Report: The Strategic Costs of Civilian Harm by Christopher Rogers, Rachel Reid & Chris Kolenda, Open Society Foundations

During the early years of the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan, the U.S. military was killing too many civilians and depriving too many others of basic rights and liberties. By 2008, nearly 40 percent of civilian deaths in Afghanistan resulted from U.S. military operations.

The level of “civilian harm”—the military’s term for killing innocent civilians and causing major political, social, and economic disruption—was adversely impacting the United States’ efforts to defeat the Taliban and weakening the legitimacy of the U.S. and Afghan governments.

The report, The Strategic Costs of Civilian Harm: Applying Lessons from Afghanistan to Current and Future Conflicts, examines how the U.S. military learned from its early mistakes in Afghanistan and applied lessons to mitigate civilian harm. In fact, starting in 2009, the U.S. military recognized its mistakes and started to understand the high strategic cost of civilian harm. The military’s changes led to a significant reduction in civilian deaths during the next few years.

The report argues that the United States should develop a Uniform Policy on Civilian Protection. The new standards would apply to all U.S. military operations in current and future conflicts and, hopefully, better protect civilians caught in conflict.

Download & read the full report.

The War of the Future? Picture Big Armies and Many Fronts by Helene Cooper, New York Times

… From the Middle East to South Asia to Africa, American forces for the past decade and a half have fought counterinsurgency and counterterrorist campaigns — essentially smaller-scale guerrilla warfare — rather than the large land wars of the past. But Russia’s invasion of Crimea, a surging China and an unpredictable North Korea have led American military commanders to make sure soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are trained in conventional warfare.

It is part of learning how to fight what the Pentagon calls the hybrid wars of the future, envisioned as a mix of conventional battles, insurgencies and cyberthreats.

“You’re looking at different level of capabilities when you’re talking about a higher-end threat, and the United States Army hasn’t fought against that type of enemy in a long time,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, the Army chief of staff, said in an interview. “The way we train won’t be the same because the environment now is totally different.”

Future wars, he said, “could have conventional forces, Special Forces, guerrillas, terrorists, criminals all mixed together in a highly complex terrain environment, with potentially high densities of civilians.”…

Read on.