Abstract
Based on a qualitative content analysis of human rights reports, US military statements, and newspaper accounts, this article describes the ascendency of ‘humanitized violence,’ which characterizes airstrikes in the US war against the Islamic State (2014–2017). This hyper-rationalized violence utilizes precision weaponry, technical and administrative procedures to limit civilian deaths, and calculations to achieve goals in ‘proportionality.’ This method of violence is further accompanied by a discourse of precision, care, legality, and regret. The article further shows that leading nongovernmental critics of this violence largely accept its logic. Consequently, rather than offering opposition, humanitarian NGOs instead reinforce the humanitization of violence by calling on governments to be more precise and to exercise more care when striking enemy targets. Noting the high numbers of civilian deaths that can accompany humanitized violence, along with the US government’s continued capacity for total war, the author cautions that its rise does not necessarily portend a more peaceful future.
In 2017, much of the western section of the ancient Iraqi city of Mosul was leveled. As ground zero in a multifaceted war, Islamic State fighters fiercely defended their well-entrenched positions in the densely populated old part of the city, while Iraqi government forces levied artillery and other heavy armaments against them. Additionally, the US military and its coalition partners in the fight against the Islamic State provided Iraqi national soldiers air support, firing more than 5000 bombs, rockets, or missiles into the city (Airwars, 2017a), the vast majority of which were precision-guided munitions. 1 The article at hand focuses on this latter form of violence, seeking to explore the paradox that, on the one hand these bombings unintentionally killed hundreds of unarmed civilians and contributed to the utter devastation of Mosul’s built environment (Al-Tikriti, 2018; Amnesty International, 2017). On the other hand, these bombings were also part of an air campaign that has been trumpeted as ‘the most precise war in history,’ and one in which the language used by humanitarian critics to describe this violence is mirrored by the US military itself.
For instance, Amnesty International decried the loss of civilian lives in the attack on Mosul, but it did not – at the same time – also propose alternatives to state violence in Iraq, nor did it discuss how the United States’ 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq helped give rise to the Islamic State in the first place. Instead, the organization counseled the US government and its coalition partners that, ‘constant care must be taken to spare the civilian population, civilians and civilian objects’ (Amnesty International, 2017). Human Rights Watch (2017) echoed this sentiment, demanding that ‘Anti-ISIS forces should take all feasible precautions in the choice of means and methods of warfare to minimize incidental loss of civilian life.’ The US government, for its own part, agreed that ‘the death of innocent civilians in Mosul is a terrible tragedy,’ but stressed that it was taking ‘extraordinary measures to avoid harming civilians’ (CentCom, 2017a). Elsewhere, in response to humanitarian critics of civilian deaths in Mosul, US officials insisted that ‘our goal has always been for zero civilian casualties’ (CentCom, 2017b).
In the course of this article, I argue that this paradox can be explained by recognizing that the US airstrikes in the war on the Islamic State are one example of a qualitatively new category of violence that has emerged in the past several decades, but is coming into full maturity now. I describe the characteristics of this humanitized violence below, and compare it to other forms of brutality.
Humanitized violence in comparative perspective
In a now classic essay, Randal Collins (1974) described the distinction between ferocious and callous violence. Ferocious violence, according to Collins, is overt brutality committed with intense passion; its archetypes being public mutilations and executions, human sacrifices, and ritualized war hunts. Collins argued that while ferocious violence continued to exist in the modern world, it had largely been supplanted by another form of violence that is not committed with vehemence or fervor, but is instead committed with the cold efficiency of bureaucratic organizations. The kinds of violence that typify callous cruelty include the highly bureaucratic and routinized Nazi Holocaust in Europe and the indiscriminate aerial bombings of the Second World War and the US war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia (Collins, 1974). For Collins, this transformation of violence was nothing to celebrate. While violence was less and less the province of passion and bloodlust, it nonetheless was a regular and consistent feature of the modern world, retaining an undiminished capacity to destroy human lives. In fact, thanks to advances in technology and organizational rationality, it could do so with a proficiency that would be previously unimaginable.
But where in Collins’ typology should we place contemporary forms of violence that use precision weapons, which are applied with careful restraint to minimize civilian casualties? This newer form of violence does not neatly fit, and while it shares some similarities with callous cruelty, it is different enough to require a new category. This practice of violence (1) utilizes advanced weaponry to kill from afar, (2) relies upon satellites, lasers, or other mechanisms to precisely strike intended targets, (3) is subjected to technical calculations to avoid or minimize civilian casualties, (4) and undergoes legal/administrative vetting. Finally, this violence is (5) accompanied by a humanitizing discourse between governments and human rights organizations, which is devoid of questions about the morality or wisdom of military violence, but instead focuses on a narrow set of issues such as the acknowledgment of deaths or questions about ‘proportionality.’ For this reason, I suggest that humanitized violence is reinforced, rather than opposed by, leading human rights and humanitarian organizations today.
It is helpful to compare callous and humanitized forms of violence side by side in order to better understand their similarities and differences (see Table 1). To begin, both forms of violence differ from ferocious violence, as described by Collins (1974), in the sense that they are not being committed out of passion, but instead in the course of bureaucratic officials’ duties and job responsibilities. Also, similarly, both forms of violence share an impersonal nature, this is further enhanced when such violence is committed from great distances, sometimes even from halfway around the world. Finally, both forms of violence result in ‘collateral damage,’ that terrible phrase used to describe the incidental destruction of civilian property and lives.
Comparing forms of violence.
But here the similarities end. In describing callous violence, Collins (1974: 434) refers to ‘the use of long-distance, bureaucratically administered weapons [that] produce appalling atrocities.’ Such instances of state violence result in what Shaw (2005) describes as ‘degenerate war,’ where the use of vast amounts of imprecise weapons are used to achieve maximal destruction with little to no moral restraint. Humanitized violence, in contrast, utilizes advanced technologies to strike targets with astounding levels of precision, but is also characterized by meticulous calculations and bureaucratic procedures to minimize harm to civilians (Weizman, 2011). The calculations and administrative procedures center on the goal of ‘proportionality,’ understood in international humanitarian law as the requirement that militaries establish a ‘proper balance’ between military objectives and civilian harm (Gardam, 1993).
However, as the idea of proportionality indicates, the humanitization of violence in no way guarantees that unarmed civilians will not be harmed. This is far from the case, as the analysis below will show. But humanitized violence does require real restraint and results in actual changes to the deployment of force, including changes in the timing of a strike, changes in the way a weapon is deployed (adjusting, for instance, the trajectory of a missile attack or the timing of its detonation), or changes in the particular choice of a weapon (Weizman, 2011). Sometimes these processes mean that a military target will be abandoned altogether because the number of predicted civilian casualties, despite whatever preventative measures might be taken, would be too far out of bounds of what is deemed proportional by governing policy (McNeal, 2014).
With humanitized violence, some strikes are indeed ‘clean,’ killing only intended targets who are actual enemy fighters. Others, however, result in what Shaw (2005: 86) describes as ‘small massacres,’ resulting in the killings of, most commonly, ‘a handful of people, but in numerous cases fifty to one-hundred people at a time.’ While these targeted strikes produce irremediable tragedies for the families that are impacted, and extensive suffering across whole communities, they are also much different than the mass killings of tens of thousands of people, or even more, when the unrestrained mass violence of callous cruelty is deployed.
But what explains the rise of humanitized violence? The answer, of course, is that it is the outcome of several different, but related, developments in the contemporary era. First and foremost is that the US government developed the necessary technological capacities, starting with the ability to conduct around-the-clock surveillance of potential overseas enemies either through unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) or satellite (Wall and Monahan, 2011). Along a similar timeframe, the US government also developed the ability to pinpoint areal strikes. The US government first developed and employed laser-guided precision weapons in the 1960s, while satellite-guided weapons were first put into use in the 1990s (Kuginskie, 2013). Increasingly deployed since then, in what some have described as a ‘revolution in military affairs’ (Gillespie, 2006), it was not until the US war on the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq that the overwhelming majority of all airstrikes used precision weapons (Drew, 2016).
These weapons were developed, in part, due to a shift in strategic thinking after the US military’s debacle in the Vietnam War, in which it was increasingly recognized that the disproportionate use of military violence does not ensure victory (see Hunt, 2010). After this experience, the US and other Western governments came to believe, according to Weizman (2011: 11), ‘that by moderating the violence they perpetrate, they might be able to govern populations more efficiently and even finally win over the hearts and minds that have continuously eluded them.’ 2 Indeed, the importance of making the exercise of violence as precise as possible, and otherwise limiting harm to civilians, is stressed again and again in contemporary US military strategy documents (Kilcullen, 2010; US Army, 2006).
But war-fighting tactics are not the outcome of technological development and strategic calculation alone. Warfare is also dependent upon cultural processes (Smith, 2005), a recognition of which suggests additional factors that help explain the rise of humanitized violence. For one, the very nature of these lethal technologies challenges conventional norms governing war (Henriksen and Ringsmose, 2015). Traditionally, war has been understood as involving reciprocity in risk, as a courageous pursuit in which one kills, but in which one also faces the prospect of dying (Van Creveld, 1991). But in new riskless wars, this ‘noble’ dimension of facing danger is gone. This is certainly to the strategic advantage of those doing the killing, but it also lacks some of war’s traditional moral justification (Henriksen and Ringsmose, 2015; Kahn, 2002). The practice of humanitized violence, with its precision weaponry, calculations and adjustments, and procedural processes to minimize civilian deaths, is one means by which state killing is again made to seem moral. This is especially important in the case of the United States, whose government conducts state killings via airstrike without formal declarations of war or without temporal or geographical boundaries (Shaw, 2017).
Perhaps equally important, and again contrary to traditional cultural understandings of war, the targets of US aerial strikes are not self-evidently enemies of the United States (Wilcox, 2015). Rather, individuals are targeted in signature strikes, not because they are in the midst of carrying out or planning an attack, or even because they have been identified as known militants, but only because their behavior matches characteristic ‘signatures’ of militants, at least as observed on the cameras from drones or from satellite imagery (Wilcox, 2015). In this regard, the surveillance and data collection that are part and parcel of humanitized violence are used to socially construct ‘enemies,’ separating them from the category of ‘civilians.’ Once enemies are constructed, their targeting can be made to appear moral.
Taken as a whole then, humanitized violence is both a practice, requiring the use of new surveillance and precision-killing technologies, and also a legitimating discourse. This discourse is directed both internally, to those US officials who need to feel that they are acting morally and ethically while killing people overseas, and it is deployed externally, in order to maintain the public’s acquiescence, if not support. To achieve these goals, the developers and practitioners of this discourse adeptly draw from the lexicon of human rights, which have become increasingly important, ideologically, since the end of the Cold War.
After all, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the US government could no longer legitimate its foreign incursions and war-fighting in terms of combating the alleged spread of communism. Consequently, the US government has justified subsequent wars in terms of human rights, especially by claiming to advance democracy, promote women’s equality, and defeat vicious enemies that, according to this rationale, have no respect for human life (Bricmont, 2006; Chomsky, 2008). These justifications, within this historical context, do place some real limitations on the US government, but only in the sense that US military violence must appear more limited, more rational, and more ‘humane’ than that of its enemies (Shaw, 2005).
Potential normative limits on state violence become consequential when they are policed by global networks of activists and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), who publicize governments’ violations of humanitarian norms in hopes of both embarrassing them on the international stage, and as they attempt to mobilize domestic populations to pressure leaders to act better (Hafner-Burton, 2008; Risse et al., 1999). Indeed, today US military violence is frequently scrutinized by NGOs and other civil society groups. But liberal critics and watchdogs of state violence often do not condemn its use out of hand. Instead they typically insist that governments adhere to international humanitarian law when deploying deadly force (Del Rosso, 2014), in this case adhering to the norms of precision and proportionality. Consequently, NGOs and other civil society actors that hope to police state violence do not prevent its use, so much as moderate it or alter the forms by which it is employed (Rejali, 2007; Weizman, 2011). The result is that human rights and humanitarian organizations play a role in the further rationalization of violence in our present moment. To the extent that the US government publicly responds to such criticism, other than through outright denial, it attempts to deflect criticism with a ‘humanitizing discourse’ of its own, which stresses the care and effort taken to conform to humanitarian norms (Bonds, 2013).
Taken together, US military violence has been humanitized both because it provides strategic advantage in the conduct of counterinsurgency war, and because it is a principal way through which military violence is legitimated by Western nations in our contemporary era. It effectively depoliticizes violence through ‘arena shifting’ (Flinders and Buller, 2006). Rather than engaging in a moral and ethical debate about war and the destruction of human lives, in the realm – as Weber (1978) describes – of substantive rationality, US governmental officials can instead engage critics in a more limited conversation in the arena of technical rationality. Consequently, the United States government’s and humanitarian NGOs’ humanitizing discourse avoids concerns about the utility of violence or questions about a state’s entitlement to use it. This discourse never asks: What is the root cause of this violence? Will it produce more violence in the future? Are there alternatives? Instead, debate focuses around a more narrow set of issues: Has the US acknowledged the number of its civilian victims? Did a strike achieve goals in ‘proportionality’? Were enough precautions taken? and so on. All this will be illustrated through an examination of US violence in the war against the Islamic State.
Research methods
In order to study this violence, along with the discourse surrounding it, I utilized a qualitative content analysis approach (Altheide, 1987, 1996). I first conducted a LexisNexis Academic search of major US newspapers in order to gather stories about civilian impacts from US airstrikes in the war, which yielded 98 unique stories between September 2014 and December 2017. I also analyzed daily press releases and official statements regarding airstrikes posted on the US military’s CentCom website during this timeframe. While I read hundreds of such press releases, I selected 41 for more detailed analysis, either due to their representative nature (n = 5) or because the statements or press releases specifically discussed civilian impacts (n = 36). Finally, I also included 34 press releases, official statements, web pages, and investigative reports from three humanitarian organizations regarding the war (Airwars, 3 Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch).
By obtaining documents for analysis from newspapers, human rights organizations, and the US military, my goal was to gather information from multiple sources in order to develop a fuller accounting of this violence than would be possible by relying on any one single source alone. I sought to utilize a dialogical approach in order to understand how discourse and practices develop out of conflict and conversation between disparate parties (see Coy et al., 2008; Del Rosso, 2017). In analyzing these documents, I took an inductive approach to understand the following questions: How is violence being deployed? What are the consequences to civilians? And how is both violence and its civilian harm being discussed? During my preliminary reading, I identified some initial categories of analysis after noticing recurring themes, for instance regarding care, precision, restraint, proportionality, and international law. I readjusted these categories and added new ones as my analysis developed, rereading documents as necessary to ensure validity (Altheide, 1987). I then sought to make sense of these emergent categories and themes in terms of existing scholarship on state violence, which I present below.
Humanitized violence in the US war against the Islamic State
In 1974, Collins argued that callous cruelty was the result of modernity’s thorough rationalization of violence. But violence has been rationalized even further since his initial writing. This is obvious when considering the differences in the indiscriminate weapons of mass violence he described in his essay, compared to the precision munitions used by the US military today, which became available only through the continuous application of scientific and technical rationalities to the practice of killing. But rationalizing the violence further, the US government typically subjects each potential airstrike to legal and procedural rationalities with the goal of eliminating or minimizing non-targeted deaths, which is hardly consistent with Collins’ (1974) description of callous violence. In the war against the Islamic State, the US military undertook methodical processes to minimize civilian casualties and to ensure that strikes met criteria that were intended to ensure compliance with international humanitarian laws and norms. As described to journalists, the process began when a target was nominated by an intelligence analyst scouring satellite data, by troops on the ground, or by a pilot. If a target was selected from a list of potential strike locations, analysts conducted surveillance through drones and/or satellites to establish its ‘pattern of life,’ which ideally included a daily accounting of the activities of the human target(s) and the numbers of civilians that may reside within the same structure or nearby (Michaels, 2017). From this point, analysts then assigned the target a ‘collateral damage estimate,’ depending upon the risk it posed to civilians and the extent to which those risks could be minimized (Michaels, 2017). According to journalist Jim Michaels (2017), but also corroborated by other sources (see CentCom, 2016a; Khan and Gopal, 2017): If there is a risk of hitting nearby buildings, [officials] mitigate the risk by choosing smaller bombs or a fuse that can delay the explosion, so a bomb detonates only after it penetrates the target. Military officers plot each bomb’s point of impact on a building or other target, measuring precisely the blast radius of each explosive they will drop. The selection of munitions can produce a precise impact.
After these calculations, but before airstrikes are conducted, each one is further subjected to a proportionality assessment in order to ensure that the strategic benefits of destroying a target are not outweighed by the costs of civilian deaths or injuries that would likely be caused by the attack (Ryan, 2017). Depending upon this analysis, each airstrike then must be approved by a higher-ranking official (Hennessy-Fiske, 2017; Michaels, 2017; Ryan, 2017).
This sort of violence is in stark contrast to what Shaw (2005) describes as ‘degenerate war’ – or the large-scale application of callous violence. Even critics of precision airstrikes like Chris Woods (2016), the founder of the nonprofit organization Airwars, acknowledge that, ‘in barely a generation, air power has shifted from indiscriminate to discriminating. Thanks to advances in precision guidance, American bombs and missiles now generally get to where they’re intended.’ Despite these differences in callous and humanitized forms of violence, both result in civilian deaths, albeit on different scales.
Precision weapons and the legal-bureaucratic processes to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law are not, after all, failsafe. Again according to Woods (2016), ‘human or machine error, bad luck or faulty military math still lead to unforeseen civilian deaths.’ More typically, civilians are unintentionally killed, no matter how precise the weapons system, when faulty intelligence leads military officials to mistakenly identify civilians themselves as military targets (Khan and Gopal, 2017; Shaw, 2005). This was especially consequential in the US campaign against the Islamic State where gathering actionable intelligence was a challenge in a warzone where the US had relatively few ground troops. As a result, US officials frequently relied upon satellite imagery, areal footage from drones, and sometimes on less than scrupulous partner forces fighting on the ground, which can all lead to mistaken assumptions about targets and/or the presence of civilians (see Arango and Cooper, 2017; Khan and Gopal, 2017). Additionally, US officials frequently determine that killing civilians may be strategically necessary and lawfully justified if their deaths cannot be avoided in a militarily important strike (McNeal, 2014). In this sense, civilians became ‘collateral damage’ in the US war against the Islamic State, and were killed simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, even if that ‘wrong place’ was a home, a mosque, or a medical clinic (Gibbons-Neff, 2017; Human Rights Watch, 2016; Khan and Gopal, 2017). These risks to civilians were, in fact, magnified by the sheer scale of the US bombardment in Iraq and Syria. According to Airwars (2018a), the US-led coalition against the Islamic State carried out 28,922 airstrikes. Given that a single airstrike can involve attacks on multiple targets multiple times, the US-led coalition fired 105,308 bombs and missiles (Airwars, 2018a).
For all these reasons, the US-led coalition has caused numerous deaths, though the exact number is not clear. The US government’s estimate puts the total number of civilian lives lost at less than a thousand (Shaheen, 2017). The monitoring group Airwars – which tracks multiple sources of information including Iraqi and Syrian news reports, on-the-ground humanitarian investigations, social media posts, and official disclosures of airstrike locations from the US government – gives a minimum estimate of civilian casualties at 6047 (2018a). Much of this discrepancy can be accounted for by the fact that the US government does not conduct its own on-the-ground investigations after airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, and so typically only acknowledges those civilian casualties it can confirm through satellite imagery or areal footage (Khan and Gopal, 2017; Woods, 2016). Based on interviews and fieldwork assessments of 150 bombsites in Syria and Iraq, Khan and Gopal (2017) found that the actual number of civilians killed by US airstrikes is likely far higher than both the US government’s and Airwars’ estimates. Given such widespread killing, the US government and other coalition partners have faced criticism from human rights organizations. This criticism, however, is on very limited and technical grounds.
Humanitized violence and its humanitarian critics/proponents in the US war on the Islamic State
The egregious brutality of callous cruelty can provoke widespread social movement opposition, even leading up to social and political unrest. According to Shaw (2005), the US government, like other Western nations, works to avoid these outcomes and to make war more politically palatable by minimizing risks to its own soldiers through reliance on airstrikes and proxy armies, and by utilizing precision weapons that, while potentially killing civilians, also avoids committing mass slaughter. In the US war on the Islamic State, the US government faced criticism, but largely on legal-technical grounds. Human rights NGOs raised several concerns, the first of which is that the US government failed to adequately acknowledge and account for the civilian victims of its airstrikes.
Calls to better account for lost lives
The NGO Airwars was created with the main objective of identifying and counting the civilian victims of airstrikes, committed by all warring parties in the multifaceted conflict in Syria and Iraq. The group’s main criticism of the US government, in fact, centered on its failure to acknowledge the death toll caused by its airstrikes. In one early report near the beginning of the war, for instance, the organization acknowledged that, There is no doubt that – relatively speaking – the Coalition goes to significant efforts to reduce the risk to civilians on the ground. Even so, the public record indicates that hundreds of civilians have been killed by the Coalition in its intensive air war against Islamic State. Yet at the same time, the Coalition’s near-total denial of having caused civilian casualties continues to damage its own credibility. (Airwars, 2015)
Throughout the war, the organization continued to criticize the US government’s lack of acknowledgment of civilian deaths. According to Airwars (2016), the US government repeatedly underestimated the number of civilian deaths caused by its airstrikes due to its reliance on a ‘civilian casualty assessment process’ that was ‘opaque, ad hoc, and significantly biased towards internal military reporting.’ Additionally, Airwars (2016) found fault with US military investigations because, ‘poorly-resourced investigators often concluded their limited assessments too quickly, with little evidence that credible external claims were properly engaged with.’ Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch also frequently called on the US government to better investigate the civilian impacts of its bombings, with the additional demand that any officials who violated norms of proportionality should be tried and punished.
Appeals to international humanitarian law
The US government will, of course, never prosecute its own military officials for violating international humanitarian laws when they are carrying out official US policy. Human rights organizations know this, and so when they call for prosecutions and punishment, it is part of a larger appeal to encourage the US military to take further steps to protect civilian lives by more strictly adhering to international humanitarian norms. For instance, in writing about a US airstrike on a medical clinic, at which Islamic State fighters were present, but which also resulted in the deaths of eight civilians, Human Rights Watch (2016) stated, Despite the presence of ISIS fighters, to be lawful, those conducting the airstrike would need to have ensured that they targeted military targets only. They also would have been required to issue an effective warning, to take feasible precautions to protect civilians. … United States-led coalition and Iraqi forces should conduct an impartial, thorough, and transparent investigation into the incident to establish who was responsible and whether it was lawful.
Likewise, Amnesty International (2017) stressed to all parties in the war against the Islamic State that, ‘everything feasible must be done to verify that targets are military objectives, to assess the proportionality of attacks, and to halt attacks if it becomes apparent they are wrongly directed or disproportionate.’ Indeed, in their press releases and investigative reports, Amnesty International, Airwars, and Human Rights Watch repeatedly criticized the US government for its failure to take ‘all feasible precautions.’
A key precaution they stressed was the need to use weapons that produce smaller explosions in order to limit civilian harm. For example, a Human Rights Watch (2017) report states that, despite the fact that the ‘apparently accurate targeting pattern’ indicated that precision-guided munitions were used in one particular airstrike, human rights investigators found, Craters of 10 or more meters in diameter, consistent with the use of conventional air-dropped bombs weighing between 500 and 1,000 pounds. The use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects such as air-dropped bombs of this size on probable military targets in densely populated civilian areas of western Mosul may be resulting in civilian casualties and damage to civilian objects that is excessive considering the anticipated military objectives of the strikes.
Echoing this statement, the organization Airwars (2017b) wrote in a press release that, The use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects … may be resulting in civilian casualties and damage to civilian objects that is excessive to the anticipated military objectives of the strikes. Such disproportionate military attacks are prohibited under international humanitarian law.
These appeals to international humanitarian law and ideals of proportionality are, first and foremost, not a challenge to a government’s prerogative to exercise violence when and where it wants, but rather they are pleas that state violence should be more fully rationalized (see Del Rosso, 2014). Additionally, humanitarian organizations are not asking questions about how the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq helped create the Islamic State in the first place. Nor are they asking questions about whether or not airstrikes from foreign military powers can even bring about a more peaceful future in Iraq and Syria, given the weakness of these states and their problems with legitimacy. Instead, these organizations are making much more narrow critiques. While they believe that greater respect for international humanitarian law and stronger adherence to norms of proportionality from the US military will save lives, they are also, in effect, contributing to the depoliticization of US military violence by removing it from the realm of substantive rationality (involving, for instance, questions about the morality and wisdom of using violence), and instead creating a much more limited debate about law and technique (Flinders and Buller, 2006; Weber, 1978). The effect that these kinds of critiques can have on the US military, if any, is the increased rationalization – and humanitization – of violence. But the extent to which humanitarian groups can achieve even this impact is limited because, as the US military shows in its responses to humanitarian critiques, ‘proportionality’ – and international humanitarian law itself – is very open to interpretation.
US military responses
In the course of the US war on the Islamic State, government officials continuously stressed, both proactively and in response to criticism from humanitarian organizations, that the military was taking numerous precautions and procedures to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law. For instance, while belatedly acknowledging four civilian deaths due to a coalition airstrike, a US military press release underscored the technical and procedural rationality that its officers use to meet international standards: The airstrikes were conducted in accordance with applicable military authorizations, targeting guidance, and LOAC [Law of Armed Combat]. The target engaged was a valid military target, and the LOAC principles of military necessity, proportionality, and distinction were observed. All reasonable measures were taken to avoid unintended deaths of or injuries to non-combatants by reviewing the targets thoroughly prior to engagement, relying on accurate assessments of the targets, and engaging the targets when the risk to non-combatants was thought to be minimized. (CentCom, 2015)
Likewise, in another characteristic statement from a 2017 press release, officials emphasized that ‘the Coalition applies rigorous standards to its targeting process and takes extraordinary efforts to protect non-combatants.’ The press release further asserts that, ‘the Coalition will continue to strike valid military targets, after considering the principles of military necessity, humanity, proportionality, and distinction’ (CentCom, 2017c).
Over the course of the US war against the Islamic State, the US military stressed numerous times that the extensive rationalization of its violence meant that it was not only in full compliance with international humanitarian law, but that it had far exceed what has been historically expected of any fighting force. For example, in response to growing criticism of the increasing number of civilians killed by US airstrikes, a US military spokesperson stated in 2016 that, ‘the campaign against the Islamic State is the most precise air campaign in the history of warfare’ (quoted in Altman, 2016). Similarly, in a direct response to criticisms over civilian deaths made by Airwars, Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend (2017), Commander of US operations against the Islamic State, wrote in Foreign Policy: ‘I challenge anyone to find a more precise air campaign in the history of warfare. The Coalition’s goal is always for zero human casualties. We apply rigorous standards to our targeting process and take extraordinary efforts to protect non-combatants.’ And in an ‘insider’s account’ of the air war based on time spent in a US command center, one USA Today reporter in 2017 echoed this statement, informing readers that, ‘the U.S. operation against the Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria has become the most tightly managed air campaign in the history of warfare’ 4 (Michaels, 2017).
Whatever the level of care and precision that was used, civilians were killed in US bombings. In acknowledgment of these deaths, one more characteristic of the humanitizing discourse around this violence was the consistent expression of sympathy and regret. For example, after reporting the results of an investigation into civilian deaths in 2015, one general was quoted by a Central Command press release as saying, ‘we regret the unintentional loss of lives and keep those families affected in our thoughts’ (CentCom, 2015). Similarly, a US Central Command spokesperson is reported in the Tampa Bay Tribune to have said, ‘we deeply regret the unintentional loss of life and injuries resulting from those airstrikes and express our deepest sympathies to the victims’ families and those affected’ (Altman, 2016; CentCom, 2016b).
The expression of these emotions may be an additional means through which contemporary US military violence is legitimated. In the context of wars that have been justified on humanitarian grounds (Bricmont, 2006), expressing sympathy and regret after killing civilians suggests that such events are rare, while it also signals that the US government places great value on the lives of civilians as opposed to, it is implied, its ‘ruthless’ enemies that have less concern for the wellbeing of others. Whatever the motivation, the consistent expression of sympathy and regret is yet one more way that humanitized state violence differs from the ‘unfeelingness’ of callous cruelty, though they both also share important similarities and are both at work shaping – and ending – human lives in the world today.
Conclusion: Violence in our time
In his 1974 essay, Randall Collins wrote that processes of rationalization meant that most modern state violence was qualitatively different than premodern forms. Organized violence had been subjected to scientific ‘improvement’ and bureaucratic rationality, such that it took on a characteristic of callousness or unfeeling. Rather than being driven by passion and bloodlust, state killing had become systematized and highly technological; it was also historically unparalleled in terms of its destructive capacities. Based on Collins’ insight, contemporary scholars of violence can draw two important lessons. First, forms of violence do not stand still, but evolve and change over time depending upon changes in culture and social structure. Second, these changes are not inherently progressive, despite their initial appearances, and will not necessarily lead to less brutality and suffering experienced throughout the world.
Building upon these lessons, I have advanced the idea that violence since Collins published his essay has been further rationalized, ultimately resulting in the development of a new category of violence that shares similarities with the callous cruelty he described, but also differing in important ways. First and foremost, the weapons have themselves been subjected to further scientific/technical rationality, such that they can be deployed in very precise ways. Additionally, attacks are subjected to extensive procedures intended to further minimize non-target casualties, including calculations to determine exact measures of ‘proportionality,’ technical procedures to minimize unwanted deaths, and vetting/approval procedures to promote compliance with international norms. But given the inevitability of civilian deaths, despite the use of these technologies and procedures, this violence is frequently accompanied by a humanitizing discourse that stresses legality, care, and precision while also expressing sympathy and regret. While humanitarian NGOs do extremely important work calling attention to the civilian victims of war, they largely accept the logic of humanitized violence instead of rejecting it outright or stressing the importance of nonviolent interventions. Consequently, they call instead for the further rationalization of state violence, that it should become even more precise and that it should be used with yet more care.
The point here is not that there is a clean break between callous and humanitized forms of violence. They are both impersonal and they both inevitably kill unarmed persons even without specific intent, unlike the individualized and impassioned ferocious violence described by Collins (1974). But if callous violence is that which has been rationalized, humanitized violence has been hyper-rationalized. By humanitizing violence, the US government seeks to become more proficient at counterinsurgency wars (Shaw, 2005; Weizman, 2011; see also US Army, 2006). But this is also the means by which the United States has sought to make its military’s violence consistent with our ‘humanitarian present,’ or ‘the collusion of technologies of humanitarianism, human rights, and humanitarian law’ that characterizes today’s global culture (Weizman, 2011: 4).
While humanitized violence seems like a major improvement from less rationalized forms of brutality, at least in regard to potential numbers of civilian deaths, caution is warranted. The ascendancy of humanitized violence has not, after all, replaced or diminished the United States’ capacity to callously deploy mass amounts of imprecise weaponry. For instance, as the US government was fighting its counterinsurgency war against the Islamic State, it was also conducting war games and otherwise planning for a total war on the Korean Peninsula, in which all sides would unleash vast quantities of destructive weapons with practically no meaningful mitigation to limit civilian harm (see Cooper et al., 2018). Furthermore, the ongoing multifaceted conflict in Syria shows how multiple categories of violence can interact in a single war. The personalized and spectacular forms of violence used by the Islamic State best match Collins’ description of ‘ferocious cruelty.’ While the Russian and Syrian governments’ heavy reliance on indiscriminate weapons such as barrel bombs and cluster munitions exemplifies the worst of callous violence. All this combined with the humanitized violence of the US-led coalition that has been described in this article, in total creating enormous devastation, including the almost complete obliteration of whole cities.
It is also worth pointing out that there is nothing permanent about the humanitarian present in world political culture. Given the rise of populism and nationalism in the United States and around the world, newly empowered strongmen as heads of state may look for opportunities to utilize crude force in order to demonstrate their power. If these developments continue apace, the importance of human rights and humanitarian norms may recede. While the US government will continue to use precision weapons in this context, they will be used with less restraint and alongside their indiscriminate counterparts. If so, humanitized violence may itself be short-lived, having only made but the briefest of appearances in the long history of human brutality.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
