Hacker News Reader

Comment by glitchc | Hacker News Reader

The modern era has dramatically reduced civilian casualties compared previous generations. Moreover the decline is in absolute terms, despite the fact that global population has been increasing in the same time frame. Precision munitions contribute heavily to this reduction. All in all, war has become a lot safer for the typical civilian.

View on HN

Not true. The 20th century saw more civilian deaths than the total world population for most of human history.

Only in absolute numbers. But e.g. Mongol conquests wiped out >10% of the entire world population over the course of about a century. All of our 20th century wars don't add up to that.

GP claimed the decline was in absolute terms, not just percentage of population. On that note though, WW2 killed 3% of the world population in the span of 6 years.

"The modern era has dramatically reduced civilian casualties compared previous generations." Or perhaps put a temporary dampen, at the cost of increased probability of increased magnitude apocalyptic scenarios. We are flirting with nuclear war as we speak, at risk levels higher than the most nightmarish Cold War scenario. Time will tell.

Current state of nuclear threat is not even remotely comparable to Cuban Missile Crisis.

There is a hot war in Europe funded by USA and a drone just hit the Kremlin.

> All in all, war has become a lot safer for the typical civilian.

Tell that to the 387,000 civilians killed in the "war on terror", roughly equal to the number of "opposition fighters"

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2019/direct-war-...

> Precision munitions contribute heavily to this reduction.

Tell that to all the wedding parties blown up by precision munitions launched from drones because somebody's uncle, who exchanged texts with an "opposition fighter" and keeps an AK in the bed of his truck, showed up.

~226,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki alone, most of which were civilian.

Shall we include people drafted into a war they didn't want to fight? People shot by their own countrymen because they didn't want to go over the top as they were a scared civilian with minimal training being used as cannon fodder? Those same scared civvies with minimal training who did go over the top and got mowed down by machine guns and shells?

Shall we do civilian resistance groups next? Whole villages of France that were shot dead? You can still visit at least one of them and see it as it was left. It's shocking, and it's left like that as a reminder of how shit things were.

Yes, proxy wars are terrible, as are all wars. All loss of life is horrible. Nobody is saying anything to the contrary. But saying it isn't less terrible is blatant denialism. These are all people who are all someone's son or daughter, both now, and then.

You need to look at ratios. WW2 was such an unimaginably large scale war, that anecdotes don't really tell you anything. In WW2 the Allies lost 16,000,000 military and 45,000,000 civilians. The Axis powers lost 8,000,000 military and 4,000,000 civilians. Comparing this to e.g. Iraq is difficult due to a lack of reliable source of casualties, so we'll have to ballpark it. Leaked US figures (Iraq War documents) claim we killed 45,000 enemies, which is going to be a heavy overestimate. Civilian deaths in Iraq range from 110,000 to 1,0333,000. I'll pick a meet in the middle of 500,000. Using those figures we can measure this objectively:

Civilians deaths per combatant death:

---

WW2 Allied Forces = 2.8

WW2 Axis Powers = 0.5

Iraq War Iraqis = 12.7

---

Modern wars are smaller in scale (for now), but much worse on civilians as a ratio where they do happen. The reason is because of the nature of wars we get into. We invade countries which cannot competently defend themselves, and so it immediately transforms into an asymmetric Guerilla style defense against an occupying force. And in these scenarios its impossible for the invader to know who is an enemy and who is a civilian, so civilians suffer just terribly and over very long periods of time.

The final drone strike of Afghanistan [1] is quite a symbolic one that will certainly go down in history. The US military initially claimed they killed a group of Islamic State forces planning an attack on US forces, after observing an ISIS militant placing explosives in his trunk. In reality they killed 1 man, 2 adult members of his family, and 7 children from the local neighborhood (who ran out after he honked his horn when getting home). Those "explosives" were bottles of water, and the "ISIS militant" was a longterm humanitarian aid worker, who was working for a US NGO and applying for a US visa. If not for the excessive media attention on the final strike of the war, that would likely have just been marked up as another successful strike, with some unfortunate collateral damage. And that was one day in a 20 year occupation.

[1] - https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-kabul-taliban-strikes...

This is almost like arguing that ISIS inflicted civilian casualties are only due to US air strikes, because it reads to me like you are arguing that Iraqi civilian casualties are not due to unimaginable number of IED's in civilian population, and not due to using combat storage/staging ares in civilian population, in addition, to country as whole being in a civil war a like state of many years.

This is actually a pretty interesting issue, which I hadn't bothered to look up before. A large chunk of all violent deaths are directly attributed to the US Coalition. For instance here [1] is the Lancet study, which directly attributes 186,000 violent civilian deaths to the Coalition alone. That yields a 4.1 ratio due to direct violence from the Coalition alone, which is itself already far worse than even WW2.

And that's extremely surprising to me. When you look at things like WW2 civilian deaths you're not only looking at violent deaths caused by the enemy. You're looking at deaths caused by all involved powers as well as indirect deaths caused by the nature of war - starvation, disease, despair, etc. The fact that one side, alone, in modern warfare can cause more violent civilian deaths (as a ratio) than all of those factors combined, in past wars, really emphasizes the notion that the concept of modern war being better for civilians is just exceptionally misguided.

The history books of the future are going to look back on the present in a way I think few can imagine today.

[1] - https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet...

"Whole villages of France that were shot dead" That was with gloves on. The Eastern Front was on a whole different level. I stumbled at some point upon the fate of Belarus under 3 years of Nazi occupation, and just could not wrap my head around it.

"Altogether, more than 2 million people were killed in Belarus during the three years of Nazi occupation, almost a quarter of the region's population,[1] including 500,000 to 550,000 Jews in the Holocaust in Belarus.[2]"

"At least 5,295 Byelorussian settlements were destroyed by the Nazis and some or all their inhabitants killed (out of 9,200 settlements that were burned or otherwise destroyed in Belarus during World War II),[3] and more than 600 villages like Khatyn had their entire population annihilated.[3]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_occupation_of_Byeloruss...

Well, the French villages were over civilian resistance in wartime.

I'm Ashkenazi Jewish myself, and I don't like to be the guy invoking The Holocaust at every opportunity because there's plenty of other demographics usually overlooked, and The Holocaust itself wasn't as civilian war casualties, it was state-sponsored murder, and the topic at-hand is civilians getting killed through the war itself, thus invoking The Holocaust would skew the stats on wartime civilian casualties if it was to be included relative to more recent conflicts. Commonly, the victims are counted separately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

But yes, it's horrifying, and I find it difficult to understand the true scale of. I've been in stadiums with tens of thousands of people, that certainly seems like a lot of lives, a lot of families, a lot of humanity. Hundreds of thousands or millions? Yeah, it boggles my mind, and it really wasn't very long ago whatsoever.

> Tell that to the 387,000 civilians killed in the "war on terror", roughly equal to the number of "opposition fighters"

The fact things aren't perfect doesn't mean they're not objectively better.

No one here said that war is NOT hell, what exactly are you trying to say?

Also wasn't "opposition fighters" counting every able bodied man, regardless of affiliation?

In the good old days we intentionally bombed entire cities with the goal of killing as many innocent civilians as possible. It wasn't a technological issue. The goals have changed since then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...

You should point to the firebombing of Tokyo [0]

Arguably more destructive than Hiroshima.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo

> It wasn't a technological issue.

Precision guided munition is 90's technology, this removes any need/justification to carpet bomb anything, today even artillery shells are guided (is in biggest, longest range guns have accuracy in meters).

> this removes any need/justification to carpet bomb anything,

You totally missed the point. The mass bombing in WW2 was intentional. That was specifically the goal, to kill as many civilians as possible.

I guess I fail to see how this is relevant to current and future military technology, where name of the game is stealth, high precision, range, speed, and intelligence, and not in any way about building large number of bombs/cannons that fire in general vicinity of the enemy location.

This is going off topic, but originally I was replying to this comment: "The modern era has dramatically reduced civilian casualties compared previous generations... Precision munitions contribute heavily to this reduction.". I was trying to explain that the cause of excessive civilian casualties in WW2 was not due to technological limitations. It was fully intended. It was the goal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com