By: Federico Borello In most conflict zones around the world, the majority of those killed were civilians. Those who survived suffered myriad physical, emotional, and economic hardships. In the Middle East, three permanent members of the UN Security Council – the body charged with maintaining global peace and security – conducted or supported military campaigns…
By: Daniel R. Mahanty and Eric Eikenberry The debate over U.S. complicity in Yemen’s humanitarian catastrophe is coming to a head in the Senate, with a series of votes on the Sanders-Lee-Murphy war powers resolution. But beyond this immediate measure, other members of Congress are planning to increase their long-term leverage over weapons sales to problematic…
By: Daniel R. Mahanty and Rita Siemion For all the time and attention that the Defense Department has rightly spent addressing civilian casualties, no single official at the Pentagon has ever been formally charged with overseeing the many challenges involved with proactively preventing civilian casualties and assessing and responding to reports of harm. And while many…
Last Thursday, the Senate approved the 2018 NDAA with a voice vote, sending this year’s Defense policy bill to the desk of President Trump. With at least five measures focused on the protection of civilians, the bill is notable for its emphasis on increasing protection for civilians through US military partnership and its focus on…
Today’s story by Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal in the New York Times Magazine should be required reading for all those involved in Operation Inherent Resolve, which the Pentagon often refers to as the most precise air campaign in history. It’s the story of one Iraqi, Basim Razzo, who lost his family and home to a US air strike…
Protecting civilians is too often a “nice-to-have” and not a “must-have” part of militaries’ missions. This is fundamentally wrong-minded
The Foreign Policy article penned by Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend in rebuttal to one by Airwars’ Samuel Oakford is the latest shot fired in the ongoing public quarrel between NGOs and the US military over civilian casualties. When talking about civilian casualties in conflict, the Center for Civilians in Conflict believes that constructive dialogue and…
Fighting in densely populated areas poses a number of significant challenges to forces trying to adhere to the rules that govern warfare. Even assuming that international humanitarian law (IHL) is respected, the cumulative effect of urban warfare inevitably leads to human suffering. Nowhere is the tension between the military necessity to defeat an enemy and…
The United States government has been using drones as a weaponized platform since at least February of 2002, when the Central Intelligence Agency launched a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone, killing neither Osama bin Laden—the presumed target—nor any militants, but rather four civilian men scouring an abandoned military base for scrap metal. This intelligence failure was…