In war today, killing civilians is no longer treated as an accident to be avoided—it has become an acceptable tactic of state power. Syria, Israel in Gaza, and Russia in Ukraine reveal a chilling pattern: mass civilian deaths are reframed not as war crimes, but as strategic necessities. The normalization of this practice abroad should alarm us. If history teaches anything, it is that methods of control tested on “others” eventually come home. The United States, increasingly drawn toward authoritarian politics, is preparing to sacrifice its own civilians in the name of “security” and “order.”

Syria: Siege and Starvation as Weapons

In the Syrian civil war, the Assad regime adopted a policy of “surrender or starve.” Civilian neighborhoods in Aleppo, Homs, and Eastern Ghouta were systematically bombarded, besieged, and denied food, water, and medicine. Entire cities were reduced to rubble, with civilians deliberately targeted to break the will of rebel groups sheltering among them.¹ Hospitals—protected under international law—were struck repeatedly by airstrikes, killing doctors, nurses, and patients.² What was once condemned as barbaric is now defended as “counterterrorism.”

Israel in Gaza: Civilians as “Human Shields”

Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza has escalated the normalization of civilian killing. Apartment towers, schools, and refugee camps are destroyed in strikes justified as eliminating Hamas “command centers.”³ We know that more than 30,000 Palestinians—mostly women and children—had been killed since October 2023.⁴ Further evidence underscores the scale of civilian targeting. A joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call found that Israeli military intelligence itself had identified only about 8,900 named or “probably dead” fighters out of an overall death toll of roughly 53,000 by May 2025. This internal data implies that 83% of those killed in Gaza were civilians.⁵ The Israeli Defense Forces disputed the accuracy of the published figures, but did not deny the existence of the classified database on which they were based.⁵

Israel frames these deaths as Hamas’s responsibility, accusing the group of using civilians as “human shields.” Yet the sheer scale of destruction reveals something deeper: the deliberate targeting of civilian life as a pressure point, a tool to reshape political outcomes and demoralize entire populations.Israel frames these deaths as Hamas’s responsibility, accusing the group of using civilians as “human shields.” Yet the sheer scale of destruction reveals something deeper: the deliberate targeting of civilian life as a pressure point, a tool to reshape political outcomes and demoralize entire populations.

Russia in Ukraine: Terror by Artillery

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has relied on indiscriminate bombardment of cities such as Mariupol, Kharkiv, and Bakhmut. Apartment blocks, hospitals, and theaters sheltering children were destroyed by missiles and artillery.⁵ The aim is not only military victory but terror: to break civilian morale, force mass displacement, and collapse the Ukrainian state’s capacity to govern. The murder of civilians here is not a side effect—it is the message.

Global Precedents: Civilian Sacrifice as Policy

The pattern of sacrificing civilians is not new; it is a long-standing tool of empire and state violence.

Vietnam (1955–1975): U.S. “search and destroy” missions, napalm, and Agent Orange blurred the line between soldier and civilian. By the end of the war, as many as 2 million Vietnamese civilians were dead.⁶

Iraq (2003–2011): The U.S. invasion and occupation killed between 200,000–300,000 civilians. “Shock and awe” airstrikes on Baghdad and sieges in Fallujah normalized the idea of “collateral damage.”⁷

Afghanistan (2001–2021): Drone strikes and night raids killed ~47,000 civilians, including repeated massacres of wedding parties. These killings were rebranded as “precision strikes” despite massive error rates.⁸

Yemen (2015–present): U.S.-backed Saudi airstrikes on hospitals, funerals, and marketplaces have killed more than 150,000, while famine and cholera—also products of war—have devastated millions more.⁹

Chechnya (1990s–2000s, Russia): Russia’s “anti-terrorist” campaigns used indiscriminate bombardment of Grozny, killing tens of thousands of civilians.¹⁰

Bosnia and Kosovo (1990s, Balkans): Ethnic cleansing campaigns targeted civilians to re-engineer demographics; ~100,000 were killed in Bosnia alone.¹¹

These examples show that when great powers face resistance, they increasingly turn to total war against populations themselves. The doctrine is clear: the fastest way to break an opponent is to kill, starve, or displace their civilians.Civilian Deaths and State Violence: Historical to Domestic Arc

Region / Context	Civilian Deaths / Impact	Tactic Used	Purpose / Justification	Sources
Vietnam (1955–1975)	~2 million civilians killed	Napalm, Agent Orange, “search and destroy,” carpet bombing	Body counts replace distinction between combatants and civilians	Turse⁶
Chechnya (1990s–2000s)	Tens of thousands killed	Indiscriminate bombardment of Grozny	“Anti-terrorist” operations justify mass civilian deaths	Gall & de Waal¹⁰
Bosnia/Kosovo (1990s)	~100,000 civilians killed	Ethnic cleansing, shelling of cities, mass displacement	Demographic engineering by targeting civilians	ICTY¹¹
Iraq (2003–2011)	200,000–300,000 civilians killed	“Shock and awe” airstrikes, urban sieges, checkpoints	Frame deaths as “collateral damage” in counterinsurgency	Iraq Body Count⁷
Afghanistan (2001–2021)	~47,000 civilians killed	Drone strikes, night raids, airstrikes on weddings	Killings reframed as “precision” despite error rates	Brown Univ.⁸
Yemen (2015–present)	150,000+ civilians killed; famine & cholera devastate millions	U.S.-backed Saudi airstrikes on hospitals, funerals, marketplaces	Targeting reframed as strikes on “rebels”	UNDP⁹
Syria (2011–present)	~300,000 civilians killed	Siege, starvation, barrel bombs, hospital strikes	Break morale; punish rebel-held areas	HRW¹; PHR²
Ukraine (2022–present)	Tens of thousands killed (Mariupol, Kharkiv, Bakhmut)	Indiscriminate artillery/missiles	Terrorize civilians; force displacement	ICC⁵
Gaza (2023–2024)	30,000+ killed, mostly women and children	Bombing of homes, schools, refugee camps	Destroy Hamas infrastructure; blame “human shields”	Amnesty³; UN OCHA⁴
U.S.–Mexico Border (1994–present)	8,000+ migrant deaths	“Prevention through deterrence” forcing crossings into deserts/rivers	Use death itself as a deterrent to migration	De León¹²
Standing Rock (2016)	Hundreds injured	Militarized policing—rubber bullets, water cannons, tear gas	Suppress Indigenous resistance to pipeline	Estes¹³
BLM Protests (2020)	Dozens killed, thousands injured	National Guard, militarized police, federal snatch squads	Restore “order,” suppress mass protest	U.S. House¹⁴
Future Domestic Risk (Project 2025)	Potential “acceptable casualties” in dissent suppression	Urban occupation, expanded militarization, suspension of civil liberties	Authoritarian consolidation under “law and order”	Heritage¹⁵; McCoy¹⁶; Huq¹⁷

Coming Soon: U.S. Civilian Sacrifice and Project 2025

The lessons of foreign wars have always come home. In the 20th century, surveillance, propaganda, and counterinsurgency tactics were exported from Vietnam to the streets of American cities.¹⁶ In the 21st, drones, predictive policing, and militarized SWAT forces carry the logic of the “war on terror” into neighborhoods. The Trumplican vision embodied in Project 2025 intensifies this convergence: the militarization of domestic governance, the blurring of civil authority and military authority, and the redefinition of civilians as potential enemies of the state.¹⁵

As being implemented, Project 2025 will concentrate unprecedented power in the executive branch, dismantle agencies of oversight, and expand tools of repression in the name of “law and order.”¹⁷ Under these conditions, the military’s foreign strategy of targeting civilians to break resistance will migrate seamlessly to U.S. cities.

• Mass Deportations and Border Militarization: Already framed as “deterrence,” the deliberate sacrifice of migrants through exposure and denial of aid demonstrates how death itself becomes policy. This same logic could apply to domestic “undesirables”—protesters, the unhoused, political opponents.¹²
• Urban Occupations: Major U.S. cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles—could be declared “zones of unrest.” Military and National Guard units would be deployed not to protect civilians, but to contain them. Crowd control weapons, drones, and live ammunition could be justified under the banner of restoring order.¹⁴
• Rebranding Civilian Resistance as Terrorism: Just as hospitals in Syria or schools in Gaza were relabeled “command centers,” protests in the U.S. could be reframed as “insurrectionist strongholds.” In this climate, civilian deaths in crackdowns would not be accidents—they would be premeditated tactics of repression.¹
• The Normalization of “Acceptable Casualties”: Once civilian sacrifice is reframed as security, public outrage dulls. Protesters killed at demonstrations, migrants left to die at the border, neighborhoods razed by militarized police—these are absorbed as the necessary costs of authoritarian governance.¹³

The Trumplican administration’s preparation for city invasions mirrors counterinsurgency doctrine abroad: treat communities as occupied territory, conflate dissent with terrorism, and use violence against civilians to break collective resistance. In this scenario, American cities become Fallujah or Gaza—laboratories for authoritarian control where civilian bodies are expendable in the consolidation of power.

The Next War Is Already Here

Civilian sacrifice is no longer an external tragedy—it is the emerging domestic doctrine of authoritarian politics. From Aleppo to Gaza to Mariupol, from Vietnam to Iraq to Yemen, the killing of civilians has been normalized, excused, and institutionalized as strategy. The danger now is that these methods are turned inward. Project 2025 provides the legal scaffolding, the rhetoric of “law and order” provides the cover, and the militarized state provides the muscle.

The U.S. government has long tested its tactics on foreign civilians; the Trumplican vision now threatens to test them on its own. The question is not whether this strategy could be used—it already has been, in fragments, at Standing Rock, in Ferguson, in Portland. The question is how far a desperate authoritarian administration will go when faced with millions resisting its rule.

The precedent is clear: in the name of order, civilians can be sacrificed. Unless stopped, the next war will not be abroad. It will be in America’s streets.

1. Human Rights Watch, Syria: Events of 2016 (New York: HRW, 2017).
2. Physicians for Human Rights, “Anatomy of a Crisis: A Map of Attacks on Health Care in Syria,” 2019.
3. Amnesty International, “Israel/OPT: Evidence of War Crimes as Israeli Attacks Wipe Out Entire Families in Gaza,” October 2023.
4. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), “Hostilities in the Gaza Strip and Israel,” Situation Report, March 2024.
5. Bethan McKernan et al., “Revealed: Israel’s Own Data Suggests Majority of Gaza Dead Are Civilians,” The Guardian, August 22, 2025; +972 Magazine and Local Call reporting.
6. International Criminal Court, “Statement of the Prosecutor on the Situation in Ukraine,” March 2022.
7. Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Picador, 2013).
8. Iraq Body Count Project, “Documented Civilian Deaths from Violence,” 2023.
9. Brown University, Costs of War Project: Human Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars, 2021.
10. United Nations Development Programme, “Assessing the Impact of War in Yemen,” 2021.
11. Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: A Small Victorious War (New York: Pan Macmillan, 1998).
12. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), “Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,” 2000.
13. Jason De León, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
14. Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London: Verso, 2019).
15. U.S. House of Representatives, Report on Federal Agents in Portland, Committee on Homeland Security, 2020.
16. The Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Washington, D.C., 2023).
17. Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).
18. Aziz Huq, “The Authoritarian Constitution: Project 2025 and the Concentration of Power,” Yale Law Journal Forum, 2024.