For years, American officials insisted that the air wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan set a new standard for sparing civilians from harm. Barack Obama told the public that the United States was “conducting the most precise air campaign in history,” and Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, who once commanded the bombing campaign against the Islamic State (or ISIS), claimed the military’s “dedication, diligence and discipline in prosecuting our combat operations while protecting civilians” was “without precedent in recorded history of warfare.”
A new Cornell dissertation by Stephen Roblin sets out to test whether the American public actually believes any of that, and more importantly, whether it cares when the claim turns out to be false.
The backdrop for Roblin’s research was a 2021 New York Times investigation that punctured the Pentagon’s narrative. Reporter Azmat Khan and her colleagues combed through more than 1,300 documents from what they called a “hidden Pentagon archive,” visited dozens of strike sites, and interviewed survivors and officials. What they found, in Khan’s words, was “an institutional acceptance of an inevitable collateral toll,” with the military routinely failing to distinguish civilians from combatants and rarely facing consequences when it got things wrong.
The Pentagon’s response came the following year, when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered new measures to reduce and investigate civilian harm, a shift Roblin treated as a natural prompt to ask what role public opinion plays in shaping how the military accounts for the people it kills.
Roblin has situated the dissertation inside a long running academic argument about whether Americans actually care about foreign civilian deaths caused by their own military, and if so, why.
One camp, which Roblin called the legal public, holds that decades of exposure to human rights advocacy and legal rhetoric have taught Americans to judge wars by the standards of international humanitarian law, so that revelations of unlawful killing would erode support.
A second camp, the strategic public, argues the opposite: that Americans mainly care whether wars are winnable and whether American troops come home safely, and that foreign civilian deaths barely register unless they undermine battlefield success. A third group of social psychologists offer the tribal public account, contending that any indifference to foreign civilians stems not from strategic calculation but from an in-group bias that simply discounts people outside the American “tribe.”
Roblin argues all three camps miss something. His “moral public” theory holds that Americans do respond to the killing of foreign civilians, but not because they have absorbed the technical content of international law. Instead, he proposes that ordinary people rely on innate moral intuitions, the same instinctive judgments that shape how people evaluate harm to bystanders in any context, to assess the conduct of their own military. As Roblin puts it, his framework presents “an inside-out theory in which the public’s moral concern for the foreign civilian victims of US wars is internal to the human mind/brain,” rather than something instilled through legal education or advocacy.
To make his case, Roblin points back to the Abu Ghraib scandal as an illustration of the stakes. After CBS broadcast photographs of American soldiers abusing detainees at the Iraqi prison in 2004, public support for the war fell sharply, in what other scholars had called “one of the sharpest drops in wartime approval rates in the last half century.”
Roblin argues that drop had little to do with Americans suddenly invoking the laws of war, and everything to do with a more basic, automatic revulsion at cruelty toward people who could not defend themselves.
The dissertation tests this argument using six original survey experiments, including two with nationally representative samples, examining whether the public reacted differently to civilian deaths described as intentional, foreseeable, or accidental.
Roblin reports that support for the use of force “decreased as intent shifts from accidental to foreseeable to intentional,” and that this pattern tracks moral reasoning rather than legal reasoning. He also finds that concern for civilians persists even when a strike is framed as militarily effective, though effectiveness still moderates how strongly people react.
If the research is correct, then Pentagon assurances about precision and lawful conduct may matter less to public opinion than whether the killing of civilians looks deliberate or reckless.
