(2020) 46:64956. A young captain had told the investigators a sickening story: he'd been under so much pressure from headquarters to boost his numbers that he'd nearly gotten into a fistfight with a South Vietnamese officer over whose unit would take credit for various enemy body parts. Posen B. (2019) 5:18794. (2020) 31:122. There was essentially no record kept in Afghanistan and Pakistan for a few years of any U.S.-caused civilian casualties, and most especially the killing of children. Some of the best-documented cases of child casualties involve U.S. drone strikes, which arent the main source of civilian killing in these wars, Crawford points out. Amazonia Investiga. doi: 10.1007/s11292-020-09450-x. Our enemies kill children too. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation (2001). [11], Some scholars and human rights activists, such as Sarah Knuckey and Radhya Al-Mutawakel, criticize the U.S. Defense Department failing to "regularly interview" eyewitnesses as part of investigations into civilian casualties, arguing that this is "a critical flaw in their investigation methodology" and that the U.S. military could overcome obstacles such as a "lack of on-the-ground networks, security concerns and/or issues related to impartiality. Figure 3. doi: 10.34069/AI/2020.26.02.40. 5. US Soldiers and Sailors Wounded in Post-9/11 Wars35 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 (1996) 7:3827. In a highly anticipated decision, the Supreme Court on Friday struck down President Biden's groundbreaking plan to forgive some or all federal student loan debt for tens of millions of Local civilians were warned, allowing them to flee their homes and hide to protect themselves from deaths and injuries (12). (2011) 11:96119. All 9 Titans From Attack On Titan, Ranked By Strength. But we abhor these groups, supposedly, because we find their brutal treatment of civilians (among other acts) inexcusable. BBC News When soldiers kills someone at close quarters, how does it affect them? Available online at: https://nsiteam:com/social/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/SOF-OHD-Concept-V1:0-3-Aug-15:pdf (accessed August 26, 2021). Gunter Lewy estimated that 1/3 of those killed and counted as "enemy KIA" killed by US/ARVN forces were civilians. This review aims to highlight the differences between traditional wars and modern conflicts, examine existing casualty estimation tools and evaluate the possibility of foreseeing the medical impacts of 21st-century warfare on the civilian population concerning the number of casualties, mortality, and morbidity. Figure 1. military. Available online at: https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/appraisal-globalization-history/docview/2343679843/se-2?accountid=11162. The term confirmed kill gets thrown around a lot, especially in sniper circles. Burkle FM. Former Marine Officer and later war-time corresponding Philip Caputo in the book A Rumor of War noted: General Westmoreland's strategy of attrition also had an important effect on our behavior. Attacks on healthcare facilities as an indicator of violence against civilians in Syria: an exploratory analysis of open-source data. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. The inability to estimate the casualty rate (16, 17) influences the calculation of needed resources, which creates a troublesome situation for the affected state and international help organizations. Available online at: https://www.gmu.edu/programs/icar/ijps/vol3_1/learch.htm (accessed August 26, 2021). The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Boko Haram and other militant groups have indeed committed atrocities against children, according the United Nations. doi: 10.1080/09592318.2019.1601866, 46. The weekend mutiny was the culmination of a long war of words between the official military establishment in Russia and The Wagner Group, easily the most powerful of Russias many mercenary firms. How do they count confirmed kills during war [12]:193. (See my critique of the film here.) Congress is seeking to kill the Army Combat Fitness Test, or ACFT, and revert to the service's previous fitness test. While casualty counting during modern conflicts is deficient due to organizational, political or strategic reasons, the international organizations responsible for collecting such data (the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent and International Institute of Humanitarian Law) face difficulties to access the conflict scene, resulting in under-reported, unreliable or no-reported data. What if no body was around and a solider made 3 kils. Counting of enemy dead by the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War, Killing and counting of unarmed civilians, "Declassification of the BDM Study, 'The Strategic Lessons Learned in Vietnam', "The On-Going Battle for the Soul of the Army", "CNG TC TM KIM, QUY TP HI CT LIT S T NAY N NM 2020 V NHNG NM TIP THEO, B Quc phng Vit Nam", "Cng tc tm kim, quy tp hi ct lit s t nay n nm 2020 v nhng nn tip theo", "Lost Souls: The Search for Vietnam's 300,000 or More MIAs", "Vietnam's Sad Hunt: 300,000 Missing Souls", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vietnam_War_body_count_controversy&oldid=1129156869, Military history of the United States during the Vietnam War, Articles with unsourced statements from November 2018, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0, This page was last edited on 23 December 2022, at 21:31. For the calendar year 2016: 53 U.S. strikes "against terrorist targets outside areas of active hostilities" (i.e., outside Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria) with 431-441 combatant deaths and 1 non-combatant death; This page was last edited on 5 April 2023, at 01:38. Accessed August 26, 2021. As far as I understand, there is no way of keeping track of individual kills. The multiple ethnical wars in Former Yugoslavia (19912001), on the other hand, lasted almost 10 years and resulted in lower civilian death rates of 5256% (5456). Although it fails to present a simple casualty estimation algorithm, it highlighted the need for international engagement and each state's responsibility in following the rules of war. doi: 10.1097/TA.0000000000002089. [44] Like any military technology, armed UAVs will kill people, combatants and innocents alike. Pakistans military says security forces have raided two militant hideouts in regions near the Pakistani security forces kill 6 militants in separate raids near the border with Afghanistan. War & Law. [1] Competitions were held between units for the highest number of VC/PAVN killed in action, or KIAs. 14. [45] Brooks asserted that the U.S.' legal justifications for UAV attacks are confusing because they switch from focusing on self-defense to armed conflict. The number of hits was reduced to 2,501 by adding Casualty Estimation, and to 152, when all keywords were included. Eaton JG. From 2006 through 2021, a total of 19,378 active-duty servicemembers have died while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. In October 2013, the Pakistani government revealed that since 2008, civilian casualties made up 3 percent of deaths from drone strikes. Security personnel watch traffic at a checkpoint in Moscow (Reuters) 1. Available online at: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG709.pdf (accessed August 26, 2021). How many kills does the average soldier get? - Your Fast Tip Putin sought to bolster the image of his military on Tuesday, addressing dozens of military officers and soldiers who supposedly took part in quelling the mutiny. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, By recalling the commandment, You shall not kill, our Lord asked for peace of heart and denounced murderous anger and hatred as immoral. (CCC 2302). doi: 10.1007/s00068-017-0778-6, 98. Twenty Republicans voted to kill the resolution, which also called for a $16 million fine if the California Democrat were found to have lied while investigating former President Donald J. Trump. The civilian death ratio obtained by dividing civilian deaths by the total number of deaths aims to compare the outcome of the various war and to indicate a possible trend. Available online at: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/Direct%20War%20Deaths%20COW%20Estimate%20November%2013%202019%20FINAL.pdf (accessed August 26, 2021). Crit Care. (2016) 27:18395. These differences may indicate the diversified information obtained in each conflict due to differences in analyzing methods, or other reasons such as: Table 2. The international search and rescue efforts kicked into high gear in the past few days. Figure 1. Ive checked and double-checked my ERB and ORB. doi: 10.1136/bmj.a137, 18. Titan: 10 Scout Regiment Members With The Gondusky JS, Reiter MP. [25] After Joe Biden took office, he halted counterterrorism drone strikes without White House approval and initiated a broad review of U.S. policy on drone use. Summary of Information Regarding U.S. Counterterrorism Strikes Outside Areas of Active Hostilities, Summary of 2016 Information Regarding United States Counterterrorism Strikes Outside Areas of Active Hostilities, "Pentagon Admits Major Investigation Flaw: They Rarely Talk to Air Strike Witnesses or Victims", "There Is Much More to a Civilian Casualty Investigation than Eyewitness Accounts", "Secret memos reveal explicit nature of U.S., Pakistan agreement on drones", "Secret 'Kill List' Proves a Test of Obama's Principles and Will", "Biden Secretly Limits Counterterrorism Drone Strikes Away From War Zones". Bombing of Civilians, Barack Obama Should Call for End of All War, Not Just War on Terror, Thanksgiving and the Myth of Native American 'Savages', The Problem with Protesting Violence with Violence. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, By recalling the commandment, You shall not kill, our Confirmed kills: A solemn secret for military snipers is becoming a Spagat M, Mack A, Cooper T, Kreutz J. Estimating war deaths: an arena of contestation. doi: 10.34172/hpp.2020.30, 97. The initial response to the Boston marathon bombing: lessons learned to prepare for the next disaster. Williamson H, Murphy K. Animus toward Muslims and its association with public support for punitive counter-terrorism policies: did the Christchurch terrorist attack mitigate this association? (2015) 386:25358. [5] The My Lai Massacre and Son Thang massacre both initially reported women and children killed as "enemy combatants". In such a society, the ordinary sources of reporting do not exist and the reliability of information and information sources are questionable. At the time the US government used kill count stats to prove it was winning the war , these kill counts were frequently inflated to paint the picture the government wanted to paint and individual soldiers would boost their own counts for their ego I guess. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. Moreover, when we commit atrocities, we provide ISIS and other groups with a provocation and justification for their behavior. Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at, Copernicus, Darwin and Freud: A Tale of Science and Narcissism, Silicon Valley and "Disruptive" War Research, photograph of a three-year-old boy, Aylan, a video of Daniya and the other child killed in the attack here, A Global Security System: An Alternative to War, U.S. [23] However, in the pre-strike review, Obama "embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties" that effectively counted "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent. 53. Army and marine officers knew that promotions were largely based on confirmed kills. 387,073 civilians have died violent deaths as a direct result of the U.S. post-9/11 wars. 65. (2021). In contrast to traditional wars, modern armed conflicts involve networks of state and non-state actors with various means of military and militia influences and strategies. ", In Lewis Sorley's book A Better War, published in 1999 after studies of voluminous previously-secret papers of Creighton Abrams, he writes "Body count may have been the most corrupt and corrupting measure of progress in the whole mess. doi: 10.1080/13518046.2020.1763129. For more information, please see our The transcript is full of statements like "that truck would make a beautiful target"; "Oh, sweet target! Of the 263, the majority (202) occurred under the Trump administration. Defence Stud. The search was limited to literature in English and Russian language. (2014) 260:9606. MCDC Countering Hybrid Warfare Project. doi: 10.1007/s40719-019-00177-3. 92. Several nations in conflicts are governed by autocratic regimes, which have failed to adopt investments in public health infrastructure, education, and prevention measures to keep pace with population growth and density (41, 46). Burkle F. Declining public health protections within autocratic regimes: impact on global health security, infectious disease outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics. Consequently, hybrid warfare may result in a larger number of civilian casualties not included in earlier estimation tools for traditional wars. Reddit, Inc. 2023. [33], In October 2013, the Pakistani government revealed that since 2008, civilian casualties made up 3 percent of deaths from drone strikes. (2021) 4:4960. The Ministry of Defense for Vietnam reported 849,018 military dead during the war for the period between 1955 and 1975 (of which a third were non-combat deaths). In Somalia, there were a total of 263 U.S. counter-terrorism airstrikes, drone strikes, and ground raids from 2003 to 2021. Israeli-Palestinian Fatalities Since 2000- Key Trends. Since 2008, it alleges there have been 317 drone strikes that killed 2,160 Islamic militants and 67 civilians. Table 1 presents the available minimum reported number of totals, military, and civilian deaths in some major wars and armed conflicts (19502019), demonstrating the changing paradigm of warfare from the traditional wars to locally-focused armed conflicts (3235). Kaldor M. New And Old Wars: Organised Violence In Global Era. The Washington Post said this was "at odds with research done by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International". Implementing International Humanitarian Law: From law to action. Gates JD, Arabian S, Biddinger P, Blansfield J, Burke P, Chung S, et al. I think the mythos of kill counts comes from the Vietnam war. Britannica. Cookie Notice December 9, 2019 In a war perceived as just, many Americans excuse soldiers who commit war crimes, Stanford scholar finds Almost half of Americans are willing to allow a war crime a [12] Journalist Jonathan Schell, who reported on Operation Cedar Falls, reported a general inability of US forces to discern VC from unarmed civilians, based on tacit ignorance of the culture and the killing of civilians on whim or suspicion. Throughout the operation, there is a sense of the drone controllers desperation to kill the people and destroy the vehicles whatever the evidence of their clearly civilian nature. [17] During the Battle of Dak To and the Battle of the Slopes, one company commander alleges after losing 78 men while finding 10 enemy bodies, the "enemy body count" figures were deliberately re-written as 475 by General William Westmoreland and released as official operational reports. One important denominator of these attacks is the chaos and overwhelming pressure they created for emergency services, particularly healthcare. There is no official process. [13], In the summer of 1970, H. Norman Schwarzkopf writes, "the Army War College issued a scathing report" that, among other things, "criticised the Army's obsession with meaningless statistics and was especially damning on the subject of body counts in Vietnam. The United Nations (UN) reports over 13,000 deaths from April 2014 to February 2020. doi: 10.1093/milmed/usaa071, PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar. Public Health 9:765261. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2021.765261. WebDoes the military count kills? Conclusion: There are challenges in estimating and counting the number of civilian casualties in modern warfare. The majority of cases represent political and religious motives. This is the view advanced implicitly in American Sniper. Available online at: https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1289.html (accessed August 26, 2021). The roadside deaths are often not recorded unless the U.S. gives some compensation to the families., Crawford adds that the harm to children in war is also indirect--morbidity and mortality due to the destruction of infrastructure which impairs delivery of medical care, makes drinking water unsafe, and makes food scarce.. War on the Rocks. 52. The current state of globalization and the technological advancement within the arms industry enable nations to avoid interstate conflict and direct involvement, using proxy fighters and escaping state's responsibility in following the International Humanitarian Law and Geneva Convention (24, 25, 30, 85, 86). A few days after the incident, Yemeni MPs voted for a ban against the use of drones in Yemen, though it is unclear what effect this will have on drone usage. Conflicts may also lead to the displacement of large populations into temporary settlements or camps with overcrowding and rudimentary shelters, inadequate safe water and sanitation, and increased exposure to disease vectors during the acute phase of the emergency. It is also responsible for the deeds of those acting in fact on its instructions, or under its direction or control, and by private persons or groups, which it acknowledges and adopts as its conduct (30, 38, 39). At the time the US government used kill count stats to prove it was winning the war , these kill counts were frequently inflated However, previous estimation algorithms, such as the one introduced by Kuhn used for traditional wars (14), fail to estimate the casualty and mortality numbers of future armed conflicts. kill A major criticism of drone strikes is that they result in excessive collateral damage. Since warfare in cyber and human domains involve substantial pillars of civilian society, civilian contingencies planning requires casualty estimation in these warfare. In contrast to traditional wars, modern armed conflicts target the local structures, organizations, and public services and aim at destabilizing the authorities and societal networks (13, 30, 31, 41, 4345). Tomes RR. [8] Table 1. "[31], The U.S. launched an investigation following an August 2021 drone attack in Kabul that killed 7 children, their father who worked for a U.S. employer, and other family members. Summary of each paper, along with article information was transferred to a Microsoft Excel File and are presented in Appendix 2. Focus Strategique. Khorram-Manesh A, Lnroth H, Rotter P, Wilhelmsson M, Aremyr J, Berner A, et al. [36] Also in 2011, the BIJ found that there were "at least 1,117 people whose injuries were severe enough to merit a mention in press reports," and that these were "a mixture of militants and civilians, adults and children, though their names are rarely reported. 59. FB reviewed and collaborated on the writing of the manuscript. Methods: A systematic review was conducted following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines, using PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science search engines. 69. While some may perceive globalization as an advancement for human society, which despite a need for continuous adjustment, promises new opportunities for all, others perceive globalization as a vehicle of economic and cultural disaster, and the main cause of the decline in the value of existing territorial interstate border, cultural and national identity (2, 5). Khorram-Manesh A. Europe on fire; medical management of terror attacksnew era and new considerations. Millett A. Korean War. We Need a New Just-War Theory, Which Aims to End War Forever. If he (or she) says that they did it themselves, you can nod and smile at them. [9], Christian Appy in Working Class War documents and describes some atrocities committed by US forces. House Kills Effort to Censure Adam Schiff, Aided by Some 38. International Committee of the Red Cross. The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.765261/full#supplementary-material, 1. 48. 0:02. 10. Bombing of Civilians? the perspective of armed groups. J Trauma Acute Care Surg. 6. With an increasing number of public health emergencies and the lack of vital elements of life such as water and food, emerging armed conflicts seem to be inevitable (26). How does Since 2001, more than 53,700 US soldiers and sailors have been officially listed as wounded in the major post-9/11 war zones. Please reload the page and try again. Available online at: https://www.ifri.org/en/publications/etudes-de-lifri/focus-strategique/future-urban-warfare-age-megacities, 95. BBC News When soldiers kills someone at close quarters, how does it affect them? They assist the affected population, direct and coordinate the international relief activities, promote the importance of IHL, and draws attention to universal humanitarian principles (40, 41). Discover world-changing science. 42. Where does the Wagner Group's name come from? The greatest number of casualties and wounds were inflicted by artillery, followed by small arms, and then by poison gas. Figure 1. doi: 10.1146/annurev-publhealth-032315-021913, 19. Lancet. Copyright 2021 Khorram-Manesh, Burkle, Goniewicz and Robinson. This led to such practices as counting civilians as Viet Cong. Medical planning for modern armed conflicts in the future should include an estimation of casualties in urban areas caused by domestic assaults, the use of drones, and terror attacks. 70. de Ceballos JP, Turgano-Fuentes F, Perez-Diaz D, Sanz-Sanchez M, Martin-Llorente C, Guerrero-Sanz JE, et al. (2016) 4:1835. Privacy Policy. 86. "[17], Assessing civilian versus militant casualties is difficult. Command of the commons: the military foundation of U.S. Hegemony Int Secur. doi: 10.33723/rs.842487, 68. Who most confirmed kills? Certainly the consensus of senior Army leaders, the generals who commanded in Vietnam, strongly indicates that it was. J Trauma Acute care Surg. Consequently, the civilian death rate in Vietnam decreased to 46% compared to that of 74% in the Korean War (51). Congress' Move to Scrap the ACFT Sparks Outcry from Army 30. "[1], Taken together, independent estimates from the non-governmental organizations New America and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism suggest that civilians made up between 7.27% to 15.47% of deaths in U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia from 20092016, with a broadly similar rate from 20172019. - In protracted and post-conflict situations, populations may have high rates of illness and mortality due to breakdown of health systems, flight of trained staff, failure of existing disease control programs, and destroyed infrastructure. According to historian Christian Appy, "search and destroy was the principal tactic; and the enemy body count was the primary measure of progress" in General Westmorelands war of attrition. Grgoire Chamayou's analysis, of one three-hour-long surveillance and attack operation on a convoy of three SUVs that killed civilians in Afghanistan in February 2010, shows a typical, if notorious, case. Consequently, hybrid warfare leads to a society in chaos with no functional entities. Estimating civilian casualties of U.S. military operations is extremely difficult, Crawford told me by email. Int Rev Red Cross. [5] For official US military operations reports on free-fire zones, there are no distinctions between enemy KIA and civilian KIA since it was assumed by US forces that all individuals killed in an area declared a free-fire zone, regardless of whether they were combatants or civilians, were considered enemy KIA. (2016) 145:11326. In hybrid warfare, the target of warfighting is not limited to the military staff and includes even civilians by creating political instability, conventional assaulting methods, riots, disinformation, influencing social media, and electoral outcomes (19, 21). Assuming that the number of deaths is a technical problem, the overwhelming number of injuries will be the cause of the collapse in all systems (11, 19, 83). Britannica. Smith RP. Witnesses and relatives told Human Rights Watch that no members of AQAP were in the procession and provided names and other information about those killed and wounded. It is not surprising, therefore, that some men acquired a contempt for human life and predilection for taking it. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Roberts A. Available online at: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf (accessed August 26, 2021). (2019) 13:65562. Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). Or pilots during WW1 and WW2 how did they confirm those kills? Khorram-Manesh A. PDA (Project Defense Alternatives). Frontiers | Estimating the Number of Civilian Casualties in Modern Overview of civilian casualties from U.S. drone strikes, Civilian casualties from U.S. drone strikes, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, List of attacks on civilians attributed to United States government forces, Everything We Know So Far About Drone Strikes, Obamas covert drone war in numbers: ten times more strikes than Bush, "U.S. airstrike kills top Iran general, Qassem Soleimani, at Baghdad airport". Dardagan H, Sloboda J.