Can democracies any longer tolerate casualties? The question has important implications for national decision-making and for international politics. This article examines how and why governments take casualties into account in decisions about military commitments—the casualty factor. This is a phenomenon that goes beyond the normal military desire to reduce losses. The article explores the wide range of popular theories put forward to explain why the casualty factor appears to have become casualty aversion or even casualty phobia in democratic nations. Explanations are classified under four headings: national interest, strategic calculus, internal politics, and long-term social change. Each type of explanation has strengths and weaknesses. Finally, an assessment is made of the overall influence of casualty aversion in democratic decision-making.
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References
1.
Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 75–75.
2.
T.S. Milburn, “Casualties—The Crucial Factor in Modern Conflicts,”British Army Review113 (August 1996): 78–84. In arbitrary fashion, “democracy” is not defined here and the terms “democratic” and “Western” are used interchangeably.
3.
A technical exception is the re-calculation of the United States’ Korean War deaths long after the end of hostilities to eliminate double-counting.
4.
Andrew P.N. Erdmann, “The U.S. Presumption of Quick, Costless Wars,”Orbis43, 3 (Summer 1999): 378–380.
5.
Steven Kull and Clay Ramsay, “The Myth of the Reactive Public: American Public Attitudes on Military Fatalities in the Post-Cold War Period,” in Public Opinion and the International Use of Force, ed. Philip Everts and Pierangelo Isernia (London: Routledge, 2001), 205–205.
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Jan van der Meulen and Marijke de Konink, “Risky Missions: Dutch Public Opinion on Peacekeeping in the Balkans,” in Everts and Isernia (eds), Public Opinion (see note 5), 120–121.
7.
Ibid., 118.
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Eric V. Larson, Casualties and Consensus: The Historical Role of Casualties in Domestic Support for U.S. Military Operations (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1996), 10n5–10n5.
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Germany still drafts young men not only for military reasons, but also for social welfare purposes (about 30 percent take this option). Mary Elise Sarotte, German Military Reform and European Security, Adelphi Paper no. 340 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2001), 22–28.
13.
“The rich man’s option is to sanitise war; the poor man’s is to make it even more horrendous that it is.” Christopher Coker, Humane Warfare (London: Routledge, 2001), 65–65.
14.
Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 153–153.
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Jentleson and Britton propose three broad categories of “principal policy objectives” which roughly correspond to the table: restraining the foreign policy of another country, bringing about political change within another country, and humanitarian intervention. Bruce W. Jentleson and Rebecca L. Britton, “Still Pretty Prudent: Post Post-Vietnam American Public Opinion on the Use of Military Force,”Journal of Conflict Resolution42, 4 (August 1998): 395–417. Feaver and Gelpi similarly distinguish “realpolitik” military missions (wars between states) from “interventionist” (operations other than war) missions. See Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles, 107–8.
16.
Larson, Casualties and Consensus, 36–39, 114–115.
17.
See, for example, David Malone, “Haiti and the International Community: A Case Study,”Survival39, 2 (Summer 1997):126–146.
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Charles A. Stevenson, “The Evolving Clinton Doctrine on the Use of Force,”Armed Forces & Society22, 4 (Summer 1996): 515–515.
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Kenneth J. Campbell, “Once Burned, Twice Cautious: Explaining the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine,”Armed Forces & Society24, 3 (Spring 1998): 357–374.
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Cited in Erdmann, “The U.S. Presumption of Quick, Costless Wars,”363–363
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Steven Kull, “Misreading the Public Mood,”Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists51, 2 (March/April, 1995): 58–58.
23.
Steven Kull, “What the Public Knows That Washington Doesn’t,”Foreign Policy101 (Winter 1995–96): 102–115.
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Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles, 135–138.
25.
James Burk, “Public Support for Peacekeeping in Lebanon and Somalia: Assessing the Casualties Hypothesis,”Political Science Quarterly114, 1 (Spring 1999): 77–77.
26.
Feaver and Gelpi suggest that “excessive sensitivity” to casualties in the Kosovo operation derived from “the ‘gap’ between civilian leaders with little or no experience in combat and a military they do not understand.” Choosing Your Battles, 101.
27.
Burk, “Public Support,”61–61.
28.
Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles, 172–172.
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Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 1995).
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See Cori Dauber, “Image as Argument: The Impact of Mogadishu on U.S. Military Intervention,”Armed Forces & Society27, 2 (Winter 2001): 220–220.
31.
On the role of the media in the Somali case, see Jonathan Mermin, “Television News and American Intervention in Somalia: The Myth of a Media-Driven Foreign Policy,”Political Science Quarterly112, 3 (Fall 1997): 385–403.
32.
Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles, 145–145.
33.
Everts, Democracy and Military Force, 181–181.
34.
Bruce W. Jentleson, “The Pretty Prudent Public: Post Post-Vietnam American Opinion on the Use of Military Force,”International Studies Quarterly36, 1 (March 1992): 49–74; Jentleson and Britton, “Still Pretty Prudent.”
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Edward N. Luttwak, “Towards Post-Heroic Warfare,”Foreign Affairs74, 3 (May/June 1995): 115–115.
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Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles, 182–182.
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Charles C. Moskos, “When Americans Accept Casualties,” Newsletter, Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society (Winter 1996).
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Peter G. Peterson, “Gray Dawn: The Global Aging Crisis,”Foreign Affairs78, 1 (January/February 1999): 44–44.
39.
Israel’s “refuseniks”—reserve officers and soldiers who reject service in occupied territories—are a classic example. Robin Hughes, “The IDF’s ‘refusenik’ factor,”Jane’s Defence Weekly (20 March 2002): 25–25.
40.
Michael Mandelbaum, “Learning to be Warless,”Survival41, 2 (Summer 1999): 151–151.
41.
Edward Luttwak calls the protective attitude of parents toward children in the military mammismo or “motherism.” Luttwak, “Where Are the Great Powers? At Home with the Kids,”Foreign Affairs73, 4 (July/August 1994): 25–25.
42.
Across a number of missions, fatalities among blacks have been slightly lower on average than their proportion in the armed forces, and about the same as their proportion of the 20– to 34–year-old population in the United States. Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler, All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way (New York: BasicBooks, 1996), 8–9.
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Charles C. Moskos, “Our Will to Fight Depends on Who Is Willing to Die,”Wall Street Journal (March 20, 2002): A22–A22.
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Cynthia H. Enloe, “The Politics of Constructing the American Woman Soldier,” in Women Soldiers: Images and Realities, ed. Elisabetta Addis, Valeria E. Russo, and Lorenza Sebesta (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994); Linda Bird Francke, Ground Zero: Gender Wars in the Military (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), ch. 3.
45.
Martin van Creveld, Men, Women, & War (London, Cassell, 2001).
46.
Everts, for example, suggests that “stricter norms” apply to exposing conscripts to risk as opposed to regulars. Democracy and Military Force, 161.
47.
Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: Free Press, 1991).
48.
Luttwak, “Towards Post-Heroic Warfare.”
49.
A calculation by Time magazine suggested that if the Gulf War had not occurred, 40 percent more military personnel would have died in normal peacetime activities through training accidents, road deaths and the like. Christopher Coker, “Post-Modern War,”RUSI Journal143, 3 (June 1998): 8–8.
50.
Of the 31,336 deaths of serving US military personnel from 1979 through 1998, 60 percent resulted from accident, 18 percent from illness, 14 percent from suicide, and 6 percent from homicide. Hostile action accounted for less than 2 percent. Department of Defense, Worldwide US Active Duty Military Personnel Casualties (October 1979 through June 1998),Table 1 (updated September 15, 1998), available online at http://%20www.dior.whs.mil/mmid/m07/jun98cas.pdf.
