“The misfortunes of war” – US airstrikes and civilian casualties

Dr Katharine Hall, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, looks at how air strikes have been waged in the context of the war on terror. 

This post is by Dr Katharine Hall, Module Leader for Queen Mary Online's MA in International Relations. 

In December 2021, the New York Times was one of the news outlets to report on a US military air strike unit called Talon Anvil. The unit coordinated air strikes largely in Syria against potential ISIS targets. What made this unit different, according to the reporting, was the high level of casualties associated with their strikes, the secrecy surrounding the unit, and the lack of oversight from senior commanders or officials.

Because of its secrecy and limited accountability, Talon Anvil was essentially able to call in strikes – many of them from drones – as it felt necessary, bypassing more normal protocols. Much of the discussion about Talon Anvil has painted a picture of a unit gone rogue, operating in a messy counterterror environment.

While this air strike cell may have been operating largely on its own, it by far better reflects how US air strikes have been waged in the context of the war on terror than not. In other words, this is less a rogue unit than a manifestation of how US air strikes have been functioning.

Air strikes and the war on terror

Two trends in the use of air power during the war on terror help to illustrate this in relation to Talon Anvil. First, as one of the generals was reported saying, civilians died and were harmed in these air strikes not because of a lack of concern but because they were “the misfortunes of war.”

Civilian casualties can be caused by all air strikes but the use of drones in particular – either in its surveillance or targeting capability – has made clear that civilian casualties are intimately related to the racialization and gendering of target identification.

As Lauren Wilcox, for example, has shown, drone pilots and those observing the drone feed are more likely to see children as adults, men as potential combatants, normal group behavior as suspicious, and so on. While her research focused on Afghanistan, the examples of strikes from Talon Anvil in Syria confirm this.

Strikes as self-defense

Second, Talon Anvil wasn’t operating outside of the laws of war so much as mobilising and shaping the laws of war to suit its needs. Authorisation for strikes was moved down the chain of command and the unit began to rely increasingly on self-defense justifications for strikes.

Calling a strike necessary for self-defense, even if the target wasn’t near ground troops or posing an imminent threat, allowed Talon Anvil to carry out attacks quicker and within the US military’s legal frameworks.

In fact, self-defense and the concept of imminent threat formed part of the legal backbone of the Obama administration’s justifications of the use of drones, and in particular for the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki.

Imminence was always highly disputed but used to support the expansion of drone strikes globally - Craig Jones in his new book The War Lawyers similarly shows how the mobilisation of the law (lawfare) often enables rather than restrains air strikes.

Talon Anvil, in other words, can be situated within trends in the development of Western airpower.

In the War and International Security module, part of Queen Mary Online’s International Relations MA, we engage with developments like these in contemporary warfare and seek to understand them within the historical development and changing nature of modern war.