Austin orders more focus on limiting civilian casualties
Earlier Thursday, a federally funded think tank released a report that said the U.S. military follows a flawed and inadequate process for assessing and investigating suspected civilian damage and casualties caused by U.S. airstrikes.
The military’s own internal reporting on civilian casualties can be unreliable and incomplete, and the staff who are assigned to work on civilian casualty issues are often inadequately trained and supported, the RAND Corp. report said.
“Without reliable operational data that are easily accessible to commanders, the military will be limited in its ability to understand the root causes of civilian casualties, characterize patterns of harm, and identify specific measures to mitigate civilian harm while preserving mission-effectiveness and force protection,” the report said.
RAND said the military needs to take a broader view of damage to civilian society from airstrikes, taking into account not just deaths and injuries but also structural damage that harms the basic functioning of communities and cities.
In reviewing the military’s record on dismissing the validity of claims of civilian casualties, the RAND report found a troubling pattern: “Civilian casualties were alleged to have occurred, the military indeed attacked the alleged location, and available military information neither confirmed nor ruled out civilian casualties. Thus, these cases were determined to be not credible.”
Among other shortcomings, the Pentagon has limited its own ability to avoid repeating mistakes by not distributing the results of investigations more widely, the report said.
“According to our interviews, even the individuals involved in an incident often never saw the results of the investigation, so they could not learn lessons from what happened,” the report said.
The attention to civilian casualties has focused for years on military operations in places like Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. Looking to the future, the RAND study found that the Pentagon is not adequately prepared to deal with this issue in a large-scale war against China or Russia, which likely would involve combat in more urbanized areas where it is more difficult for military forces — especially aircraft — to distinguish between civilian and military targets.
