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War

On War, Kabbalah & Collateral Damage

Anton Koslov takes a concept from the Kabbalah to understand the nature of war.

I recently spoke with an American-Israeli tech entrepreneur about the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, specifically about the deaths of over a hundred and sixty girls and staff at the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab. My interlocutor dismissed those deaths as “unfortunate but inevitable collateral damage” serving the cause of the greater good. I’d heard that phrase before. Last June, I watched Benny Morris, a historian whose rigor and courage in examining modern Israeli history I had long admired, speak publicly about civilian deaths in Gaza. He used the same words, delivered with the same calm detachment. What remained with me was not his statement, but how effortlessly it arrived and how little it seemed to cost him to say it.

War has often been described as an instrument of rational policy. Strategic planning, operational doctrine, and legal regulation, all presuppose that military violence can be directed by rational calculus and smart modern technology. But how does this correspond to the actual experience of war?

Over two hundred years ago, Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz used the term ‘friction’ to describe the pervasive discrepancy between war as it is planned and war as it actually unfolds. Friction arises from the countless contingencies that constitute combat: miscommunication, error, imperfect intelligence, logistical failures, weather, and the unpredictable reactions of the enemy. These forces transform even the simplest operation once it enters the field of action. In this sense, war follows a logic closer to chaos than to rational design. This reveals a disturbing aspect of human reality: the attempt to control violence through rational design continually encounters forces that resist such control. ‘Organized chaos’ is a contradiction in terms, yet war lives inside that contradiction. The political structures designed to govern violence operate within an order of intention and responsibility, while the violence they attempt to regulate emerges from a space far less stable. This is the disturbing aspect of warfare that no legal framework has been able to resolve, and perhaps none can resolve, because the problem is ontological rather than ethical: you can’t change the nature of war, no matter how good your intentions are. That is to say, some good intention may initiate a war, but it loses governing power once combatants enter the chaotic zone of action.

Sitra Achra

There is an older vocabulary for this domain. In the language of the Kabbalah, a medieval Jewish mystical system, Sitra Achra, literally meaning ‘the other side’, designates the realm of impurity, excess, and distortion, in which meaning dissolves and destructive forces prey on its residues. In the present understanding, war is the passage into Sitra Achra, as the entry into war is the moment at which those structures designed to regulate violence enter a territory whose dynamics continuously exceed their capabilities. Strategic strikes, misdirected weapons, destroyed infrastructure, systemic civilian casualties, are all expressions of this process. Sitra Achra also identifies the point at which the moral language of war encounters something it cannot fully incorporate, where the consequences of violence exceed the intentions that set them in motion. War, then, is the revelation of Sitra Achra, the realm of chaos, within political reality.

To use a concept invented by Mikhail Bakhtin, war also has a carnivalesque dimension. This means that it does not merely free violence from the constraints of good ethical intention, it also releases men from the identities peacetime imposes on them, as if they were taking part in a carnival. The pilot who bombs a police station or a housing complex, and who moves through the destruction with something like exhilaration, is the same man who, six days earlier, drove his children to school and complained about the weather to his wife. Thus war suspends the civilian identity and issues another in its place. This suspension is not incidental to the institution of war, though; it’s one of its constitutive features. War is the moment when a society collectively lifts its prohibitions, and the individual is temporarily relieved of the self that ordinary life requires. What is pathological in peacetime becomes not only permissible, but celebrated. To kill, to burn, to destroy – these acts, which in civilian life would require years of psychiatric elucidation, are in war the basis of medals. The transformation is institutional: here the state licenses a particular form of behaviour that it elsewhere criminalizes.

These facts of chaos and inversion are what the moral language of warfare works hardest to suppress. The idea of ‘collateral damage’ presupposes an erroneous technician, an administrator of the accidental – a man who aimed at one thing and, regrettably, struck another. The entire ethical architecture of modern warfare is built around this figure. Yet the historical record is less tidy. War has always produced men who enjoy what they’re doing. This enjoyment is something the institution enables, then needs to manage afterward.

Here the ideas of Sitra Achra and the carnival of war converge. Sitra Achra is where the ethical order of intention and accountability loses its governing power. The carnival of war is the psychological experience of that loss manifest in a felt liberation from the constraints of one’s peacetime identity. Put together, they describe a domain of chaos in which destruction is not always unintended. Here the language of ‘collateral damage’ is invoked to obscure both the chaos and also any pleasure the chaos releases. It’s used to account for the bomb that went astray, but also (more quietly), for the fire among civilian buildings that was set deliberately and gleefully. The troubling suspicion the carnival idea raises, is that ‘proportionality’ is often the story told about a violence that has already exceeded it. The perpetrators would rather not name the mere anarchy of war directly.

Language’s Double Effect

The Tree of Life. Mediaeval, Public Domain

Violent chaos is precisely the issue the term ‘collateral damage’ was invented to solve, or rather, to manage. It entered military discourse in May 1961, in a paper by nuclear strategist Thomas C. Schelling titled ‘Dispersal, Deterrence, and Damage’, where Schelling used the term to describe unintended harm to civilian areas resulting from strikes on strategic targets. It was subsequently absorbed into U.S. Department of Defense documentation, where it was defined as unintentional or incidental injury to persons or objects that are not lawful military targets, with the addendum that such damage is lawful provided it is not excessive relative to the anticipated military advantage. The concept echoes the medieval Catholic doctrine of Double Effect, whereby an action that incidentally causes harm may be morally permissible so long as the act itself is intended for good, the harmful effect is not intended, and there’s proportionality between the good achieved and the harm done. Collateral damage is this doctrine stripped of its theological underpinnings, put into administrative terminology, and issued as a bureaucratic classification. It provides a language of moral intention in a domain where that intention has already lost its governing authority. That is the central function of the concept, and also its central dishonesty: it attempts to impose a symbolic system of moral accountability onto a space of violence that Clausewitz (and warfare itself) has already shown to be ungovernable by such a category.

In practice, however, the concept of collateral damage does something even more troubling. It renders the lives of all those killed ‘by accident’ peripheral to the moral imagination, reducing them to residue. Their deaths are framed as regrettable background to the ‘real’ ethical struggle – say, Israel against its adversaries, Russia’s war against Ukraine, or the US’s ‘management’ of regional order. These victims are not mourned as ends in themselves. They are accounted for, briefly, then forgotten.

There’s also the hierarchy of civilizational proximity – an implicit distinction of whose deaths belong to the moral universe (those on our side) and whose do not. The organizing principle used to assign a population to one side or the other of the line drawn between civilization and its adversaries is political, religious, and/or cultural affiliation. Once a population has been placed on the enemy side, or in the ambiguous category of those who harbor enemies, their deaths carry a different moral weight. The division sorts the dead into the grievable and the statistical, establishing a hierarchy of whose deaths require accounting for, and whose deaths may be aggregated and approximated. Thus, Israeli deaths appear in Israeli and American news reports with names, ages, and personal histories, while Iranian deaths (say), when tallied at all, arrive as numbers. And ‘collateral damage’ is often the language used for managing the deaths of people who were already, by prior classification, on the wrong side. When a Western broadcaster describes over a hundred and sixty girls killed in Minab as ‘collateral damage’, what’s being communicated, quietly and politely, is that these lives occupied a different category of humanity from ‘our’ people. They were incidental lives, extinguished through procedure rather than malice. The distinction the term makes, intended to preserve moral seriousness, ends by evacuating it.

The question this poses is of an ontological order: who is permitted to be a victim, and who vanishes into statistics? Some civilian casualties rupture the world, while others leave no mark, like rubble cleared from a site where a building stood that was already considered expendable. The concept of collateral damage administers this inequality with the neutrality of a technical term. It drapes the decision to kill in the language of military necessity, converting an ethical consideration into an operational outcome.

Summation

Since its inception in the 1960s, the term ‘collateral damage’ has dissolved so thoroughly into the stream of evening news, press releases, military briefings, and policy papers, that its origin is easy to forget. We forget that it was designed to forestall moral judgment about violent actions; to shield power from indignation and its wielders from ethical censure or legal consequence. It performs a final act of erasure by removing the dead from moral discourse. So its victims are killed twice: first by the bomb, and then by the language that renders their deaths without moral weight. Primo Levi observed of the concentration camps that the ultimate ambition of their operators was not merely to kill, but to make it as though the killed had never existed. The concept of collateral damage works toward the same end by different means, and with considerably greater institutional respectability.

The term ‘collateral damage’ requires no cruelty in the person who uses it. It requires only habit and the willingness to accept that certain deaths need not disturb one’s morning. But the Sitra Achra is not far from us. It’s on the other side of the language we have agreed to use.

As for Thomas Schelling, who introduced the term: he went on to become one of the most influential American strategic thinkers of the twentieth century. He died at the age of ninety-five, well-regarded and at peace. In 2005, he was even awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, for “having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis.”

Anton Koslov is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Political Theory at the American Graduate School of International Relations and Diplomacy in Paris.