Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict by Eli Berman

Author:Eli Berman [Berman, Eli]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B078SHYNSR
Goodreads: 36854824
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-06-11T23:00:00+00:00

THE EFFECT OF CIVILIAN CASUALTIES ON COMBAT OUTCOMES ELSEWHERE

Outside of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, most of the evidence that often informs debates about civilian casualties comes from research focused on tactics used by various armed forces, not directly from measured harm to civilians. Excellent work has been done on the consequences of indiscriminate uses of force, for example, though studies in different contexts arrive at different conclusions, as we saw in the previous chapter. Lyall’s work on Chechnya showed that villages targeted by indiscriminate use of artillery strikes saw less insurgent violence than those not targeted.66 Dell and Querubín’s research on Vietnam showed that uses of indiscriminate air power led to increased insurgent attacks.67 These studies did not focus primarily on the effect of civilian casualties, controlling for other kinds of combat activity; instead the treatment effects they measure precisely are attributable to the use of a particular kind of violence, not its consequences. In Chechnya Lyall comes close, by looking within only shelled villages at how the count of civilians harmed and other measures of damage affected subsequent rates of violence. He found the correlations were mostly weakly negative and statistically insignificant.68 As we discussed in the previous chapter, that result is consistent with the theory if the casualties caused by the shelling did not shift local attitudes. In a setting in which civilians were already implacably opposed to the Russians, further evidence of malevolent and indiscriminate shelling might do little to convince civilians—who might be already so opposed to Russian control of their neighborhoods that information-sharing would have been unthinkable.

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