Collateral damage is any death, injury, or other damage inflicted that is an unintended result of military operations. Since the development of precision guided munitions, 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-combatantcasualties. Collateral damage doesn't include civilian casualties caused by military operations that are intended to terrorize or kill enemy civilians.
Etymology
The word "collateral" comes from medieval Latin word collateralis, from col-, "together with" + lateralis and is otherwise mainly used as a synonym for "parallel" or "additional" in certain expressions. 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 the intentional killing of non-combatants and destruction of their property.
Non-military uses of the phrase
The term has also been borrowed by the computing community to refer to the refusal 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 addresses rather than individual IPs associated with spam, which can deny legitimate users within those ranges the ability to send email to some domains. The related term collateral mortality is also becoming prevalent, and probably derives from the term collateral damage. It has been applied to other spheres in addition to the original military context. Fisheries are an example of this, where bycatch of species such as dolphins are called collateral mortality; they are species that die in the pursuit of the legal death of fishing targets, such as tuna.
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".
In 1999, "collateral damage" was named the German Un-Word of the Year by a jury of linguistic scholars. With this choice, it was criticized that the term had been used by NATO forces to describe civilian casualties during the Kosovo War, which the jury considered to be an inhuman euphemism.
The USAF Intelligence Targeting Guide defines the term as the "unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment, or personnel, occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities”, stating that “uch damage can occur to friendly, neutral, and even enemy forces". Another United States Department of Defense document uses "nintentional or incidental injury or damage to persons or objects that would not be lawful military targets in the circumstances ruling at the time”, which also states that “uch damage is not unlawful so long as it is not excessive in light of the overall military advantage anticipated from the attack." In U.S. military terminology, the unintentional destruction of allied or neutral targets is called "friendly fire". The U.S. military follows a technology-based process for estimating and mitigating collateral damage. The software used is known as "FAST-CD" or "Fast Assessment Strike Tool—Collateral Damage."
