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Collateral damage is a U.S. Military term for unintended or incidental damage during a military operation. The term, which originated as a euphemism during the Vietnam War, can refer to friendly fire or the destruction of non-combatants and their property.^[1]

Contents 1 Definitions 2 Examples 3 Other uses 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Collateral damage is a military euphemism made popular during the Vietnam War (Army Technology Glossary). The term has been in use so long that it is now an accepted term within military forces, meaning "unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment or personnel, occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities. Such damage can occur to friendly, neutral, and even enemy forces." (USAF Intelligence Targeting Guide).

As to its etymology, the expression "collateral damage" probably originated as military doublespeak rather than a euphemism, as the adjective "collateral" doesn't seem to have been used as a synonym for "unintentional" or "accidental" earlier. "Collateral" comes from medieval Latin 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 ("collateral veins" run parallel to each other and "collateral security" means additional security to the main obligation in a contract). However, "collateral" may also sometimes mean "additional but subordinate," i.e., "secondary" ("collateral meanings of a word"), and that specific meaning of a rather obscure word in the English language seems to have been picked up and broadened by the military in the expression "collateral damage."

• On May 7, 1999 the United States destroyed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade with a JDAM guided munition. The CIA claimed that it had incorrectly identified the embassy as a Yugoslavian weapons factory.

• On July 30, 2006 Israel bombed a house in Qana sheltering women and children in what it claimed was an attack on a Hezbollah rocket launch site^[2]. No militants were injured.

The term "collateral damage" came into the public consciousness during the Persian Gulf War of 1991 from televised military briefings, and was used to describe civilian victims of the bombing of Iraq.

The phrase was also quoted after the April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, OK by Timothy McVeigh. According to McVeigh, the 168 people that died on in the Murrah building were "collateral damage". McVeigh carried out the bombing in retaliation for the 1993 FBI siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. McVeigh made a statement to the effect that he had learned the term while serving in the military during the Persian Gulf War.

The term collateral damage has also been borrowed by the computing community to refer to the denial of service to legitimate users when administrators take blanket preventative measures against some individuals who are abusing systems. For example, Realtime Blackhole Lists used to combat email spam generally block ranges of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses rather than individual IPs associated with spam, and can deny legitimate users within those ranges the ability to send email to some domains.

Different connotations can be applied. There is both the military interpretation favoured by the administrators doing the blocking (as a euphemism that sounds better than acknowledging that real people are being affected) and the cynical interpretation that administrators are simply trying to gloss over the problems inherent in combatting abuse in this way.^{[citation needed]}

• Geneva Conventions
• Militarism
• Realpolitik
• Total war
• Philosophy of war
• War crime

1. ^ Air Force Law Review, Wntr, 2005, by Jefferson D. Reynolds
2. ^ HRW

• USAF Intelligence Targeting Guide Attachment 7 : Collateral Damage
• Free Dictionary
• Army Technology
• muse.jhu.edu
• Air Force Law Review, Wntr, 2005 by Jefferson D. Reynolds
• 'Collateral Damage' by Michael Tennant, LewRockwell.com, July 28, 2005
• The Faces of “Collateral Damage” by Charlie Clements, Friends Journal, April 2003
• Collateral Damage during NATO bombing of SR Yugoslavia 1999 Warning: explicit images