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Concept
Collateral damage
Summary
Collateral damage is any death, injury, or other damage inflicted that is an incidental result of an activity. Originally coined by military operations, it is now also used in non-military contexts.
Since the development of precision guided munitions in the 1970s, military forces often claim to have gone to great lengths to minimize collateral damage.
Critics of use of the term "collateral damage" see it as a euphemism that dehumanizes non-combatants killed or injured during combat, used to reduce the perceived culpability of military leadership in failing to prevent non-combatant casualties.
Collateral damage does not include civilian casualties caused by military operations that are intended to terrorize or kill enemy civilians (e.g., the bombing of Chongqing during World War II).
The word "collateral" comes from medieval Latin word 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 (e.g. "collateral veins" meaning veins running parallel to each other, or "collateral security" meaning security additional to the main obligation in a contract).
The oldest known usage of the term "collateral damage" in this context occurred in an article written in May 1961 by T. C. Schelling entitled "DISPERSAL, DETERRENCE, AND DAMAGE". The term "collateral damage" likely originated as a euphemism during the Vietnam War referring to friendly fire or to the intentional killing of non-combatants and destruction of their property.
During the 1991 Gulf War, Coalition forces used the phrase to describe the killing of civilians in attacks on legitimate military targets. According to Scottish linguist Deborah Cameron, "the classic Orwellian arguments for finding this usage objectionable would be that
it is jargon, and to the extent that people cannot decode it, it conceals what is actually going on;
it is a euphemism; abstract, agentless, and affectless, so that even if people succeeded in associating it with a real act or event, they would be insulated from any feelings of repulsion or moral outrage".
Official source
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