For years, Britain and America have made it clear that their militaries wage war both ethically and with accuracy.
Words like “precision weapons”, “legal oversight”, “proportionality” and “targeting” were bandied around and, to be frank, they were done so with a sense of exceptionalism. The message was that these countries were capable of waging a ‘civilised war’.
They are words that help distinguish Western democracies from the indiscriminate violence they condemn in others.
But two recent developments suggest that such a moral high-ground (for all of its fragility and questionable claims) is no longer being so brazenly claimed.
In Britain, a Ministry of Defence commissioned review revealed that the UK military has no coherent system for tracking civilian harm caused by its operations. As AOAV’s own Freedom of Information request also showed, there is no central register of allegations, no dedicated casualty assessment unit and no systematic mechanism for reviewing post-strike civilian deaths. Earlier casualty recording systems developed during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, according to the review, had “fallen into disuse”.
In America, the same was happening. A Pentagon inspector general’s report found the Trump administration has dismantled much of the military’s civilian harm recording infrastructure. Funding has ended, personnel have been reassigned and oversight mechanisms designed after years of criticism over civilian deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have died on the vine.
Together, at least from AOAV’s perspective, these cuts show a shift in Anglo-Saxon Western military culture where civilian protection, once presented as a moral necessity and a strategic requirement, is now not embedded in the hearts of operations.
This sea change appears to be being articulated openly inside defence circles. AOAV understands that, at a recent defence workshop in London, a senior British military official reportedly described efforts to retrain personnel away from what was characterised as the “Herrick generation” way of thinking. That belief, developed during Afghanistan and Iraq, was that soldiers should do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties – it was framed as ‘courageous restrain’t
Participants of the event, it is understood, left that meeting with the impression that current British military thinking increasingly accepts higher civilian harm thresholds as Britain prepares for future conflict. Some attendees expressed concern that British doctrine may be drifting closer to an American permissive targeting culture.
Whether or not such views become formal doctrine (and you can predict that this would be denied by the MOD who routinely say they follow International Humanitarian Law, even when inquiries into SAS killings in Afghanistan suggest this is not the case), the wider trajectory is unmistakable.
In short, for those who follow such things, it seems clear that those systems designed to monitor civilian harm are being weakened at the same time as political rhetoric around military “lethality” strengthens.
This is all against a backdrop of dubious past claims, anyway. During Operation Shader against Islamic State, the UK officially acknowledged – outrageously to some – causing just one civilian death. Research by AOAV found at least 29 likely civilian deaths from nine RAF strikes between 2016 and 2018, while the casualty recording network Airwars documented at least 26 civilian deaths in six strikes in Mosul alone.
That was then. Now, rhetoric, cuts and mood seem to reflect a growing accountability vacuum. It’s there with the United States attacking Venezuela and Iran. It’s there with American military strikes on vessels in the Caribbean. It’s there with the West’s military assistance of Israel.
Of course, it is inevitable that civilians will die in war. As AOAV’s data shows: when explosive weapons are used in towns and cities, 90% of those killed or injured will be civilians.
But democracies that stop systematically counting civilian deaths risk abandoning something deep and fundamental: the basic principle that the use of force must remain publicly accountable to the societies in whose name it is exercised.
Britain and the United States should heed this concern. Without it they risk becoming the evil they are fighting to end.
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