Yagil Levy’s excellent new book asks a difficult question in a difficult time: Whose life is worth more? The question is posed to policy makers in democratic countries that are engaged in military operations against nonstate actors embedded in civilian populations. How do these leaders alternatively value the lives of their own civilians under threat, the lives of their soldiers, the lives of their adversaries, and the lives of noncombatants caught in the crossfire? As these decisions are made, implemented, and revised, Levy demonstrates how hierarchies of risk and death are constructed through discourse and practice within the “ingrained” structures of a state’s history and culture (p. 43). Most importantly, Levy explores how these hierarchies are dynamically changed as legitimacies of force and sacrifice interact to alter military strategy and battlefield tactics (p. 40). In the background, international humanitarian law (IHL) and international opinion further constrain these states as they pursue military missions. Using case studies tracking a state’s military campaigns over time, Levy can observe risk transfer—from upper-middle-class soldiers to lower, from a state’s own soldiers to adversaries and noncombatants, and from noncombatants back to one’s own soldiers.

The book begins with Levy’s admonition that his work is “more theoretically than empirically motivated” (p. 2). The first three chapters carefully set out the Weberian state-focused perspective on dilemmas that modern democracies (Israel, Britain, and the United States) face as they pursue nonstate actors (Hamas, Hezbollah, Jaysh al Mahdi, al-Qaeda in Iraq, Serbian militias, the Taliban) through expeditionary campaigns in (mostly) urban environments. Policy makers must balance mission requirements with casualty sensitivity at home and the normative and instrumental application of the noncombatant immunity principle (NCIP) in the field. The two core concepts in the book—legitimacies of force and sacrifice—are painstakingly grounded in extant literatures on war, just war, strategic culture, casualty sensitivity, antiwar movements, bereavement discourse, and public opinion. Careful definitions are offered (p. 13 and p. 29) that both emerge from “a socially constructed system of norms, symbols, values, and beliefs” within these societies. These legitimacies are built on an infrastructure of ingrained components but are also subject to dynamic variables—legal and policy, cultural-discursive, and structural. These chapters culminate in a “(middle-range) typological theory” where the author eschews “a strict causal explanation that isolates alternative variables” (p. 40). The third chapter lays out the variation in risk transfer and operationalizes this dynamism by measuring three to four categories of fatality ratios (p. 44).

The five case-study chapters cover Israel’s operations in the West Bank and Gaza; British efforts in Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan; and US campaigns in Iraq, Kosovo, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The cases are selected to generate commonalities in certain variables (regime type, adversary, setting, and time period) while providing important variation in others (culture, method of military recruitment, vulnerability of civilian population), thereby approximating the “method of difference” design (p. 41). Levy is clear that the goal of this project is to “provide conceptual clarification for a broader research” (p. 41). Theory is developed, and concepts are defined and articulated, but the cases serve to probe the plausibility of the model, rather than engage in explicit hypothesis development and testing. Levy fully embraces the qualitative nature of his work. Opportunities for formalization and quantification are rejected or ignored, and the construction of the fatality ratios is the only time statistics are offered. Given the recency of the cases selected, secondary sources provide the bulk of the empirical evidence: memoirs, after-action reports, military histories, NGO and IGO reports, contemporary news reporting, and datasets on casualties.

In the Israeli cases, the legitimacy of force is generally high (pp. 55–56), but the legitimacy of sacrifice declined after the First Lebanon War (p. 61). In Jenin risk was transferred to lower-class and religious recruits, while reservists were spared. In Gaza, initial efforts to reduce noncombatant casualties were subsumed by efforts to reduce Israeli casualties. This involved transferring risk to Gaza residents and reimagining Gaza as a “frontier,” rather than a “ghetto” (p. 227)—a place where liberal fire policies and noncombatant casualties were more acceptable.

In the British cases, the battlefields were farther afield, and the missions ranged from humanitarian intervention to counterinsurgency. In Kosovo, the NATO air campaign, using stand-off weapons launched from high altitudes, demonstrates the strategic transfer of risk to noncombatants on both sides (Serbs and Kosovar Albanians), because the legitimacy of sacrifice was low for the United States and United Kingdom. British efforts to manage Basra in 2006–7 took place in a post-9/11 world where legitimacies of force and sacrifice had been heavily altered. By 2006 both legitimacies had waned, but the British were still willing to risk their own soldiers in Operation Sinbad and avoid transferring risk to the noncombatant population in the city (pp. 77–84).

The US cases offer the highest variation in risk transfer. Initial post–9/11 US military operations enjoyed an extraordinary level of both legitimacies. However, as Iraq was reinterpreted as a “war of choice” and efforts to promote democracy and capitalism in Afghanistan floundered, both legitimacies declined, even as the bulk of the US population avoided military service and the costs of war. A short section on the US drone war in Pakistan highlights the future of war “at-a-distance” where pilots at home make decisions about who lives and dies elsewhere (pp. 146–50).

Levy’s book resists normative conclusions, and his sympathies seem to lie with these democracies. He generally portrays military and civilian leaders as earnestly attempting to balance fatality ratios, either out of respect for IHL or instrumentally to avoid international criticism. He acknowledges the role of ethnonationalism and religion in motivating battlefield atrocities but generally views these military operations as the product of subjectively rational cost-benefit calculations in pursuit of worthy goals. This vexes the reader, especially when Levy offers the occasional provocative comment but then retreats to the “outside the scope of this book” defense.

More critically, a key element of the model—fatality ratios—is notoriously prone to miscalculation and ignores the deaths of contractors and the severe wounds that modern war inflicts on combatants and noncombatants alike. “Body counts” are seductive metrics for policy makers and scholars but are prone to inflation/deflation. Levy frequently mentions advances in battlefield medicine, but he does not fully explore the extent to which the injuries of war (physical and mental) affect the discourse surrounding legitimacies of force and sacrifice. Levy is similarly aware of, but not fully attentive to, the degree to which rules of engagement formulated by higher-level officers are discarded when “self-defense” is paramount. The common thread across these cases is the willingness to ignore the NCIP when one’s forces are under substantial threat. In the rare instances when risk was transferred to one’s own soldiers, bereavement discourses and intra-military protest quickly emerged to question these policies.

In the end, the question of whose life is worth more appears to have a timeless answer—those most like me. In the hierarchy of death, “others” will always be valued less, and leaders will wring their hands while speaking of “accidents” and “collateral damage.”