Collateral Damage

"Collateral damage" is a term for any incidental and undesired death, injury or other damage inflicted, especially on civilians, as the result of an activity. Originally coined to describe military operations, it is now also used in non-military contexts to refer to negative unintended consequences of an action.

Since the development of precision-guided munitions in the 1970s, military forces often claim to have gone to great lengths to minimize collateral damage.

Critics of use of the term "collateral damage" see it as a euphemism that dehumanizes non-combatants killed or injured during combat, used to reduce the perceived culpability of military leadership in failing to prevent non-combatant casualties.

Collateral damage does not include civilian casualties caused by military operations that are intended to terrorize or kill enemy civilians (e.g., the bombing of Chongqing during World War II and Russian strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure openly described as "retaliatory" and intended to "make towns uninhabitable").

Origins and usage

The term "collateral damage" is often attributed to economist Thomas Schelling, who used it in his 1961 article ''Dispersal, Deterrence, and Damage'' published in ''Operations Research''. In this article, Schelling discussed military strategies that inadvertently lead to the destruction of civilian areas, not directly targeted but affected by military actions intended to affect other strategic assets. The term came into usage during the Vietnam War and over several decades became entrenched in U.S. armed forces jargon. stating that " ch damage can occur to friendly, neutral, and even enemy forces". Another United States Department of Defense document uses " intentional or incidental injury or damage to persons or objects that would not be lawful military targets in the circumstances ruling at the time", which also states that " ch damage is not unlawful so long as it is not excessive in light of the overall military advantage anticipated from the attack".

In U.S. military terminology, the unintentional destruction of allied or neutral targets is called " friendly fire".

The U.S. military follows a technology-based process for estimating and mitigating collateral damage. The software used is known as "FAST-CD" or "Fast Assessment Strike Tool—Collateral Damage".

Non-military uses of the phrase

While not actually invented by the military, its use in military context has been common. However, the term has since been widely adopted for non-military cases, and in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic. A large number of medical, government sources and media use this term widely in relation to deaths caused indirectly as a result of government policy such as lockdowns, and not directly by the virus itself. Significant debate on the pandemic strategy has ensued, with some advocating restrictions such as lockdowns to save lives, where others claim the 'collateral damage' caused by enforced lockdowns, masks and distancing may in fact cause more deaths over a longer term. An example is the Great Barrington Declaration, purportedly signed by 3500 medical and other professionals (and mentioned in UK parliament and media) has a FAQ page titled 'Lockdowns and collateral damage', and refers to this phrase several times.

The term has also been borrowed by the computing community to refer to the refusal of service to legitimate users when administrators take blanket preventative measures against some individuals who are abusing systems. For example, Realtime Blackhole Lists used to combat email spam generally block ranges of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses rather than individual IPs associated with spam, which can deny legitimate users within those ranges the ability to send email to some domains.

The related term ''collateral mortality'' has been presumed to derive from the term "collateral damage" and has been applied within military and non-military contexts. Fisheries are an example of this, where bycatch such as dolphins are called collateral mortality; they are species that die in the pursuit of the legal death of fishing targets, such as tuna.

See also

* Non-combatant Casualty Value
* Acceptable loss
* Accidental death
* Legitimate military target
* Principles of war
* Unintended consequences
* Roadkill
* Center for Civilians in Conflict
* Principle of double effect

References

External links

*

USAF Intelligence Targeting Guide – Attachment 7: Collateral Damage
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* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20090527142007/http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/1571 "Collateral Damage: A Military Euphemism for Murder"by Camillo Mac Bica, Znet, 16 April 2007

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Military-related euphemisms
Linguistic controversies
War casualties