CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

The issue might, then, be seen as one of cost-benefit analysis: casualties will be
accepted in proportion to the issue at stake. This is the tack taken by the UK’s (2000)
Future Strategic Context for Defence:
Casualties to our own force will only be acceptable to public opinion if they are
seen to be proportionate to what is at stake in the campaign. The critical factor
will be the extent to which the public feels the UK national interest is engaged or
the scale of the wrong to be righted. The degree of public aversion to casualties
can be expected to vary between members of an alliance and this may have an
impact on operational planning. 21
Similarly, Charles Hyde 22 has argued that the American public is far more sophisticated
in its cost-benefit analysis that it is popularly given credit for. As evidence he cites
research by the Triangle Institute for Strategic Studies 23 (see p133). This suggests two
things: firstly, perhaps unsurprisingly, acceptance of casualties is proportionate to
perceived national interest. Secondly, and unexpectedly, that of three constituencies –
the mass public, the US political leadership and the US military leadership – it is the
senior military figures who are most casualty averse, closely followed by the political
elite. The mass public – at least in answers to a survey examining hypothetical
situations – showed a significantly greater tolerance of casualties.
With this sort of evidence and more recently the empirical evidence of US public
acceptance of the casualties from Iraq – though this is becoming more fragile as time
goes by – some are questioning whether the West – and the US in particular – really is
as casualty averse as it was characterised throughout the 1990s. At a TISS-sponsored
Strategy and Policy Planning workshop in 2005, an expert panel on Casualty Aversion
tentatively concluded that ‘the whole notion of American casualty phobia was probably
based as much in myth as in fact.’ 24 However, one of its members, Albert Pearce had
earlier argued that casualty aversion was ‘the Achilles heel’ of US humanitarian
intervention policy 25 ; that disproportionate concern for own-force casualties undermined
the US’s ability to conduct effective humanitarian interventions.
The change – whether in actuality or perception is accounted for by Colin Gray:
Because the 1990s presented the United States with highly discretionary
conflicts, theorists were able to propagate two plausible fallacies in particular.
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