More Than Collateral Damage: Civilian Casualties in a Technological War
How tech developments and changing war strategies are legitimizing the targeting of civilians
It would be untrue to say that the wars the world is watching today and will fight tomorrow are, at their core, different than the wars it fought yesterday. Technologies change and tactics change with them, but I imagine that the feeling of a Ukrainian watching their apartment burn after a Shahed drone attack is probably the same as a Londoner watching their flat burn during the Blitz.
What is different today and will be more so in upcoming conflicts is that civilians are inextricably entwined with military sensors, technologies, and a manufacturing process that derives from commercial-off-the-shelf products. This entwinement, when coupled with the increasing need for societies to engage in “total war” economies and mobilization, presents a sordid proposition: everything is a military target.
When democracies go to war
The norm is that democracies are surprised at the start of all wars. The only way to respond and fight through the shock of surprise is to have a broad range of military capabilities to provide many options to government and enhance military resilience. Only a balanced force can do this. (
, Futura Doctrina)
Ukraine faces a similar dilemma today that the United States faced during the Global War on Terror: personnel shortages. Both are also coping with it the same way. Ukraine has revolutionized military tactics and technologies with drone warfare, a strategy of attrition meant to counter Russia’s superior manpower advantage, while preserving the lives of as many Ukrainians as possible. In the war against ISIS, the United States made a political decision to use technology, artillery, and special operators at high rates that had severe consequences, shielding the American electorate from the consequences of war. I highly recommend the linked NYTimes article to understand the full consequences of using a small military footprint (New York Times Gift article link).
The ability to prosecute a war like the U.S. did during the Global War on Terror (GWOT), characterized by technological solutions meant to keep American soldiers off the ground, is probably over for the time being. The Futura Doctrina piece linked above discusses the balance militaries will have to take in future wars, including dramatically increasing their armed forces through rapid mobilization.
The experiences of Ukraine and Israel in the past three years have demonstrated the need for rapidly expandable military forces. While the core professionalised force has played the central role in American and Australian forces since the end of the Vietnam War, this model is increasingly not fit for its strategic purpose. The vast array of challenges that military forces must now respond to – at home and abroad – calls for larger forces. At the same time, an array of new skillsets – from drone pilots to AI experts to the need for more logisticians to support integrated global operations – are needed in military organisations used to contracting these capabilities. Finally, the ability to recruit sufficient personnel has come under increasing pressure in societies where there is declining trust in institutions and many people are reticent to commit to long-term careers in a single organization.
This idea was echoed by Jacquelyn Schneider and Julia Macdonald in their recent piece “How to Lose the Drone War: American Military Doctrine Is Stifling Innovation” in partial response to Hegseth’s “unleashing drone dominance” memo.
[The U.S.] cannot simply copy the Ukrainian (or Israeli) drone strategies. Before rushing toward procurement, U.S. defense strategists need to articulate a new theory of victory, reviewing the beliefs and assumptions that undergirded the last 50 years of technological acquisitions.
The United States’ delay in adopting the new generation of drones is a product of strong convictions that it acquired over the past 60 years of fighting wars: that it could, and should, leverage remotely operated technology to win quick conflicts fought from a distance. The United States believed that it could rely on relatively expensive drone technology to save pilots’ lives, deliver real-time intelligence straight to decision-makers, and enable precision targeting.
Before rushing to invest in a fresh wave of technologies, however, U.S. defense planners will need to review fundamental beliefs and assumptions that guided their acquisitions over the last half century. They will have to reconsider the American public’s tolerance for casualties, reevaluate long-standing procurement processes, and wrestle with the different services’ tendency to push for bigger, pricier systems.
For half a century, the United States built a military based on the belief that the American public would not sacrifice its blood but would be willing to spend its treasure. As the deficit balloons and the U.S. electorate shows an increased appetite to punish presidents for inflation and wasteful government programs, U.S. leaders can no longer simply assume they can throw money at expensive technologies to mitigate their own political risk.
One upshot from these pieces is that jobs that used to be done by the military and have since been contracted out will probably have to come back to the military. Not every American will have to be a soldier, but millions more will have to don the uniform for the next war to be successful.
Everyone is a drone maker
“Without reevaluating the American way of war, no amount of new drones will be able to defend the United States against wars it doesn’t want to fight.” (Foreign Affairs)
Ukraine has a decentralized military-industrial complex. Everything from R&D to testing to procurement happens mostly around small and medium-sized businesses and at the unit level. This is not to say the entire system from start to finish is decentralized. Ukraine still has a centralized procurement certification process—the money to buy supplies still mostly comes from the national government, although cities, towns, and NGOs also supply capital and equipment.
Many small businesses within a particular vertical, such as demining technologies or FPV development, lean on each other for co-development and co-procurement. That centralized procurement certification procedure is difficult and takes time, so many small businesses will band together to sell “one product” to the government instead of each company going through the process. They will license technology to each other, formally and informally, to create a singular product. One company might make cameras, another solenoids for motors. The end product of this consortium is a usable drone that can navigate the procurement process as a single product.
Knowledge is also dispersed. One contact of mine told me he was impressed by how non-military, non-engineering, “every-day” Ukrainians know how to assemble drones. There are schoolhouses throughout the country that teach the skill. Pop-up workshops are available. A Ukrainian 20-something told me on the train that he hosts drone-making parties.
These consortia of knowledge sharing, either in the procurement process or on the training side, are just one example of the integration of the population into the war effort. This decentralized “total war” system lends itself well to a democracy fighting back an invasion. However, as I’ll discuss later, the dissolution of any clear distinction between what is civilian and what is military has consequences.
Two more reads on drone warfare that can be read as a point-counterpoint:
Ukrainian Drone Battalion Forms Fire Wall Against Russian Advance. (Kyiv Post)
From the Frontline: I’d Rather Have a Mortar Than a Drone. (CEPA)
Internet problems
It is not just that civilians are choosing to make drones to support their soldiers that creates this technology-driven civil-military entwinement. The sensors and communication methods that are vital to civilians' livelihood and used every day are not just nice-to-have “dual-use” items to the military, but are also vital to military combat operations.
The limiting factor in military operations can nearly always be attributed to communications in some way. Drones are limited by the electronic warfare environment in which they fly. Orders are limited by how quickly they can be disseminated. Requests for fire support will only be fulfilled if the artillery battery receives them.
A new report confirmed suspicions that Elon Musk personally ordered the shutting off of Starlink during a major counteroffensive in 2022.
The move reportedly caused front-line units to lose connectivity, disabling drones and disrupting artillery coordination. A Ukrainian military source told Reuters that the outage directly contributed to the failure of the encirclement operation. (Kyiv Independent)
While Musk denies this happened, the unambiguous part of the story is that a lack of connectivity hampered active military operations. Soldiers more than likely lost their lives because of this.
The communication issue cuts both ways. Russians heavily rely on mobile internet for their day-to-day lives, more so than other nations, as it is the primary source of connectivity for most Russians. Not only is it their only source of connectivity, but Russians have to use their phones to engage in all sorts of day-to-day transactions that are not possible in an analog form anymore. They cannot effectively buy food, gas, pay rent, or much of anything without the internet. Ukraine has been taking advantage of this by using Russian networks to navigate during their deep strikes into Russia. (The New York Times)
The Russian response to this problem is to shut the internet off for everyone. It is unclear if this is having any effect on Ukraine’s ability to navigate its drones inside Russian territory, but it is affecting the Russian population. The reality is that the ubiquity of sensors, communication networks, and digital infrastructure is dual-use, and militaries, especially an invading one operating from over the horizon, are going to need to take advantage of these sensors. Many of them (think of the millions of ring cameras) may not be able to be shut off like mobile network towers. And if they are, there are going to be consequences for a population that is actively trying to resist the invaders at the same time. The consequences will be much worse for the civilian population using them if the military wanting to shut them off is not friendly. These sensors provide direct “effective military contributions,” and, as Russia has shown, it doesn’t matter if they are on top of or amid civilian infrastructure, or if civilians rely on them for their livelihood.
Two other reads on communications and war, and a primer on quantum technology:
Hackers Disrupt Russia's Drone Weaponization Network. “A volunteer-run network of service centers halts custom firmware updates for DJI drones following a cyber attack.” (Oleg Shakirov @fromcyberia Packets from Cyberia)
To keep the world’s data flowing, countries need to quickly fix broken undersea cables. This is an excellent history of undersea cable tampering. (The Bulletin)
Military and Security Dimensions of Quantum Technologies Primer (SIPRI)
Cyber-enabled terrorism
John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down is a great story about a small town resisting an occupying force. It is a short read, and I highly recommend it. At one point in the story, the town’s residents discuss trying to get allied nations to drop sabotage supplies from cargo planes—a method that is not exactly inconspicuous.
Airdropped cargo for sabotage, resistance, or not, is not required anymore. Russia is using a “gig model” version of acquiring assets and sabotaging countries allied with Ukraine. This free-lance, Uber for sabotage system has been attributed to the Warsaw shopping mall fire last year, a false-flag operation in Germany during an election cycle, and arson at the U.K. Prime Minister’s home. (Politico)
Inside Ukraine, and to a lesser extent in other countries, Russia is using Telegram to trick and entice people into being suicide bombers. Children and older women have been given packages under false pretenses and delivered the packages to the target while being remotely detonated by the Russian operative. Sometimes the Russians use crypto payments to entice people, payments that usually don’t come. (CEPA)
One key issue behind these attacks is the communication system: Telegram. 70% of Ukrainians rely on Telegram for news, bomb alert information, and government communications. I only use it in Ukraine, and sometimes it is the only way to communicate.
It is probably impossible at this point for Ukraine to disentangle itself from Telegram, and it goes to Mick Ryan’s earlier point about ensuring countries have “a broad range of capabilities.” The Telegram example should be a pressing issue to leaders who do not have to deal with military or national security decisions. It is not conducive to civil resistance to have to communicate with your people using the same app the enemy is using to recruit saboteurs.
In America, X is analogous to Telegram. Think about how often officials tweet out information crucial to the public, or how frequently you read about an official tweeting out information in a news story. If this platform is compromised in any of the ways described above, are there other reliable alternatives?
Another read on this subject:
X and WhatsApp Host Arms Traders Tied to Houthis. “Elon Musk’s X and Meta-owned WhatsApp are hosting a thriving arms trade tied to Houthi militants in Yemen…undermining U.S. national security interests” (Tech Transparency Project)
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The thin legal shield
In some ways, Ukraine is a poor example of the entwinement of the civilian population with warfighting efforts. It is hard to disentangle your war effort when the war was brought to you by an aggressive authoritarian power trying to eliminate your nation. Russia is not really trying to legitimize striking apartment buildings in international law—it is just blatantly killing civilians. Still, the future of warfare is probably going to require this level of civilian involvement—and certainly this level, if not more, of technological entwinement—whether that nation is being physically invaded or not, and this is going to have severe consequences for the civilian population when the enemy selects targets.
“Targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, even if it is sometimes used by the military, is illegal under the law of war. The Geneva conventions “prohibit[s] not just useless violence against civilians, but useful violence against them as well.”1
In international law, an object is “either a ‘military objective’ and may be attacked (subject to proportionality and necessity analyses) or it is a ‘civilian object’ and may not be attacked.” There is no such thing, legally, as ‘dual-use.’”
Article 52 in the Geneva Conventions Additional Protocol I says that a:
Military Objective “is those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture, or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.”
Civilian Objective is everything else.
Dual-Use Objective is not defined in international law.
Hathaway’s piece (linked here and in the footnotes) presents evidence from states’ militaries that supports the idea that objects labeled as “dual-use” are not causing militaries to be more cautious about targeting them, but are being used as an argument and rationalization as to why the object should be targeted. To counter this trend, Hathaway offers three solutions that could better protect civilians:
Militaries must consider the harm caused by the loss of the object through the eyes of the civilian, in addition to things like collateral damage.
Objects that do not have a direct connection to the war but are “war-sustaining” should not be targeted.
“States should 'incorporate ‘reverberating effects’ and ‘cumulative harm’ into their analysis—civilian casualty rates are not enough to calculate the loss of livelihood.”
I think the first and third recommendations make sense. Regardless of the civilian-military technological entwinement or any “dual-use” discussions, we should be striving, especially in war, to protect civilians in every way possible.
The problem with the second second recommendation is that it assumes that civilians can effectively be separated from the technological entwinement that is characteristic of modern war.
Hathaway’s analysis may lead to an overcategorization of objects that are “war-sustaining” and then be effectively ignored by military planners, as then nothing will be able to be targeted. Alternatively, it may lead to an undercategorization (i.e., ignored completely), which is where we are at with Russia’s war.
Here are some other practical examples of where a “war-sustaining” analysis runs into trouble with civil-military technological entwinement.
The Commander in Chief of the United States effectively controls the board of Nippon Steel. The Pentagon is taking a 15% stake in MP Materials, a mining company, and guaranteeing a price floor for rare earth minerals the company mines, protecting MP from a potential market flood of the minerals should China resume its exports to the U.S. at full capacity. (WSJ) These rare earth minerals are used for cars as well as fighter jets. The miners and the company are war-sustaining and partially owned by the government. I think most militaries would consider this a reasonable military objective, but it would probably be considered “war-sustaining.”
Many drones are consumable, commercial-off-the-shelf products. An Amazon warehouse that has 20% of drones for hobbyists, but some are going towards military use, is “war-sustaining”, but no doubt contributes to the livelihood of all the workers—especially if you include the clothing, food, and other items stored in this warehouse. Again, I think attacking military supply chains is something most militaries would consider acceptable and legal, but this is an example of a supply chain that serves both populations.
What about mobile networks and CCTV or Ring cameras used for navigation and target selection? A sensor used for military targeting is undoubtedly an object that makes a direct and effective contribution to military action. If those ring cameras are on houses in a subdivision next to a military objective, and the civilian deaths are proportional to the military objective, then the attack is legal. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) when adjudicating the NATO bombing of a radio tower during the Yugoslavia campaign said as much, (75-76. Full decision here).
What about Telegram servers? The same ones recruiting saboteurs, causing physical, kinetic damage that kills civilians? Returning to the ICTY decision, it may be legal “Insofar as the attack actually was aimed at disrupting the communications network.” But “disrupting government propaganda [and] such grounds alone may not meet the "effective contribution to military action" and "definite military advantage." This platform is both a civilian and military objective. If Ukraine did not have a vested interest in keeping Telegram up and running for its own purposes, I think the destruction of these servers would be legally debatable.
What about a major economic lifeline of the enemy? Ukraine has consistently attacked Russian oil refineries. I am not sure this is legal under Hathaway’s solutions. Attacking civilian economic objectives is controversial in international law, and many nations won’t do it (She cites an example about U.S. allies not wanting to attack poppy fields in Afghanistan). While I think kinetic attacks on economic infrastructure should be put through her analysis in recommendations 1 & 3, I think if it is making enough of a contribution to be worthy of a sanction, it is probably worth enough to be bombed.
Protecting civilians requires consequences for the aggressor
These cases illustrate a tension between law and war and how these tensions are only going to increase as societies return to the norm of “total war.” I wish Hathaway’s piece were a promising solution, but I feel it is more of a prediction of things to come. It is hard for me to imagine an authoritarian military bent on subjecting a people to conduct this dual-use analysis. Even so, the reality is that for democracies to survive authoritarian incursion, there will have to be a full-scale civilian-military resistance, and this will make civilians a target, even under a strict reading of AP I Art. 52.
The solution is not to give up on international law, however. Democracies should continue a full-throated defense of the institution. They must refine these protocols and build on the initial research on dual-use objectives. I do not think a bright-line rule like “war-sustaining” analysis will work. Perhaps we should relook at proportionality for dual-use targets. Raising the threshold for acceptable collateral damage is one option. Another possible solution is to increase the burden of proof on the attacking army. Intelligence providing proof for attacking dual-use objectives should be retained, and a higher fidelity should be required.
Changing the law is slow. What doesn’t have to be slow are the consequences. All the laws in the world won’t mean a damn thing if war criminals and aggressive nations are not aggressively prosecuted at war’s end. And for there to be prosecution, there must be a war resolution where perpetrating leaders, officers, and government officials are turned over to war tribunals to be tried. And for this to happen, law-abiding nations must win the war. Without such a victory, there can be no justice for the civilians who have had the scourge of war thrust upon them.
The quotes in the section come from the paper “The Dangerous Rise of Dual-Use Objects in War” by Oona A. Hathaway et al. Generally, everything I put in block quotes is a full quote. This time I included quotation marks around Hathaway’s work inside the block quotes as there are a few lines that are attributable to the paper, but not direct quotes.