For moral, legal, and tactical reasons, it is U.S. Army policy to protect civilians during military operations, a newly updated Army publication explains.
“To the extent possible, civilian populations (including those loyal to the enemy) must be protected from the effects of combat. In addition to humanitarian reasons and the need to comply with the law of war, excessive civilian casualties create political pressure that limits freedom of action of Army units. Civilian harm creates ill will among the population, with lasting repercussions that impair post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation.”
And yet sometimes that policy will fail.
“Leaders anticipate that, despite their best efforts to prevent them, civilian casualty incidents occur. Similarly, mass atrocities may occur even if commanders take all possible steps to preclude them. Systems should be established in advance to respond to civilian casualty incidents; these include reporting, tracking, investigation, public response, and making amends to families and communities through the recognition of harm, appropriate compensation, and apologies and dignifying gestures if necessary.”
The necessity and the near-impossibility of employing violence in a way that minimizes its unintended effects on the civilian population are recurring themes in the new Army document.
See Protection of Civilians, Army Techniques Publication (ATP) 3-07.6, October 29, 2015.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.