Civilian Casualty Mitigation and the Rationalization of Killing

Of the two purposes of this article, the first is to show that the prohibition against intentionally targeting civilians is poorly suited to the current techno-rational landscape of warfare. Sophisticated targeting procedures, precision strike capability, and automated systems have undermined the role intention plays as a moral basis for international law. With these new tools, and by systematizing and proceduralizing the targeting process, the US military has created an operational environment that rationalizes the killing of noncombatants. In effect, most noncombatants can be killed unintentionally. The second purpose is to understand how this rationalization functions. This article will employ a line of criticism that Hannah Arendt used against the strategists behind the US policy in Vietnam. What she found so troubling about these policymakers was the degree to which they allowed themselves to become mere appendages of the simulations, models, and machines from which targeting decisions are derived. Their hypothetical posits about the world surreptitiously transformed into facts. The virtually unconscious conflation of posits to facts led to a kind of self-deception and a tendency to misrepresent the very effects of the targeting decision under question.