No Casualties Please, We’re Soldiers
Abstract
This article examines the issue of casualty aversion. The author concludes that this is more of a myth than a reality, and exists largely within the minds of the decision-making elite. The article explores the ramifications of this fact, demonstrating that casualty aversion and excessive force protection cedes a valuable asymmetric advantage to the enemy and prevents the full range of strategic options from being exercised in pursuit of political goals.
For a nation at war Australia has been remarkably lucky. Afghanistan and Iraq, the two conflicts in which the Australian Defence Force (ADF) is currently participating, have resulted in just six battle-related fatalities among the approximately 32 000 personnel who have served on Operations SLIPPER, BASTILLE, FALCONER and CATALYST.1 This is a fortunate if not extraordinary achievement, but one that cannot be explained by luck alone. The reality is that in these wars the Australian Government has followed a policy of deliberate casualty minimisation in order to safeguard its military personnel from harm and husband the support of the electorate.
Force protection is an essential duty of all military commanders. When taken to excess, however—when force protection becomes the measurement by which mission success is judged—casualty minimisation can generate complications that have significant and generally negative consequences. When a nation adopts a policy of casualty avoidance it lessens its ability to use force in the pursuit of national goals, creates a perception that war can be waged without risk to personnel, and sends an ambiguous message to potential adversaries. Furthermore, casualty avoidance prepares neither a nation’s warriors for the hazards of combat, nor the public for potential loss, when the enemy no longer allows the attainment of mission goals without cost.
Casualty Aversion in Theory and Practice
Casualty aversion is a practice that is associated with the United States. Its beginnings lie in the aftermath of American defeat in the Vietnam War, and it was revalidated by the failed interventions in Beirut and Somalia.2 Some scholars perceive an even more distant origin and argue that it has ‘long pervaded US military culture’.3 Its core tenet is that the American public will not support a deployment if casualties are anticipated, or will abandon an existing operation if casualties do occur. Such is the perceived effect of casualty avoidance on the US psyche that after the Pearl Harbor-like attacks of September 11 it still seemed necessary for Professor Paul Kennedy to ask the question whether the United States could sustain its will year after year, decade after decade, while absorbing high or even moderate casualties, in a prolonged war against terrorism.4
This belief in the need to avoid losses has also been extended to include the infliction of harm on foreign civilians and even on the enemy. In effect, senior US military personnel and policy-makers accept that their ability to utilise force for the advancement of national security goals is proscribed by the public’s reluctance to tolerate a loss of life. As a result of what has been termed the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’, American planners assume that they must ‘sacrifice operational and even strategic effectiveness for the sake of casualty minimisation.’5
US policy-makers raised the practice of casualty aversion to official status in the determination of national security policy with the pronouncement of first the Weinberger Doctrine and later the Powell Doctrine. In combination, these doctrines raised the threshold for the employment of force in the pursuit of national policy goals, while also mandating the use of overwhelming military power in order to reduce the possibility of US casualties.6 The Weinberger-Powell Doctrine assumes that the public’s tolerance for casualties is minimal, places force protection above mission success, and compromises operational and strategic effect.7 Its goal is to prevent the United States from being mired in another Vietnam War and it sets tests designed to avoid US involvement in any protracted, limited, and/or unconventional military operations.8 By increasing the reliance on technology to distance warriors from the battlefield, the United States was able to reduce further exposure of personal risk to soldiers.
In bringing the First Gulf War against Iraq to its hasty conclusion the White House acknowledged the influence of Weinberger-Powell. The magnanimous ceasefire terms General H Norman Schwarzkopf offered his Iraqi opposites obtained a rapid peace, but his generosity was not without a price.9 In effect, the United States traded the possibility of further casualties for the continuing rule of a despot who believed he had not been defeated. US lives had indeed been spared, but a further consequence was that the US public was shielded from the reality of war—’a grim, ghastly, and bloody affair’.10
In planning the 1990–91 Gulf War, the United States approached its first conflict with Saddam with a high degree of trepidation, despite what should have clearly appeared as overwhelming military force, an unassailable political requirement to liberate Kuwait, an international mandate for action, and the support of a coalition of nations. Pre-war wargaming did not emphasise the advantages the United States possessed but rather focused on the prospect for heavy casualties.11 After the conflict the US Committee on Armed Services admitted that ‘in planning Operation Desert Storm minimizing allied and civilian casualties was the highest priority’.12
In the 1991 Iraq War many US military commanders and policy-makers were veterans of the Vietnam War, or had come of age under its influence, and believed that there was little tolerance at home for casualties, US or Iraqi. The public’s reaction to the loss of American lives in the destruction of the Dhahran Billet by an Iraqi missile, and the death of several hundred Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad bunker being used as a bomb shelter seemed to confirm these fears. What the United States had also done, however, was signal to the world that a fear of casualties was its centre of gravity.13 Such was the importance of casualties in US international policy-making that when President Bill Clinton announced the United States’ 1995 intervention in Bosnia he went to great lengths to dissociate the operation from Vietnam. This, however, did not stop one commentator from calling the deployment the greatest gamble of his presidency.14
Seven years after DESERT STORM, as the United States and nato considered intervention in Kosovo to prevent the genocide of its majority ethnic Albanian population by the Serbian military, the focus of policy-makers and military leaders was again on casualty aversion, not mission success. When General Wesley K Clark wrote about the planning for what was known as Operation ALLIED FORCE he stressed the primacy of the need to avoid casualties. In setting the operation’s goals Clark identified four measures of merit. Each was important but the paramount one for him was ‘avoid losses’.15 Referring to the need to minimise aircraft casualties he observed that once losses begin ‘the countdown starts against you’ and he raised doubts as to NATO’s steadiness if contributing nations suffered ‘a succession of aircraft losses’. He concluded that in order for the mission to survive in the long term it was necessary to take ‘extraordinary steps to avoid losses’.16 Consequently, US pilots sacrificed bombing accuracy by flying above 15 000 feet where they were largely immune from ground fire.17
Force protection not operational effectiveness became the mantra of those involved in ALLIED FORCE. us Army Command declared that the mission’s primary objective was ‘to protect and take care of the force’,18 while the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Henry Shelton, stated that ‘the well being of our people [is] our first priority’.19
The low-key approach of the United States and NATO to Kosovo attracted particularly strong language from commentators. In an article titled ‘Gutless Giant?’, Jeffrey Record identified the intervention as ‘an excruciatingly circumscribed military action ... which provoked an acceleration of the very ethnic cleansing of Kosovo it was designed to halt’.20 In even stronger words Record asserted that the Vietnam Syndrome had ‘metamorphosed into a force-protection fetishism that threatens to corrupt American statecraft’, and that US behaviour was based on a ‘desperate unwillingness to place satisfaction of US armed intervention’s political objective ahead of the safety of its military instrument’.21 To the journalist Jonathan Foreman the ‘crippling caution displayed by the military in the Kosovo war has no precedent in American history ....’22
In making force protection its priority the United States revealed to its adversaries an ‘Achilles’ heel’,23 and despots around the world noted the phobic response of US policy-makers to the risk of incurring casualties. Osama bin Laden saw the US rout from Mogadishu in Somalia as evidence that it would be possible to force the United States from its bases in the Persian Gulf. For bin Laden, the United States’ reaction to the death of eighteen US Army Rangers in the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident was proof that the superpower was nothing more than a ‘paper tiger’.24 The US casualty posture in Iraq, Somalia and Kosovo suggested to every tyrant in the world that ‘if you kill a couple of hundred or even 20 American troops, the rest of them will run away’.25 Ironically, by highlighting its reluctance to take casualties the US military might in fact have raised the risk to its deployed troops. Adversaries like Saddam, bin Laden, and Slobodan Milosevic now had incentive to try to kill US troops in the hope that body bags would paralyse a super power and force a withdrawal.26
The desire to avoid casualties amongst one’s own personnel can lead to an even greater loss of life, albeit amongst other peoples. The United States blocked an early intervention in Rwanda and, along with France and Britain, was extremely cautious over involvement in Bosnia. The consequence of such prevarication was the slaughter of approximately 800 000 Rwandans and 200 000 Bosnians.27 Ethnic cleansing occurred in these civil wars because adversaries sensed that intervention either was unlikely or would be delayed. In a similar manner, after his defeat in the 1990–91 Gulf War, Saddam took the chance to viciously—and successfully—put down a revolt by Iraq’s Shiite population. He had gambled that the United States would not intercede, whereas the Shiites had made the mistake of assuming that the powerful US forces positioned nearby would not abandon them. Saddam demonstrated the folly of reliance on casualty averse American leaders.
There is also a strong case that by prioritising casualty aversion, governments run the risk of prolonging conflicts, and thereby risking a higher cost. There is evidence that by minimising its ground presence in Afghanistan, the United States allowed bin Laden and many of his al-Qaeda followers to escape across the border into Pakistan.28 As a result, the hunt for bin Laden continues and al-Qaeda remains an international threat. Even more drastic in its effect was the inability of the Coalition to prevent the outbreak of the insurgency in Iraq. There, the failure to provide enough troops to control Baghdad after the collapse of Saddam’s regime was a major factor.
Despite the evidence outlined above, the case that the United States suffers from a casualty phobia is not clear cut, as proponents of the Vietnam Syndrome would have us believe. After all, in the two World Wars of the twentieth century, the United States showed that it would not flinch from the necessity of taking and inflicting heavy losses and widespread destruction in order to achieve its national goals. The Japanese armed forces, which had based its war strategy on the assumption that the United States would recoil from the cost of reconquering the Pacific, learned a hard lesson in American resolve. The ferocity of the fighting in the American Civil War also shows the United States’ willingness to bear casualties. As the MIT scholars Harvey M Sapolsky and Jeremy Shapiro have observed, ‘The lesson that [General Ulysses] Grant taught America—[is] that war is about death, pure and simple....’29 Moreover, despite being deeply unpopular, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now into their sixth and seventh years, respectively.
In fact, casualty aversion in the United States is more complex than simply being a desire by a nation living in the shadow of Vietnam to avoid the trauma of bloodshed. The phenomenon exists, but is an affliction limited to the nation’s military and liberal elites. Research by social scientists has discovered that casualty aversion among the masses is nothing more than a myth.30
The political scientists Peter D Feaver and Christopher Gelpi have concluded that there is little evidence of casualty phobia amongst the public and that restrictions on the use of force by the US political and military leadership ‘appears to be self-imposed’.31 Furthermore they believe that only a minority of the public can be classified as casualty averse.32 The Director of the Centre for Defence Studies, Paul Cornish, came to a similar conclusion, writing that casualty intolerance ‘appears to be largely an elite, “top-down” preoccupation’,33 and Jeffrey Record, of the US Air War College, has called it a ‘misperceived lesson of the Vietnam War’.34 Perhaps the US Naval War College’s Richard A Lacquement, Jr. has stated the case most clearly: ‘There is in fact no evidence that the public is intrinsically casualty averse.’35
What is evident is that the American public takes a more nuanced and flexible approach to the employment of force and the risk of casualties in determining the worth of any foreign adventurism. In his groundbreaking Rand Corporation study into this subject, Eric Larson concluded that when assessing an intervention the US public conducts a cost-benefit calculation that balances an operation’s ends and means. The American public, it appears from his research, does not hold an inflexible attitude towards casualties, unlike the nation’s political leaders and senior military officers. To the public, casualty tolerance is a variable that is derived from the interaction of the perceived benefit of the intervention, the prospect for success and the possible and, once committed, actual cost. The public also requires to be shown visible, even if slow, progress towards a known objective.
The last and perhaps most important factor in the public’s determination of their support for an operation is the quality of their political and military leadership. The nation’s leaders must make a strong case for an operation’s necessity and then sustain the public’s support through to its conclusion.36 For example, the public’s lessening of support for the Vietnam War after the Tet Offensive had as much to do with a sense of having being misled by the overly rosy reports that emanated from HQ MACV as with the losses resulting from the battle.
Casualty Aversion and the Risk to Australia
While casualty aversion is closely associated with the United States, its influence is evident across the range of modern Western democracies. For example, following the terrorist bomb attacks on Madrid’s commuter trains the Spanish Government abandoned its commitment to the US-led Coalition in Iraq,37 and the Philippines Government withdrew its forces to save the life of a single kidnapped Filipino truck driver.38 In Afghanistan, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force’s (ISAF) battle against the Taliban is handicapped by the reluctance of some of its contributing countries to put their soldiers at risk. Even a few casualties have the potential to weaken support in these contingents’ homelands, trigger a withdrawal and even bring about the ISAF’s collapse and failure.39 At the time of this writing the US-led coalition in Iraq contained twenty-one countries,40 but since the onset of the insurgency in mid-2003 only the United States and the United Kingdom have willingly exposed their personnel to the hazards of combat, and recently the British resolve shows signs of weakening.41 In Iraq, most contributing nations restrict their troops to low-risk roles. Australia is clearly in this latter category.42
In 1996 Sapolsky and Shapiro described casualty aversion as ‘an American dilemma, though like blue jeans and Coca-Cola it will probably spread to many other countries’.43 As is the case for much of the West there are indications that this has also happened in Australia. The absence of battle fatalities in Iraq—when by comparison those suffered by the United States alone has surpassed 4000—cannot be explained by good fortune or superior prowess alone. Certainly, there have been a few close calls; a number of attacks have resulted in Australians wounded, which would have had a more serious outcome with a different blast trajectory. However, rather than luck or skill the more rational explanation for the absence of Australian battle fatalities is that the ADF has adopted force protection as the priority goal for its troops in Iraq. In mid-2004 when Major General Jim Molan returned to Canberra on leave from his position in Baghdad, he noted that the main interest of the senior people with whom he met was on ‘making sure our troops didn’t get hurt’.44 More recently, in his speech to the National Press Club the Minister for Defence, Joel Fitzgibbon, commented on the deaths of six Australian soldiers in Afghanistan. While he recognised that Australia’s loss was minor when compared to that of our allies, Fitzgibbon nonetheless observed that they were ‘six lives too many’.45
The emergence of a cult of casualty aversion in Australia is a cause for great concern. While the protection of one’s troops is a noble objective—it would be a disservice to the nation if its military strength was wantonly wasted—the institutionalisation of an automatic default to casualty aversion in decision-making holds critical pitfalls. It is unsustainable to the point of folly, it risks the nation’s ability to use force to obtain critical strategic objectives, and it desensitises public and even military understanding of the unchanging character of war, which is that it remains violent, brutish and bloody.
The context of Australia’s decision to emphasise force protection as a mission goal should be seen within a framework for strategic policy development. Contemporary theorists have divided wars into two categories: wars of choice and wars of necessity. Wars of choice are those in which there is a strategic need for Australia to participate, but not necessarily make a large contribution or expose those deployed to great risk. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are considered wars of choice because Australia is not under direct threat and the goal of our participation is less to defeat the insurgents than to demonstrate support for the lead nation, namely the United States. The United States is Australia’s most important defence partner and this relationship is the foundation of the Commonwealth’s national security policy. Wars of necessity, by contrast, are those conflicts in which Australia has a vital interest and in which the ADF is likely to be the force leader, not just one of a host of coalition members. Consequently, wars of necessity are conflicts which Australia must win. By this definition Australia’s most recent war of necessity was the Second World War, although the 1999 intervention in East Timor is held up as an example of the ADF being the lead nation.
The decision to deploy a military force with the proviso that no one gets hurt is a curious one, and raises two questions. First, since military operations are inherently dangerous, why deploy in the first place? It would be much safer to stay home. Second, if a government is unable to maintain support for an operation in the face of potential or actual casualties then it must be asked whether the mission is of sufficient national worth to be undertaken in the first place. As the Dean of the Academic Board of the United States Military Academy observed, ‘You don’t deploy somewhere to protect yourself.’46
Since wars of choice are less critical than wars of necessity there is a perception that Australia can avoid the heavy lifting; a direct confrontation with the enemy’s forces which might result in casualties. This is a false and baneful distinction. One of the realities of modern war, or, in fact, warfare in any period, is that one’s opponent gets to have a say in the conflict’s level of intensity. It is from this perspective that Australia has indeed been lucky in Iraq. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the insurgents have chosen not to focus their attention on Australian targets. This happy circumstance, however, is beyond the ability of the Australian Government and ADF to control, and it could change at any moment. For a country to maintain a national security agenda on the premise that its adversary will consider it unworthy of notice is a decidedly high risk strategy indeed.
Insurgency wars are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of a casualty avoidance policy. When compared to conventional war, insurgencies are considered to be of a lower order of magnitude. This sense is reinforced by the political nature of an insurgency war, as well as the mode of operations conducted by the counterinsurgent. The application of violence is not the counterinsurgent’s primary tactic to secure success; rather it is to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the population in which the insurgent lives. By contrast, for the insurgent the target of their operations is not the military personnel they attack in the field but the political leadership and public will in their opponent’s homeland.47
However, one of the lessons that must be taken from the insurgency now being waged in Iraq is that the threat environment of a counterinsurgency can still be extremely dangerous and lethal. It is the insurgent who determines the intensity of the conflict. In the battles for Fallujah and Najaf in Iraq the insurgents decided not to slip away but to stand and fight. The result was that US soldiers and marines had to fight street by street, building by building to take these from the insurgents. The insurgents were well armed with modern weapons, had stockpiled ammunition, prepared defensive positions, and were willing to fight to the death. Rather than an opponent who avoided confrontation, the US Army and Marine troops fought intensive knock-down fights that required the application of copious quantities of firepower in order to kill or drive out their enemy. The November battle for Fallujah alone cost the United States 54 dead and 425 wounded. Approximately 1000 insurgents also died and much of the city was reduced to rubble.48 The battles for Fallujah and Najaf, while part of an insurgency, were not low-casualty affairs.
While some theorists argue that conventional war is no longer possible—the residents of Tbilisi might dispute this assertion—conflict with insurgents can be as brutal, violent and deadly as that of traditional war. In fact, the passing of state-on-state war has only increased the prospect of the outbreak of numerous and potentially nasty small wars. Jeffrey Record has observed that weak and failed states have become ‘shelters and breeding grounds for such transnational threats as terrorism, drug-trafficking, refugee generation, environmental degradation, and political and religious extremism’.49 Australia rests on the edge of a region that is prone to destabilisation and in which it has already had need to intervene on numerous occasions. To date, these interventions have been more peacekeeping than warfighting affairs. However, the prospect that a new insurgency may break out in the region or one of the existing ones may turn nasty cannot be discounted, and if this happens Australian troops must be prepared for casualties.
The belief that casualties equate with military error has already been seen in the ADF’s deployment to Iraq and elsewhere. Senior officers, who should limit themselves to the strategic level, now intercede in tactical level decisions. Furthermore, casualties are viewed as meaning that something has gone wrong or someone has made a mistake. After every incident involving Australians copious reporting and examination takes place, often including the dispatch of a delegation of investigators from home to ascertain the circumstances surrounding a soldier’s death. The soldier and scholar Karl W Eikenberry has concluded that when the dominant culture mandates the detailed investigation of every casualty to ascertain cause and often to assign blame, the result is that the force ‘may be ill-prepared for the inevitable tough fight lurking over the horizon. Considered coldly,’ he continues, ‘soldiers ... are ultimately a means, not an end.’50 Attempts to manage casualties at the zero defect level also fly in the face of the classical understanding and interpretation of the nature of war. War is chaotic. War is violent.
More worrying than self-delusion on the part of government and the ADF is the effect this development has had on the Australian populace. As Professor Jeffrey Grey has observed, there is now a real risk that as ‘citizens in a western liberal democracy of failing to understand fully the implications of what we send others to do in our name and on our behalf’.51 Wars, as Grey continues, are not casualty free and ‘we need to accept and understand that fact’.52
Australians can take comfort in the accomplishments of its military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan. Closer to home the ADF has performed well in the interventions in East Timor, Bougainville and the Solomon Islands, and has demonstrated flexibility and humanity in the response to disasters in Aceh and Papua New Guinea. However, these relatively trouble-free activities may suddenly come to an end. For this eventuality Australian soldiers and citizens must prepare for the need to take greater risks and accept the reality of more casualties in the pursuit of national objectives. War is an unforgiving enterprise. It would be foolish to plan for anything different.
Conclusion
Australia and its army emerged from the Vietnam War unscathed by America’s ‘Vietnam Syndrome’. To now impose upon itself its own version would be a mistake at a national level. Those in the West who equate casualties with mistake or failure, who are repulsed by images of broken bodies played across television screens and who automatically discount the use of force in the attainment of national security objectives may prefer to see the goodness and kindness in the human spirit, but they forget the complexity that is contained within our species. By contrast, the opponents of Western liberal democracies do not suffer from such casualty aversion debility. This is asymmetry at its most dangerous. In becoming casualty phobic the West is exposing a weakness that its adversaries will be sure to exploit to our disadvantage.
Writing nearly fifty years ago the British historian Cyril Falls reflected that it was remarkable:
how many people exert themselves and go through contortions to prove that battles and wars are won by any means except that by which they are most commonly won, which is fighting.53
Endnotes
1 Precise ADF deployment numbers are notoriously difficult to calculate. The figure of 32 000 should be treated as best available and includes personnel who have served on multiple deployments.
2 Jeffrey Record, ‘Collapsed Countries, Casualty Dread, and the New American Way of War’, Parameters, Summer 2002, p. 12.
3 Evan Andrew Huelfer, The ‘Casualty Issue’ in American Military Practice: The Impact of World War I, Praeger, Westport, 2003, pp. ix-x.
4 Paul Kennedy, ‘Maintaining American Power: From Injury to Recovery’ in Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda, eds., The Age of Terror: America and the World After September 11, Basic Books, New York, 2001, p. 63.
5 Record, ‘Collapsed Countries, Casualty Dread, and the New American Way of War, p. 12.
6 Paul Cornish, ‘Myth and Reality: US and UK Approaches to Casualty Aversion and Force Protection’, Defence Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2003, pp. 124–25; and F G Hoffman, Decisive Force: The New American Way of War, Praeger, Westport, 1996, p. 47.
7 Jeffrey Record, ‘Force-Protection Fetishism: Sources, Consequences, and (?) Solutions’, Air & Space Power Journal, Summer 2000, p. 6.
8 For a brief assessment of the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, see Jeffrey Record, ‘Weinberger-Powell doctrine doesn’t cut it,’ United States Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol. 126, No. 10, October 2000, pp. 35–36.
9 Michael R Gordon and General Bernard E Trainor, The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1995, pp. 445–47.
10 Ibid., p. 470.
11 Richard M Swain, Lucky War: Third Army in Desert Storm, US Army Command and General Staff College Press, Fort Leavenworth, 1997, p. 291.
12 Ibid., p. 336.
13 Ibid., pp. 291–92.
14 ‘America in Bosnia: Gambling the presidency’, The Economist, Issue 7943, 2 December 1995, p. 22.
15 Wesley K Clark, ‘The United States and NATO: The Way Ahead’, Parameters, Winter 1999–2000, p. 8.
16 Ibid., pp. 8–9.
17 Cornish, ‘Myth and Reality: US and UK Approaches to Casualty Aversion and Force Protection’, p. 121.
18 Quoted in Ibid.
19 Quoted in Ibid., p. 125.
20 Jeffrey Record, ‘Gutless Giant?’, United States Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol. 126, No. 3, March 2000, p. 2.
21 Record, ‘Force-Protection Fetishism: Sources, Consequences, and (?) Solutions’, p. 4.
22 Jonathan Foreman, ‘The Casualty Myth’, National Review, Vol. 51, No. 8, 3 May 1999, p. 40. See also, Harvey M Sapolsky and Jeremy Shapiro, ‘Casualties, Technology, and America’s Future Wars’, Parameters, Summer 1996, pp. 119–27.
23 Record, ‘Force-Protection Fetishism: Sources, Consequences, and (?) Solutions’, p. 5.
24 Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America, Prima Publishers, Roseville, 2001, p. 89.
25 Foreman, ‘The Casualty Myth’, p. 40.
26 Peter D Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 209.
27 R G Patman, ‘Beyond “The Mogadishu Line”: Some Australian Lessons for Managing Intra-State Conflicts’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring 2001, p. 72.
28 Lacquement, ‘The Casualty-Aversion Myth,’ p. 46.
29 Sapolsky and Shapiro, ‘Casualties, Technology, and America’s Future Wars,’ p. 121.
30 For examples, see Eric V Larson, Casualties and Consensus: The Historical Role of Casualties in Domestic Support for US Military Operations, RAND Monographic Report, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, 1996; Peter D Feaver and Richard H Kohn, ‘Triangle Institute for Security Studies: Project on the Gap Between the Military and Civilian Society, Digest of Findings and Studies’, presented at The Conference on the Military and Civilian Society, Cantigny Conference Centre, 28–29 October 1999, <http://www.poli.duke.edu/civmil/summary_digest.pdf> accessed 11 August 2008; Philip P Everts, Democracy and Military Force, Palgrave, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2002; and Peter D Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, ‘A Look at Casualty Aversion: How Many Deaths Are Acceptable? A Surprising Answer, Washington Post, 7 November 1999, p. B3.
31 Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles, pp. 185–86.
32 Ibid., pp. 187–88.
33 Cornish, ‘Myth and Reality’, p. 124.
34 Record, ‘Force Protection Fetishism’, p. 7.
35 Richard A Lacquement, Jr., ‘The Casualty Aversion Myth’, Naval War College Review, Vol. LVII, No. 1, Winter 2004, p. 42.
36 Larson, Casualties and Consensus, pp. 99–100; Cornish, ‘Myth and Reality’, p. 125; and Record, Gutless Giant’, p. 2.
37 ‘Spain PM orders Iraq troops home, BBC News, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3637523.stm> accessed 18 August 2008.
38 ‘PM – Downer comments “rash” and “narrow-minded”: Philippine Govt, ABC Online, <http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2004/s1163162.htm>, accessed 20 August 2008.
39 Eric Ouellet, ‘Ambushes, IEDs and COIN: The French Experience’, Canadian Army Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1, Spring 2008, p. 7.
40 Multi-National Force – Iraq, ‘Coalition Partners’, Official Website of the Multi-National Force Iraq, <http://www.mnf-iraq.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&…; accessed 1 October 2008.
41 Kate Kelland and Adrian Croft, ‘Secret deal kept British troops out of Basra: report’, Reuters, 6 August 2008, <http://www.au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/latest/4856285/secret-deal-kept-britis…; accessed 12 August 2008.
42 Paul Kelly, ‘Stop playing games, start fighting for real’, The Australian, 23 July 2008, p. 12.
43 Sapolsky and Shapiro, ‘Casualties, Technology, and America’s Future Wars, p. 125.
44 Jim Molan, Running the War in Iraq: An Australian General, 300,000 Troops, the Bloodiest Conflict of Our Time, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2008, p. 128.
45 The Hon Joel Fitzgibbon MP, Minister for Defence, ‘Speech to the National Press Club of Australia’, 30 July 2008, <http://www.minister.defence.gov.au/FitzgibbonSpeechtpl.cfm?CurrentId=80…; accessed 7 August 2008.
46 Quoted in Serge Schmemann, ‘Word for Word/The Long Gray Line: For Tomorrow’s Army, Cadets Full of Questions’, The New York Times, 8 July 2001, <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9401E6D71238F93BA35754C0…; accessed 13 August 2008.
47 Ouellet, ‘Ambushes, IEDs and COIN: The French Experience’, p. 22.
48 Thomas E Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, The Penguin Press, New York, 2006, p. 400.
49 Record, ‘Collapsed Countries, Casualty Dread, and the New American Way of War’, p. 6.
50 Karl W Eikenberry, ‘Take no Casualties’, Parameters, Summer 1996, p. 117.
51 Jeffrey Grey, ‘Australia’s warrior culture’, Unleashed, 21 July 2008, <http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2309473.htm#comments> accessed 23 July 2008.
52 Ibid.
53 Cyril Falls, A Hundred Years of War, Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., London, 1961.
