Weighing Lives in War: How National Identity Influences American Public Opinion about Foreign Civilian and Compatriot Fatalities

This article explores how the American public weighs tradeoffs between foreign and compatriot fatalities during war. This focus provides an important window into the meaning and significance of citizenship and national identity and, in turn, the most fateful consequences of inclusion and exclusion in the international context. To examine these attitudes, we conducted an original survey experiment asking subjects to consider a fictional US military operation in Afghanistan. We find that: (1) Americans are significantly more willing to accept the collateral deaths of foreign civilians as compared to American civilians in operations aiming to destroy important military targets; (2) Americans are less willing to risk the lives of American soldiers to minimize collateral harm to foreign civilians as compared to American civilians; (3) Americans who express relatively more favorable views of the United States compared to other nations are more willing to accept foreign collateral deaths in US military operations; and (4) Americans are more willing to accept Afghan civilian collateral deaths than those of citizens from a neutral state, such as India. Many Americans recognize that placing a much higher value on compatriot lives over foreign lives is morally problematic, but choose to do so anyway.