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Here's a
funhistorical hypothetical: say you wake up tomorrow and it's May 1944, and Dwight Eisenhower comes to you and says "TheMotte User X, you are our top expert on collateral damage. Our forthcoming invasion of Fortress Europe has to succeed, or else condemn millions more innocents to die at the hands of Nazi Germany. Our plan is to maximize our chances of victory by bombing enemy fortifications, re-supply, repair depots, airfields, road junctions, marshalling yards, rail bridges, training grounds, troop barracks, radio transmitters, telephone exchanges, fuel and ammo dumps, and more. Furthermore once on the ground, our soldiers will make use of their supreme material, technological, and doctrinal advantages in naval and land artillery to crush German resistance in all environments, be their urban, rural, or fortified. Inevitably this will result in the deaths of French civilians, who are not only innocent of Nazi crimes but victims of them, and our allies in this fight. So the crucial question I pose to you is: how many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?"What would your answer be? What would you consider reasonable? Could you come up with a specific number as a threshold for what you would deem acceptable civilian deaths? (Ideally don't look up the actual number before coming to an answer for yourself)
This is also not meant to be a direct analogy to any extant geopolitical crisis; its function is primarily a thought experiment and not a commentary upon or justification for acts of any specific government.
There is no upper limit on how many civilians could die with the actions being entirely acceptable. The key point is how necessary any particular action is. Militaries are mandated to take on a certain risk by virtue of being non-civilian, and that risk can be asymmetrical if you're the invader. For example, it may not be acceptable to bomb a factory making fighter jets that kills 10 people if those jets can be shot down in the air by SAMs even though the latter is more dangerous to the armed troops.
That level of analysis assumes there’s never going to be a genuine threat to your own civilians. This was true for the mainland USA. It wasn’t for any of the countries in Europe or asia.
If you’re a country in range of enemy bombers during WW2, any enemy planes you fail to shoot down are now a threat to not just your own troops but also your own civilians. The less enemy planes built, the fewer that can potentially get past your air defences.
Additionally, the distinction between a civilian working at a military manufacturing plant vs a soldier working in the logistical side of things is blurry, especially in a country with mass conscription and a totally mobilised war economy.
Besides even today, Civilians get contracted to do also sorts of support services for the military, particularly in terms of logistics, that soldiers also get used for. Why is the life of a 19 year old conscript assigned to drive a truck somehow less morally worthy than a civilian contracted by the military to do the same thing?
It's worth noting that a great deal of effort to minimize the damage of war to civilians came about in Europe. Despite the threats each nations armies posed to each other, they were willing to accept the idea that it was best to avoid going after non-combatants even if they were in a position to strike. Indeed, there was significant debate over this precise issue when Germany and Britain were exchanging air strikes in WW2.
True. I don't have any hard-line stance on what is or isn't an acceptable target. But this is precisely what the lawyers and scholars do for a living, so I'm fine leaving it to them to decide on a case-by-case basis.
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Certainly the western allies saw very little distinction to be drawn between German civilians and combatants. There was sometimes an employment of various euphemisms to skirt around the brutal logic of this worldview (the proponents of strategic bombing liked to talk about "damaging enemy morale" or "targeting worker housing"), but generally the perspective was that the ultimate good was forcing unconditional surrender as soon as possible, by any means possible.
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