U.S. General, Army’s War Advisor Rip NY Times For Implying IDF Indifferent To Civilian Casualties
In a comprehensive must-read article for its explanation of how a moral war can be conducted, the U.S. General who was responsible for developing the air campaign in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and the U.S. Army judge advocate officer who served as the Army’s senior law of war advisor harshly criticized The New York Times for its spurious implication that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) made a deliberate decision to green-light increased civilian casualties.
General Charles Wald and Geoffrey Corn referred to the New York Times article titled, “Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians,” and stated that the information provided by the Times was presented “in a manner designed to lead to an invalid inference: that the IDF’s civilian casualty thresholds were a quota that every attack was designed to meet and, by raising those thresholds, the IDF displayed potentially illegal indifference towards civilian casualties.”
“This is a misrepresentation of the function of civilian casualty thresholds and what the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) demands,” they bluntly declare. “Crucially, civilian casualty thresholds indicate nothing about whether a particular attack does or does not comply with the LOAC proportionality rule. An attack falling within the scope of the threshold authority may not be proportional, while one exceeding it may be. Nor does the raising of the threshold mean that every IDF attack caused civilian casualties up to the authorized number. The Times cites examples of IDF strikes that did result in many casualties, but it fails to cite the numerous attack proposals that were canceled or suspended because a commander who could authorize them decided not to do so. Without such balance, the true meaning of this threshold expansion is lost.”
“The article’s implication seems obvious: that the decision to modify these thresholds and expand attack authority at lower levels of command was indicative of an overall disregard for the laws of armed conflict,” they wrote. “But this implication is almost impossible to square with our observations as well as those of a number of military experts who have interacted with the IDF to assess operational and tactical practices. As we, together with other retired U.S. military commanders, argued in a JINSA report informed by a fact-finding visit to Israel in which we were briefed by the IDF about their operations: ‘the IDF has carried out its mission to eliminate the Hamas threat with operational and tactical excellence and in overall compliance with the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). This occurred despite encountering a complex urban and subterranean battlefield….’”
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The authors quoted urban warfare expert John Spencer, who asserted, “Israel has taken precautionary measures even the United States did not do during its recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The authors spent considerable time explaining how armed conflict is supposed to work when civilian casualties are part of the issue: “Civilian casualty thresholds are best understood, as one of us has explained, as an important civilian risk mitigation precaution. When such thresholds are imposed, they do not, as is suggested in the Times critique, authorize inflicting that number of civilian casualties. Instead, they limit the attack decision authority at different levels of command to those expected to create a certain level of civilian risk. If the anticipated civilian risk exceeds the threshold, the decision whether to attack has to undergo greater scrutiny and be made at a higher-level command.”
“Nothing about the ground campaign the IDF was compelled to launch against Hamas mirrors prior confrontations with that enemy,” the authors noted. “As noted in our JINSA report, this was a combined arms maneuver campaign involving up to five maneuver divisions (approximately 100,000 troops) against a determined enemy numbering somewhere between 35-40,000 fighters organized into 24 battalions operating under, on, and above ground.”
“Unfortunately, the Times article ignores this military operational reality that almost certainly influenced this modification,” they continued. “Anyone reading the critique would assume that nothing changed in the operational situation confronted by the IDF between October 6, 2023, and the commencement of its Gaza campaign. But such an assumption is simply absurd. The campaign the IDF conducted against Hamas and other organized armed groups in Gaza was unprecedented in scale and intensity, certainly the most extensive campaign against an enemy in decades.
“There is nothing remarkable or unusual about the fact that the IDF leadership modified these thresholds to align with the nature of the campaign they were about to conduct. If anything, the fact that limits were retained is an indication of their consistent commitment to the precautions obligation,” they declared.
They concluded:
Educating the public on the procedures implemented by professional armed forces to balance the needs of military necessity with the imperative of mitigating civilian risk is both important and valuable. However, it is imperative that such education reflect both the true nature of the law that regulates war and the military operational realities in which it is applied. Ironically, to suggest an indiscriminate campaign, the Times article employed indiscriminate analysis. In the context of an unprecedentedly complex conflict, the IDF’s decision to expand civilian casualty thresholds was both logical and justified, and in no way supports the inference of a military indifferent to the human costs of war.