the idea of their Roma populations leaving, and would vote for the idea. That doesn’t say much about whether the idea of a Roma nation state would be a good one or a bad one (I’d vote for the idea myself, personally).
2) some things really are a win win situation, and if the idea of a national state for my ethnic group came up as a live option in world politics, I’d definitely take it, and welcome support from whoever, regardless of how they felt about my ethnic group in general.
3) if we’re going to be distributing blame for the Holocaust and holding national groups responsible for the actions of their leaders, it seems unreasonable to give the Palestinians a free pass for Amin Husseini. (Yes Palestine was occupied territory at the time, not an independent country, but on the other hand, Poland and Ukraine were occupied too, in the most brutal degree, and you just held *them* partly responsible in the paragraph i’m responding to).
Part of the reason I was bemused by this analogy is because for anyone who knows my politics I’m *very much* an anti-capitalist on economics and I have an extremely dim view of the idea that private property rights are somehow “natural” or predate/precede governments.
Governments nationalize and/or redistribute property all the time, it’s a basic part of what governments do, and I usually (not always, but usually) have a pretty dim view of people who protest at losing their (often ill gotten) wealth and property.
You take a dim view of people protesting slavery? (And if someone like you has the right to take the product of their labor without recompense, it’s slavery.)
Ummm…I’m not sure what timeline you’re typing from, but it’s not the one the rest of us are in. In this timeline, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria invaded Israel the day it got independence, not the other way around.
The Naqba happened in the 6-7 months before Israel was invaded, as the much better organised and armed Jewish militias drove around 600,000 Palestinians from their homes.
I’m not an expert on that war, but I’m pretty sure that the invasion literally started the same day. Probably not in great force (logistics being what they are), but I would be very surprised if any such 6-7 month window existed. Perhaps locally, but for the country as a whole?
Incorrect; the Nakba was the largely voluntary evacuation of Palestinians from their homes in anticipation of being able to come back once their fellow Arabs had wiped out the Jews.
Incorrect; the Nakba was the largely voluntary evacuation of Palestinians from their homes in anticipation of being able to come back once their fellow Arabs had wiped out the Jews.
I really don’t think that’s true. I can totally understand believing that the expulsions were a necessary evil, or that the world as a whole is better off because of them, or what not, but I think it’s pretty undeniable that they *happened*, and were in many cases not voluntary at all.
60 Guilders – that was an Israeli myth examined in detail (by Israeli scholars, to their credit) and thoroughly disproved.
That Israel was founded on colonial violence says very little about its right to exist. In this it’s in the same boat as many modern nations – including my own. But if the aim is to find some settlement that ends rather than perpetuates the ongoing violence, it helps to understand what happened.
The group that founded Israel was willing to accept the UN partition plan. The neighbouring Arab countries were not, and invaded Israel immediately upon its creation. If you have to pick one side who was unwilling to peacefully coexist in 1948, I don’t think you’d pick the Israelis.
It was the Arabs who attacked in 1948.
Try mentioning the historical norms of siege warfare in a discussion that has anything to do with Oliver Cromwell? It is unlikely to be treated rationally!
> I point out to my students that, because we live in a democracy, it is we who must take to that task of taming our instinct for war.
While we must tame our own instincts, I fear that a lot of voices conflate preparedness and deterrence with war mongering and advocate policies that would make war more likely than less.
“If you want peace, prepare for war.”
It is a troubling idea, that the rules of warfare and protection of civilians adopted in the latter half of the 20th century, will end up just being a passing, temporary fad embraced only in spirit by the world’s most powerful western militaries and soon to be ignored and discarded in total with a return to the more traditional costs of war.
It’s also entirely consistent with history.
Apropos of nothing, I’m reading “War in Human Civilization” on your recommendation, and I wonder if you have any further thoughts, maybe any discussion of its flaws.
Have you read Thomas Pueyo’s nine part analysis of the conflict? I found it excellent and was curious if others had read it.
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/how-to-solve-the-israel-palestine-conflict
It skews very much to Israeli side of the story, but it’s a start.
One of the points that tends to get missed is that civilian casualties aren’t just people who die immediately from a bomb or a gunshot: In that sense the idea to separate “infrastructure” from “civilians” is somewhat problematic since *civilians need infrastructure to live* be it in the form of shelter, food, medical care, water, etc. etc. (and of course, so do military units, making it even more complicated)
I’ll be honest, you can’t take the Russian casualty claims and go “These are obviously fabricated” And then use claims of the IDF who is well WELL known to lie about who they are killing and why and not make the same disclaimer. Just because more westerners BELIEVE their lies doesn’t change the factual truth.
Bret even mentions a lie by the IDF in his post, although he does not explicitly point this out.
“According to preliminary statistics provided by Euro-Med Monitor, based on field documentation, at least nine out of 10 Palestinian deaths resulting from Israeli attacks are in fact civilian deaths.”
https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6004
Aren’t they basically just repeating the numbers Hamas has put out, after laundering it through UN agencies?
None of these groups have enough people on the ground to collate their own stats. They all seem to just be using the ones Hamas has released. GIGO is a real risk here.
(To be clear, I don’t blame them for using those numbers – like I said, there’s not a lot of alternatives. But making these kinds of absolute claims of truth based on one side’s data is a really bad practice.)
AiryW wrote a post above specifically for you, which you clearly need to re-read more carefully:
“And once again, you use perjorative phrasing.
The Palestinian numbers, i.e. the numbers the evidence suggests are essentially accurate, you call by the name of a militant political organization that does not seem to be influencing the numbers. The Israeli numbers which come from a militant organization and show obvious signs of political influence, you dont refer to as the numbers of either the militant organization or the political organization. (That is to say you dont say “the IDF numbers” or ‘the Likud numbers”.) This is not objective and it’s not good practice.
If your goal is actually to say where the numbers are coming from, your choice of words is accomplishing the opposite. You should perhaps take a more critical eye at what you think is objective assessment on your part.”
And maybe you need to re-read ad9’s comment a little bit further down:
“Simon, looking at Freedom House, I note it gives Israel a rating of 77 (about the same as Bulgaria and a good deal better than eg Mexico) and Gaza a rating of 11 (marginally worse than Iran and Cuba).
So I think it fair to conclude that NGOs in Israel are freer to report whatever they think is true than NGOs in Gaza.”
they might be more free to report it (or not- Israel considers itself in a state of war at the moment and even “free” countries routinely restrict press freedom in wartime, especially when it comes to things like this). But, they may not have access to the facts on the grounds, and also, if the values and policy preferences of the top ranks of the military are widely shared across Israeli society, then those NGOs may not be inclined or interested in questioning official military numbers.
(I don’t know what current Israeli public opinion surveys say regarding attitudes about the war, I just wanted to point out that “freedom” isn’t a sufficient condition for having the press, NGOs or other organs of civil society report truthful information. Lots of things that are flatly nonsense make it into the US press- progressive, conservative, and nonpartisan- all the time.)
“… that number fairly clearly a lie …”
There’s an is missing in that clause.
Great post!
As an addendum to the point about civilian/military casualty ratios, one can apply the same rubric to the Israeli casualties from October 7: 695 Israeli civilians, 71 foreigners (who we’ll assume are entirely civilians), and 373 security forces, for a ratio of 373/(695+71), or 373/766, or 0.487.
In other words, even if we give the IDF the maximum conceivable benefit of the doubt — taking their own reported ratio for Palestinian casualties entirely at face value, and writing off as irrelevant the increasingly unassailable contention that at least some of the Israeli civilian casualties on October 7 were inflicted by Israeli forces rather than by Hamas — we’re left with the conclusion that the IDF’s respect for Palestinian civilian life during military operations is at best functionally indistinguishable from that shown by Hamas for Israeli civilian life.
in light of the host’s request that we be civil in the comment section, I would like to apologize for all of the times I have not been the best commentator under the various usernames I have used on this blog. my life for the past few years has left me feeling more burnt-out than usual and so sometimes I just have had a bad day, although obviously that does not justify being rude to strangers. I know that this is maybe a bit of a useless apology, since I am not identifying who I should apologize to and for what instances, but it feels better to be open about it than to say nothing.