Collateral Damage in the Gulf war: Experience and Lessons
Dinah PoKemner discusses the challenges of evaluating the use of the military force by external analysts. These difficulties include assessing actions using ill-defined terms such as "effective contribution" and "military advantage", understanding other, non-legal standards and norms (such as public opinion) that influence military planning, and grasping what steps the military takes to learn from past mistakes. She advocates greater transparency to allow credible assessments of incidents of collateral damage and warns that overly vague terminology (such as whether "attack" applies to war on terror of indefinite length) may jeopardize the concept of proportionality by justifying almost any actions or results. Principles Concerning the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts Victor Rostow introduces a document drafted by the United Stated, Great Britain, and Germany regarding their shared interpretation of the principles of Protocol 1 of the Geneva Conventions. The United States has not ratified the Protocol, because of concerns that different interpretations of Protocol 1 could lead to different rules of engagement, and interoperability would suffer. The document was intended to "provide a common basis for military operations" among the three Allied countries. Specific categories of people are singled out for protection, including wounded persons, civilian medical united, women and children, refugees or stateless persons, and civilian defense personnel. In addition, the Paper specifies that only legitimate military objectives should be attacked, and that weapons causing superfluous injury, the use of human shields, and the improper use of protective emblems - such as the Red Cross - are not permitted. The Necessity of Learning Lessons Adam Siegel argues that the war on terrorism requires a different approach to assimilation 'lessons learned'. He advocates the adoption of a 'lesson identified' process within the U.S. military to assimilate both positive and negative lessons from the war on terrorism and facilitate information sharing and problem solving approaches. He maintains that current lessons learned efforts are insufficient to produce needed changes, and proposes the development of a network of interagency teams that will work across traditional boundaries to encourage interorganizational solutions.
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Thomas Keaney considers the reasons for relatively low numbers of civilian deaths during Operation Desert Storm, and the limitations to the Defense Department's knowledge regarding collateral damage. The use of precision weapons and the concentration of strikes away from populated areas helped minimize collateral damage, according to Keaney. Nonetheless, military leaders often lacked adequate information about the effects of individual bombing missions. This information gap, Keaney says, reflects both a lack of capability and practice, and the degree to which non-DOD elements are required for effective bomb damage assessment. Keaney discussed the limited value of measuring quantitative and qualitative (including legal analyses) inputs for understanding collateral damage in a bombing campaign. Because collateral damage has political costs, Keaney concluded that DOD should develop the capabilities and practices that will enable the U.S. military to provide accurate information about its actions.