Civilians in War

We think of war as a conflict between soldiers, who have been trained, armed, and commanded to fight. Normally, civilians are neither equipped with arms nor trained in their use and sent out to fight. Yet virtually all wars have involved not only military, but also civilian casualties. Civilians have been killed and injured and their property has been destroyed, often on a large scale. Some of this killing and destruction has been accidental, caused by actions of soldiers directed at military targets which, as their unintended, unforeseen, and indeed unforeseeable consequences, bring about harm to civilians. In other cases, the harming of civilians has been incidental: inflicted as an unintended but foreseen side-effect of attacks on military targets. In still other cases, civilians have been deliberately attacked, whether as a way of attaining some war aims or for reasons that have nothing to do with those aims.