The U.S. Practice of Collateral Damage Estimation and Mitigation

Author(s):  
Gregory S. McNeal
2018 ◽  
pp. 195-216
Author(s):  
Thomas H. Johnson ◽  
Matthew DuPee ◽  
Wali Shaaker

While the vast majority of this book examine Taliban narratives and associated stories, the chapter focuses on the propaganda of Hezb-e-Islami (Gulbuddin) and its variety of IO delivery mechanisms: Oqab (Eagle) Website; EID messages, printed media (Shahadat – Martyrdom; Tanweer – Enlightenment), internet and social media, DVDs and videos. The major themes of HIG’s propaganda include: exploiting collateral damage by the U.S. Coalition, HIG’s inevitable victory, permanent of coalition military bases in Afghanistan, fraudulent Afghan elections, and a HIG peace proposal. The chapter also assesses the very significant role of Pakistan in the development of HIG narratives and associated stories.


Author(s):  
Christopher J. Fuller

This chapter focuses on the notions of accuracy, collateral damage, and blowback, assessing just how accurate the CIA's program is, and the extent to which it has aided the United States in its efforts to end the ongoing War on Terror. If one is to measure the campaign by its primary goals—the decapitation of the al-Qaeda leadership; the denial of safe haven in the AfPak region; and the undermining of the Taliban's insurgency against the U.S.-backed Afghan government in Kabul—the campaign has been a success. Yet, while the drone's ability to consistently loiter over the mountains and valleys of the AfPak region may have succeeded in reducing al-Qaeda's threat, the chapter argues that the CTC's drone campaign also played a key role in creating the power vacuum into which the Islamic State was able to step.


Author(s):  
Mark G Stewart

The paper describes a simplified approach to quantifying a reliability-based design load factor (RBDF) for the variability of explosive blast loading. The user can select range and explosive mass variability and model errors to derive RBDFs for pressure and impulse. These algorithms may be easily programmed into a spreadsheet, computer code, or other numerical method. There is a need by military planners to increase the predictive accuracy of collateral damage estimation (CDE) to ensure maximum damage to the target while minimizing harm to nearby civilians. This present paper uses the CDE damage criterion adopted by the USA and NATO to assess damage and safety risks and recommend safe collateral damage distances. Hence, the present paper utilizes RBDFs to simulate collateral damage risks to a hypothetical reinforced concrete residential building from a 2000 lb bomb using the 99th percentile of blast loads, engineering models, and Monte Carlo simulation analysis that considers variabilities of load and resistance. It was found that CDE is sensitive to airblast model errors and variability of structural resistance. It is recommended that these considerations be incorporated into CDE methodology since existing CDE methodology may be non-conservative, resulting in higher risks of collateral damage.


Author(s):  
Ryan Binkley

The issue of international terrorism at the beginning of the 21st century, in the United States in particular, has left populations asking: “who and where is the enemy and how do we bring them to justice?” But a more important question could be “Who is the victim and who is not, and what measures are appropriate while minimising collateral damage?” Peeling away the complex layers in the politics of anti‐terror policy leads to the inevitable conclusion that long gone are the alleged days of “black and white” cases of nation‐wide warfare. Franz Kafka all too often warns of the psychosocial pressure that follows as a result of the hegemonic power dynamic, and though imperialism was no new concept in Kafka’s era, his concerns shine ever brighter in light of the rise of the neo‐colonial anti‐terror initiative. Politics aside, this situation is a powerful echo, prophecy even, of a host of Kafka’s literary works, which warn of a ‘psycho‐dystopian’ world of torture machines on colony‐island penitentiaries, of summary executions and the breaching of basic human rights to achieve a government’s desired end. In this presentation, I will demonstrate how Der Prozeβ (The Trial) – with its parallels to the ethereal nature of law‐ is still relevant to the case of the U.S.‐led “War on Terror” in a world of liberally accessible media and information, spreading discontent and paranoia in the hearts and minds of the very population that the anti‐terror policy is designed to “protect”.


2005 ◽  
Vol 87 (859) ◽  
pp. 429-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles S. Maier

AbstractThe article goes back to the early discussions of the morality of city bombing which took place before and during World War II and attempts to analyze both the moral argumentation and its historical context from the 1940s until today. The development of the doctrine of “collateral damage” which recognized that attacking enemy factories was permissible even if it cost the lives and homes of civilians was soon widened beyond its original notion. After the war, the dropping of the atomic bombs became an issue in its own right, to be considered separately from the earlier recourse to conventional bombing — even when conventional bombing achieved equally destructive results. Twin inhibitions have reigned in the issue of what force against civilians was justified: the reluctance of German commentators to seem apologetic for the Third Reich, and the difficulty in the U.S. of seeming to cast any aspersions on those who fought “the good war.”


Author(s):  
R. D. Heidenreich

This program has been organized by the EMSA to commensurate the 50th anniversary of the experimental verification of the wave nature of the electron. Davisson and Germer in the U.S. and Thomson and Reid in Britian accomplished this at about the same time. Their findings were published in Nature in 1927 by mutual agreement since their independent efforts had led to the same conclusion at about the same time. In 1937 Davisson and Thomson shared the Nobel Prize in physics for demonstrating the wave nature of the electron deduced in 1924 by Louis de Broglie.The Davisson experiments (1921-1927) were concerned with the angular distribution of secondary electron emission from nickel surfaces produced by 150 volt primary electrons. The motivation was the effect of secondary emission on the characteristics of vacuum tubes but significant deviations from the results expected for a corpuscular electron led to a diffraction interpretation suggested by Elasser in 1925.


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