In a 2012 investigation conducted by The New York Times, reporters revealed that the Obama Administration made the decision to exclude boys and men who were killed in drone strikes from the collateral damage count. These boys and men were referred to as military-age males, an identifier that covers those between the ages of sixteen and sixty but, in practice, was used on boys younger than sixteen. In doing so, the Obama Administration used gender as a shortcut to assign combatant status to boys and men who were near a drone target. On closer inspection, The New York Times revelation was foreshadowed by a trickle of news stories that preceded the Obama Administration and which casually mentioned military-age males without much scrutiny. These media stories point to a post-9/11 security culture where defense and intelligence practitioners used assumptions about gender to interpret the battlespace.
We already knew that gender mattered when the CIA targeted Abu Ali Al-Harithi. On November 3rd, 2002, Abu Ali Al-Harithi, who helped plan the 2000 attack on the USS Navy Cole, was hit with a drone strike while leaving a compound in Yemen. Two SUVs left the compound; Abu Ali Al-Harithi and six other men sat in one SUV while the women were in a separate SUV. The CIA killed Al-Harithi and five other men with a Hellfire missile deployed from a Predator drone that launched from a US base in Djibouti. (One man escaped.) According to one official, âif the women hadnât gotten into another car, we wouldnât have firedâ (McManus 2003). We also knew that women, children, and âmen of nonmilitary ageâ were allowed to flee Fallujah during Operation Vigilant Resolve in 2006, while military-age males were not allowed to flee the firefight that had killed more than 450 civilians in 6 days (Entman 2006, 220). We knew that at least one colonel had instructed his platoon to âkill all military-age males that were not actively surrendering,â an order that led to a court case and a formal reprimand for the colonel (von Zielbauer 2006). The examples proliferate throughout the book and we could conceivably search for references to military-age males in newspaper archives spanning the last few generations. The military-age male identifier is entrenched in US warfighting, was used extensively by the Bush Administration, and goes back to at least the Vietnam War. Not coincidentally, the military-age male is a figure who appears most prominently in so-called irregular wars and former Western colonies.
The New York Times investigation fuelled a burst of surprise and outrage that centered on some variation of the following criticism: gender shouldnât be used to assign guilt during wartime. An important note to readers: combatants and military-age males (or MAMs, as they are often called) are not synonymous categories even if both terms refer to violence. The MAM identifier, however, does institutionalize the link between masculinity and violence. This distinction is important. On initial inspection at least, the decision to exclude boys and men from the collateral damage count violates a fundamental liberal democratic principle and smacks of hypocrisy. The just war theorist Michael Walzer, for example, writes that terrorism is deplorable specifically because civilians cannot choose their national or ethnic identities, nor have not chosen to enter public life and so they cannot be morally culpable like politicians. âOrdinary civilians are killed and no defense is offered in terms of their individual activityâ (Walzer 2007, 37). Terrorists and nondemocratic states target civilians because of who they are, not because of what they have done. Liberal democracies are supposed to do better.
The idea that there is a difference between those who choose to fight and those who do not fight is based on the widespread acceptance of liberal social contract theory and is known as the principle of distinction under international humanitarian law. The principle of distinction has been described as âperhaps the greatest triumph of international lawâ due to its success at âmitigating the evils of warâŚIndeed, the purpose of those rules is to specify for each individual a single identity; [the person] must be either a [combatant] or a civilianâ (Jones 2006, 262). But if the principle of distinction represents liberalismâs promise to fight civilized wars, then the military-age male category reveals that this promise comes with caveats and disclaimers that carve exceptions into liberalismâs architecture based on identity traits like gender, age, race, and religion.
In Chapter 2, I speak more on Geneva III, Protocol I, which contains the article that elaborates on the types of behavior that turn individuals into combatants. For now, it is enough to say that the military-age male is not a legal category, nor will you find this term used in any international or US convention that governs war. Combatant and civilian identities are designed to guarantee a set of rights and treatment afforded during wartime (e.g., civilians cannot be intentionally targeted and combatants must be afforded prisoner of war status if captured by enemy forces). With the exception of additional rights granted to children under sixteen, who are understood to be exceptionally vulnerable during wartime, age is not used to determine combatant status. Gender is also not legally used to determine combatant status, though, as we will see throughout this book, military lawyers, counterinsurgents, and drone crews routinely considered gender in their targeting decisions. The military-age male category is not a legal category, but a technocratic creation that is used to identify and manage risky bodies in irregular wars.
The United States often highlights its own superior conduct during wartime, juxtaposing the behavior of norm-violating actors against US attempts to protect civilians. The United States has institutionalized criticism against norm-violating actors through, for example, congressional resolutions condemning militant organizations for their use of civilians as human shields (H.Con. Res 107, 113th Cong. 2014). Pentagon officials have similarly criticized ISIS for forcing civilians to act as human shields (BBC News 2016). US Central Command (CENTCOM) has criticized Taliban fighters for forcing civilians to remain in villages that were at risk of being bombed by Coalition Forces. While US and Afghan military forces were âcommitted to protecting the lives of Afghan citizensâ the Taliban was âdeliberately [placing] civilians in harmâs wayâ (Garamone 2009). Considering these foreign policy stances, the decision made by both the Bush and Obama Administrations to direct military action against civilian boys and men during counterinsurgency operations and then to omit them from the collateral damage count is especially perplexing and distressing.
Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have sought to reassure domestic and international audiences that reducing civilian deaths is an American imperative. Bush, referring to the ground war in Afghanistan, stated that the Principle of Distinction, the principle under international law that differentiates between combatants and civilians, still applied (Kinsella 2005, 163). In his Nobel Peace Prize speech, Obama stated that: âI believe that the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fightâ (Obama 2009). This regard for civilian life gives the United States its moral authority (or so its officials claim) and facilitates the language of condemnation that is directed at militants and other nondemocratic states.
This research journey began by establishing an empirical puzzle. The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (2007), a document that emerged from the US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, emphasizes that militants vie for the civilian populationâs support as a way to win the war ag...