Collateral damage
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- For the 2002 film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, see Collateral Damage (film).
- For the Stargate SG-1 episode, see Collateral Damage (Stargate SG-1).
Collateral damage is a U.S. Military term for unintended or incidental damage during a military operation. The term started as a euphemism during the Vietnam War, and can refer to friendly fire or the destruction of civilians and their property.<ref>Air Force Law Review, Wntr, 2005 by Jefferson D. Reynolds</ref>
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[edit] Definitions
Collateral damage is a military euphemism that was made popular during the Vietnam War (Army Technology). The euphemism has now been in use so long that it is 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).
Etymologically, the expression "collateral damage" probably was originally used 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."
[edit] Examples
- On 10th of May, 1999 The CIA incorrectly identified the Chinese embassy in Belgrade as a Yugoslav weapons factory. The embassy was destroyed by a JDAM guided munition.
- On 30th of July, 2006 Israel bombed a house in Qana sheltering women and children in what it claimed was an attack on a Hezbollah rocket launch site<ref>HRW</ref>. 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 Dividian compound in Waco, Texas. McVeigh made a statement to the effect that he had learned the term while serving in the military during the Gulf War.
[edit] Other uses
The term collateral damage has also been borrowed by the computing community to refer to legitimate users who are denied service 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 whole IP ranges rather than individual IPs associated with spam, and can cause legitimate users within those IP ranges to lose 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 which sounds better than acknowledging 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.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
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