Collateral damage
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- For the 2002 film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger see Collateral Damage (movie)
Collateral damage is a US military term for unintended or incidental damage during a military operation. The term started as a euphemism during the Vietnam War, and can refer to friendly fire or the destruction of civilians and their property.
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Definitions
Collateral damage is a military euphemism that was made popular during the Vietnam War. (Army Technology) But the euphemism has now been in use so long that it is accepted as a correct and proper term within US military forces, meaning "unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment or personnel, occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities. Such damage can occur to friendly, neutral, and even enemy forces." (USAF Intelligence Targeting Guide) Note that this definition is not concerned with what is major or minor, lawful or unlawful (war crime), civilian or military, legitimate or not. The only thing relevant is if the damage was intended by those causing it. If it was targeted, it is not collateral. If it was not targeted, even if it was enemy soldiers, it is collateral.
Etymologically, the expression "collateral damage" is a construction so convoluted that it probably was originally used as military doublespeak rather than a euphemism, as the adjective "collateral" doesn't seem to have been used as a synonym for "unintentional" or "accidental" earlier. "Collateral" comes from medieval Latin collateralis, from col- ‘together with’ + lateralis (from latus, later- ‘side’ ) and is otherwise mainly used as a synonym for "parallel" or "additional" in certain expressions ("collateral veins" run parallel to each other and "collateral security" means additional security to the main obligation in a contract). However, "collateral" may also sometimes mean "additional but subordinate", i.e. "secondary" ("collateral meanings of a word"), and that specific meaning of a rather obscure word in the English language seems to have been picked up and broadened by the military in the expression "collateral damage".
Analysis
Any analysis of the concept quickly becomes complex: "Traditionally, collateral damage is a result of weapon system malfunction, human error, desperation in the fog of war or because it was intended. In more recent warfare, it occurs when an adversary's strategy includes concealment among the civilian population. Any formal definition of collateral damage must be largely based on perception, condition and tolerance. For example, the tolerance of collateral damage would be very different for an invaded nation in the desperate state of survival compared to a state participating in war for economic gain. Concomitantly, how should collateral damage be measured in the realms of time and physical effect? To conduct successful effects-based operations, this question is critical in determining the relationship between destruction of a particular target set and the effects anticipated on other centers of gravity. As an illustration, several hundred thousand workers in Yugoslavia were unemployed because key private industry sites supporting Serb forces were destroyed in the air campaign. (353) The short-term effect of these attacks may crush military industry and incite a civilian population to urge early termination of a conflict. However, wholesale destruction of entire segments of industry conceivably leads to economic depression and effects traditionally encountered in a post-conflict humanitarian crisis." Air Force Law Review, Wntr, 2005 by Jefferson D. Reynolds The word "intended" in this quote refers to intended damage being called unintended by using the phrase "collateral damage". As misinformation is a key weapon in war, collateral damage can sometimes also be used for intended damage, as a way to deny that it was intended. If, for example, the intent was to kill a lot of skilled workers in war factories, telling the truth may not help your war effort. It has been said that Truth is the first casualty in war.
Other Uses
The term Collateral Damage has also been borrowed by the computing community to refer to legitimate users who are denied service when administrators take blanket preventitive measures against some individuals who are abusing systems. For example, Realtime Blackhole Lists used to combat email spam generally block whole IP ranges rather than individual IPs associated with spam, and can cause legitimate users within those IP ranges to lose the ability to send email to some domains.
Different connotations can be applied. There is both the military interpretation favoured by the administrators doing the blocking (as a euphemism which sounds better than acknowledging real people are being affected) and the cynical interpretation that administrators are simply trying to gloss over the problems inherent in combatting abuse in this way.