WHEN ASKED ABOUT civilian casualties in August 2004, more than a year after the United States initiated a massive bombing campaign in Iraq, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan explained that our “military goes to great lengths to make sure that we minimize … any collateral damage or loss of human life.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also explained to reporters that the weapons used in the air strikes have a “degree of precision that no one ever dreamt of in a prior conflict.”

There’s no question that concerns about “collateral damage” — a euphemism for the unintended killing of civilians — enter into targeting decisions. But it’s also true that the U.S. military has no idea how well it does in this regard, as there’s no official tally of civilian deaths. Nor does the military make a concerted attempt to find out how its use of forceaffects civilians. “For all of its computer simulations and painstaking planning, the Department of Defense has never undertaken a systematic evaluation to determine whether its efforts to spare lives succeed or fail — or what might be done to improve them,” Kennedy School Lecturer Sarah Sewall NISM 1995 wrote in the New York Times. That needs to happen, she insists, so the Pentagon can learn from past mistakes and do better in the future.

Sewall, who heads the Means of Intervention Project at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, is taking aim at this “disconnect” between the stated aims of U.S. policy vis-a-vis civilians and the present murky reality. The focus of this endeavor, as the name suggests, really is on the “means” — the way in which military force is applied. That issue is normally given short shrift, Sewall maintains, with most discussions revolving around questions of whether or when to intervene militarily. “Yet the means of intervention have dramatic implications for the security of civilians in the target country, the security of intervening forces, and the effectiveness of the intervention itself,” she explains.

A key part of this effort, which was launched in 2001, is to find the overlap between the moral and the pragmatic — between humanitarian and military concerns. Since collateral damage can cause political and military setbacks, keeping that damage to a minimum is something both sides should strive for. By bringing major players from human rights groups and the military together in Washington, DC for regular colloquy, the program is starting to forge a common ground.

The center has hosted eight related workshops on issues like collateral damage, military targeting, ground combat, and the war in Iraq, plus military training workshops and less formal exchanges. Participants range from top military officials like retired generals Charles Horner (who led the Desert Storm air offensive) and Wesley Clark (who served as NATO’s supreme allied commander), and key commanders in the Afghan and Iraq wars such as Lt. Gen. Victor (Gene) Renuart, to senior representatives from humanitarian groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“Prior to the workshops, there had been no venue for humanitarian and human rights organizations to get together with the military,” says Stephen Del Rosso, chair of International Peace and Security at the Carnegie Corporation, a chief funder of the project. “The Carr Center provides a neutral forum for reasoned, informed discussion. Over time, each side has been socialized to the other’s view; they understand each other’s terminology and are better equipped to overcome cultural hurdles.”

One obstacle to fruitful discourse has been the legalistic framework typically embraced by human rights organizations, says Sewall. “If your only concern is condemning the military enterprise on criminal charges, that’s the end of the conversation. But if you’re interested in results, we have a common cause in making sure military force is used in a manner that causes the least harm.”

The workshops fill a “gaping hole,” says Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch. “They’re the single most valuable thing I do all year; I look forward to them like Christmas.” Sewall, he explains, takes “two communities with deep-seated mistrust and helps us realize that we need each other — that neither side has all the answers.”

Air Force Col. Gary Crowder agrees that the workshops have been “remarkably worthwhile. Despite all the differences we had going in, we now have a shared commitment to minimizing the impacts on civilian populations.”

This cooperation could prove essential in the future, Crowder notes, “as we see ourselves moving into a world with sustained counterinsurgency-type operations, whether it’s in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, or Colombia.” In such circumstances, the military and NGOs need to work together, he says. “The metric of success in Iraq today is not how many tanks we blow up, but whether the water and electricity is on and how many people are dying.”

For most humanitarian groups, thinking about the conduct of war is “very distasteful,” Sewall says, “but I want those who criticize the use of force to appreciate the tactical constraints on military decisions.” She’s seen hints of progress since the project began. Organizations are starting to hire people with military experience and are focusing more on the effects of military campaigns, rather than making judgments about culpability.

Garlasco — who devised targeting strategies for the Defense Intelligence Agency before coming to Human Rights Watch — is a case in point. Among other issues, he’s investigating “checkpoint procedures” — a situation where innocent civilians can be harmed — but rather than just criticizing the military, he plans to take up the matter at the next intervention workshop.

The meetings afford unprecedented opportunities for interaction. “How else can someone from a human rights group get to bat around ideas with a four-star general?” Garlasco asks. Participants make important contacts that may lead to developments down the road. For example, Human Rights Watch relied on military officers it met through project workshops as key sources in its report on the conduct of the Iraq war.

The project also directly engages military actors and institutions at their request. It is often able to include human rights NGOs in the process. Examples include designing and conducting ethics training for Army Special Forces as part of the officer qualification course, helping the National Training Center enhance its civilians on battlefield training and providing civil-military seminars for Army Civil Affairs forces.

In March 2005, Sewall and researchers William Arkin and Matthew McKinzie briefed the Defense Science Board on cluster munitions, which, says Sewall, “would never have happened without this project.”Army Col. Lyle Cayce says the project workshops have reinforced Army perceptions of cluster munitions as a “major contributor to civilian suffering and death.”

Sewall says that many aspects of U.S. military modernization, such as improved battlefield awareness, benefit the civilian. Precision, or “smart”, weapons have transformed airpower, making it more discriminate and flexible. Yet ground forces’ ability to project power at a distance has outstripped the ability to target discriminately, Sewall argues. This is particularly problematic when the enemy exploits the law of war by fighting amidst civilians. Sewall advocates focusing on improving tactical surveillance and developing a wider range of lethal munitions and nonlethal options.

Limited understanding of civilian harm can mean missing opportunities to mitigate collateral damage. “In Iraq, Army units were sent forward with the wrong munitions,” Sewall explains. “The only way they could respond to a single distant fire was a multiple-launch rocket system spreading clusters over a wide swath — certain to kill civilians in an urban area.”

Learning humanitarian lessons is critical. Innocent Iraqis die at road checkpoints because American troops cannot disable vehicles at safe distances. Such capabilities might have been available if the U.S. military had recognized the same pervasive problem during the 1989 invasion of Panama, she argues. Lacking such recourse, soldiers too often face a choice of kill or be killed.

Although technical fixes can surely reduce civilians’ deaths, they are by no means the sole answer. Attitudes and policies must change as well. On this front, Sewall sees encouraging signs within the military. Participants in the intervention project, for example, promoted the idea of improving collateral damage tracking at the annual Air Armaments Summit and at other forums. “We’re creating a generation of people who are very attuned to humanitarian issues,” she says.

On an individual level, the progress has been palpable. But on an institutional level, the challenges are much greater and the progress harder to discern. Overhauling policy within the gargantuan military and defense establishments is a daunting task, to say the least. Sewall knows about “institutional resistance to change” firsthand from her experience in the Pentagon as deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance during the Clinton administration. Sewall was asked to start a new office from scratch, with virtually no resources, in a place where “peacekeeping was not a high-priority mission.” The frustrations of that job afforded insights on how to catalyze change.

One difficulty is that there’s no office within the Pentagon that “owns” the problem of collateral damage, Sewall says. Consequently, there’s no resource allocation for the issue and no advocate internally. “Without such changes, there are minimal bureaucratic incentives for developing future capabilities to minimize collateral damage.”

To this end, Sewall has been asked to advise congressional efforts to encourage U.S. government assessment of civilian casualties.

The kind of analysis she’s calling for would entail a postwar survey of civilian impact, as well as investigations of serious incidents. “Friendly fire deaths are analyzed at great lengths because the military wants to reduce their recurrence in the future,” she says. “That same mentality needs to be applied to civilian deaths, though perhaps not to the same level of scrutiny. But we have to recognize there is a problem before we can learn from it.”

Steve Nadis is a freelance writer living in Cambridge.