If the lexicon of all the euphemistic terminology that is being used in war were to produce a “best of,” the term bugsplat would be one of the top contenders. Referring to the image of an insect hitting the windscreen of a speeding car, Bugsplat was the name given to a Pentagon computer software program employed to predict the scale and scope of “collateral damage,” the indirect and unintended civilian harm that was likely to be expected from U.S. military operations. And even though its cynical (some would say dehumanizing) title was changed to Fast Assessment Strike Tool after it had become known publicly and after it had caused significant political outrage, both the program (under its new, more technical, title) and the more general controversies surrounding collateral damage have continued.
In fact, Bruce Cronin would insist, claiming that “collateral damage” has merely “continued” would in itself be bordering on a euphemism; such terminology actually belittles the centrality that the infliction of indirect and unintended harm to noncombatants has come to play in contemporary Western warfare. Collateral damage has become one of the key controversial characteristics of the Western way of war. Hence, the subtitle of his book, and hence his critical engagement with both the causes and the politics of collateral damage over the past 30 years or so. In particular, the book is constructed around an important puzzle: Why is it that militaries—especially Western militaries who have so strongly committed themselves to waging their wars in compliance with international humanitarian law (IHL) in general and the principle of noncombatant immunity in particular—cause such high levels of collateral damage?
Cronin develops this puzzle in the first part of his book by showing how, since the late nineteenth century, there has been a slow but steady growth of ever more complex legal rules aimed at reducing the effects of violence on civilian populations. Here, two aspects are important. On the one hand, he shows how this process significantly accelerated since 1989 and the end of the Cold War, which has seen a fast-paced universalization of the Geneva Conventions. On the other hand, the reach of these legal rules has expanded from classical interstate warfare to now include most, if not all, types of armed conflict across the globe. Resulting from this dual process, Cronin shows, has been a general agreement worldwide—but particularly among Western states—that irrespective of geographical location and conflict type, civilian populations are to be protected from direct and intended harm. The most central provision of IHL in that regard requires combatants to take constant care to spare the civilian population and civilian objects from attacks, and that they must take all feasible precautions to avoid, or at least minimize, incidental loss of civilian life, injury of civilians, and damage to civilian objects. The author argues convincingly and in great detail that this provision, alongside other aspects of IHL, has become so internalized in Western warfare that most, if not all, Western militaries now wage war in accordance with it.
While this constitutes a positive development, especially when compared to the way in which these very same states tended to conduct their wars not too long ago, Cronin’s interest lies in a rather paradoxical phenomenon: Western states, which more than others have committed themselves to the legal restraints of IHL and to upholding the principle of noncombatant immunity, nevertheless end up killing and injuring large numbers of innocent civilians during their military operations. Collateral damage, by definition the legally permitted harm inflicted on innocent civilians, has not only been significant in scale but also largely foreseeable and preventable. Like other prominent critics before him, Cronin shows how inflicting large, at times excessive, levels of collateral damage has been incorporated into the logics underpinning the “Western way of war.”
What this book adds to the literature is an in-depth examination—across a wide variety of conflicts waged by different Western militaries since the 1990s—of why collateral damage has occurred. On the basis of five well-researched and detailed empirical cases (the 1991 Gulf War; the 1999 NATO air war again Serbia; the Israeli–Hezbollah War in 2006; the 2011 air war against Libya; and the U.S. drone war against Al Qaeda, 2002–17), Cronin develops a theoretical understanding that allows him to debunk and partially demolish some of the long-held assumptions surrounding this phenomenon. Here, the book shows how collateral damage in contemporary Western warfare is the outgrowth of particular strategies and methods through which Western militaries have come to fight their wars, rather than being caused by mistakes, technical failures, or the conduct of warfare by adversaries (i.e. explanations that tend to prevail in existing accounts on this topic).
These strategies and methods include military conflicts that are waged, for political reasons, for short duration and with overwhelming force; that are fought exclusively in theaters far removed from Western territories (and thereby Western vulnerabilities); that are fought in largely casualty-averse manners (thereby transferring the risks of combat from Western soldiers to enemy civilians); and that, for political reasons, are aimed to result in decisive outcomes rather than negotiated settlements. These key characteristics of the new Western way of war, according to Cronin, are low risk for Western societies and soldiers alike, but generate high levels of collateral damage that are foreseeable and preventable.
While many of these phenomena have been engaged with by the existing literature, the strength of Cronin’s book derives from its ability to demonstrate them as being prevalent across Australian, British, Israeli, French, U.S., and NATO military operations, allowing the author to identify them not with specific countries or types of conflicts but as characteristic of “Western” warfare. One of the most striking findings is the extent to which developments of new military technologies (from “smart missiles” to military drones) have enabled militaries to pursue more ambitious targets in ways and locations that were not previously possible without violations of IHL. The result has been the emergence of “effects-based operations” that increasingly eschew the traditional military objectives of annihilating the enemy’s military forces, and that instead are aimed at the enemy’s political and economic power structure in order to break the will of the enemy population and the ability of the enemy state to function. Here, new precision technology has enabled Western militaries to pursue World War II–style “duress bombing” in ways that no longer directly and intentionally aim at civilians lives, but that by default generate large numbers of collateral damage.
It is in these areas of analysis that Bugsplat reveals its key contribution as a timely, well-researched, fluently written, and ultimately disturbing book. Assessing a book as disturbing could mean a lot of things, but in this case, I mean it with a very positive connotation, as Cronin’s analysis reveals that the level of collateral damage today is largely foreseeable. And importantly, it reveals that collateral damage is primarily caused by political decisions driving Western warfare and is therefore preventable.
A few questions remain. While Cronin legitimately states that he is not questioning the provisions set by IHL (after all, a book is always about something, not everything), his core findings nevertheless raise questions concerning the adequacy of the existing legal framework to provide sufficient levels of protection for civilians in war. Given that this mode of warfare can generate such large levels of collateral damage without constituting a violation of IHL, do the existing laws of war, as he argues, really provide “the best guide to minimizing civilian casualties” because they offer the best balance between military necessity and humanitarian concerns (p. 28)? A number of critics have pointed to the permissiveness of IHL in this regard. Furthermore, IHL remains silent on the question of how much (additional) risk soldiers are required in order to take to reduce the risks faced by civilians. This leaves the door sufficiently open for policymakers to argue for precisely the mode of low-risk warfare Cronin ascribes to Western powers.
These two factors are important inasmuch as it is IHL’s permissiveness and vagueness that allow militaries to wage collateral damage-heavy war in the first place. And while I am very sympathetic to holding any actor strictly accountable for their actions, the problem with this mode of warfare is not that it is in violation of IHL, but rather that it is in compliance with IHL’s standards in the first instance. On the one hand, this is a major achievement, considering how these very same Western actors displayed a very different historical-record pattern of behavior (and, like Cronin, I am not trying to give absolution through comparison). On the other hand, the main issues arising out of the paradoxical phenomenon that Bugsplat engages are not necessarily legal but moral ones. Even when all legal requirements are fulfilled under IHL, inflicting collateral damage remains a sensitive moral issue precisely because civilians are entitled to something more, namely, that due care is taken with their lives.
Having said this, Cronin has written a very insightful, well-researched, and, most importantly, thought-provoking and eye–opening book. It should be read by academics, students, military planners, and policymakers alike.
