Patterns of Conflict, War, and Terrorism

Caution

This page displays sensitive imagery (e.g., images of lynching and the Holocaust) and discusses sensitive topics (e.g., sexual assault and genocide).

There are countless examples of conflict, war, and terrorism across human history, and there are numerous examples in more recent centuries and even decades. On this page we apply the types of conflict, war, and terrorism discussed on the Overview page to real events occurring over the past few centuries including to the present day. Though we include a global perspective, which is necessary in discussing war, we focus largely on US involvement in conflict, war, and terrorism in the past and today. We also offer attention to several consequences of conflict, war, and terrorism, including the loss of life, liberty, and culture, sexual assault, fear, and other outcomes. 

  

Conflict

In the subsections that follow, we provide examples of segregation, expulsion, and genocide in the US and abroad. Keep in mind the Caution box above, as you will encounter imagery that may be emotionally challenging to view – images that depict the realities and horrors of conflict, war, and violence. Please feel free to skip this imagery if needed. 

Segregation

African Americans have a history of maltreatment that began during the colonial period, when Africans were forcibly transported from their homelands to be sold as enslaved people in the Americas. Though, even Black Americans who were not enslaved faced mistreatment and violence. For instance, during the 1830s, white mobs attacked free Black people and communities in cities throughout the nation, including Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. The mob violence stemmed from a “deep-seated racial prejudice… in which whites saw blacks as ‘something less than human’” (Brown 1975). This continued well into the twentieth century, when white mobs attacked Black Americans in several cities, with at least seven anti-Black riots occurring in 1919 that left dozens dead.

In this period, Jim Crow racism in the South led to segregation in all facets of life. As you may be familiar, Black and white people were to sit in different places on busses and trains, enter theaters from different entrances, use different restrooms, and even drink from different water fountains. This institutionalized separation was driven by white supremacy, which dominated Southern mentality at the time. White supremacy refers to a social system of power relations maintained through social institutions, social interactions, and other social systems that is based on the idea that white people are superior to other races. Zainab Cheema (2025) at American University describes it this way:

"White supremacy describes structural hierarchies in society that translate the subjective meanings attached to various races and groups into differential relations of power. These relations of power are organized around the idea of white superiority, or the perception of whiteness as the norm and standard against which other races and ethnicities are defined. It is maintained through legal, social, political, and cultural systems enforcing racial dominance through the unequal distribution of power across society."

White supremacy is also cultural, meaning that it is built into the values, belief systems, practices, traditions, and norms of a culture or subculture. The National Education Association's Center for Social Justice (2020) explains:

"White Supremacy Culture is a form of racism centered upon the belief that white people are superior to people of other racial backgrounds and that whites should politically, economically, and socially dominate non-whites. While often associated with violence perpetrated by the KKK and other white supremacist groups, it also describes a political ideology and systemic oppression that perpetuates and maintains the social, political, historical and/or industrial white domination."

We will return to white supremacy when we discuss terrorism below. Jim Crow segregation was a version of racialized social control that did not stop at the social separation of Black and white people. It also involved frequent violence: The lynching of thousands of African Americans and other kinds of abuses (Alexander 2010; Litwack 2009). Lynchings refer to public killings without due process. At the time, Black people in the South were frequently hanged extrajudicially (outside of the law/courts) at the hands of white people. Thus, though Jim Crow segregation inherently refers to the legal separation of Black and white people in the South, we cannot neglect attention to the violence that accompanied it.

As discussed in the Sociology chapter, journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, now recognized as an early sociologist, researched and published accounts of lynching to help bring awareness of this reality to the North and across the world. One of her publications was accurately titled, "Southern Horrors." 

During the era of Jim Crow racism in the South, several thousand African Americans were lynched.

US Library of Congress – public domain

During the Jim Crow segregationist period, Nazi racism helped awaken Americans to the evils of prejudice in their own country. Against this backdrop, a monumental two-volume work by Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal (1944) attracted much attention when it was published. The book, "An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy," documented the various forms of discrimination facing Black Americans back then. The 'dilemma' referred to by the book’s title was the conflict between the American democratic ideals of egalitarianism as well as 'liberty and justice for all' and the harsh reality of anti-Black prejudice, discrimination, and lack of equal opportunity. Even after segregation ended, the Kerner Commission’s 1968 report reminded the nation that little, if anything, had been done since Myrdal’s book to address this conflict. Sociologists and other social scientists have warned more recently that the status of people of color has actually been worsening in many ways since this report was issued (Massey 2007; Wilson 2009).

Another example of segregation in world history is apartheid. This refers to institutionalized racial segregation in South Africa, in which a white minority (by numbers) implemented policies of racialized social control in order to bolster and maintain white supremacy. This form of segregation has roots in Dutch and British colonization of the southern African nation as far back as the 1600s, in which white settlers exploited the indigenous African population. However, apartheid was not institutionalized until 1948 when the National Party, which represented the interests of white people, came into power (Anti-Apartheid Legacy 2025). This segregation lasted from that year until 1994. 

Expulsion

After the attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II, governmental suspicion and cultural fear of Japanese individuals expanded, including of persons who were American citizens. The US Army, in the name of national security, first mandated curfews for and recommended evacuation of Japanese Americans in specific areas of the West Coast, which was deemed a military area during the war. However, in 1942 the military engaged in the process of forced evaluation and detention of Japanese-American residents in the West Coast region. As the National Archives (2025) explains, unless they were able to make alternate arrangements within days, "their homes, farms, businesses, and most of their private belongings were lost forever." An estimated 112,000 persons of Japanese descent were expelled to internment camps, with the majority of those (70,000) being American citizens. The Archives continues that for nearly three years or more, "four or five families, with their sparse collections of clothing and possessions, shared tar-papered army-style barracks." 

Another example of expulsion in US history is the forced relocation of Indigenous communities commonly known as the Trail of Tears. In the early to mid 1800s, many tribes located between the early states and the Mississippi River ceded their land to the US government in several dozen treaties. In 1830 the Indian Removal Act was passed, which mandated that the remaining tribes in this area move west of the river. Over the next couple decades, an estimated 100,000 Indigenous people relocated by force or per treaties coerced by the government. For instance, Cherokee people had lived across the land of what became several southern states, but are now concentrated in what we call Oklahoma, the end of the Trail of Tears. In the process of this relocation, around 3,500 people perished from the Muscogee (Creek) nation alone. Others expelled include the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Ponca, and Ho-Chunk/Winnebago nations (Mandewo n.d.; National Park Service n.d.). As we discuss below, the forced 'removal' of Indigenous people was part of a larger project of state-sanctioned genocide. 

A recent example of expulsion outside the US is the internment of the Uyghur population, a primarily Muslim ethnic group living in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of China. The Chinese government has been accused of engaging in crimes against humanity due to their mistreatment of Uyghur people, including allegedly detaining more than a million Uyghur individuals in hundreds of 're-education camps.' Additionally, several nations have accused China of engaging in genocide, as there have been reports of mass sterilization intended to reduce the Uyghur population (BBC 2022). We will discuss another example of expulsion and genocide co-occurring in the next subsection. 

The Nazi holocaust killed some 6 million Jewish individuals and millions of other people including disabled and queer individuals. This historical event is at once an example of expulsion (involving concentration camps), genocide (with the aim of systematic annihilation), and state terrorism (at the hands of the state). 

"Buchenwald Slave Laborers Liberation" via Wikimedia Commons is courtesy of US Holocaust Memorial Museum, National Archives and Records Administration

Genocide

We will now return to our discuss of genocide that began in the Education chapter, examining why scholars argue that this system of education and the larger processes that white settlers and the United States government engaged in were in fact genocide. According to Jeffrey Ostler, a historian at the University of Oregon, claims of genocide are contested by scholars and activists, like many other social problems. However, he provides evidence that the violence was systematic and intentional. To learn more, you are welcome to read Ostler’s article exploring complexity in claims of genocide. In addition, let’s review this history.

Recall that we mentioned how colonizers saw Indigenous people as a problem because they inhabited land that colonizers wanted. In response, colonizers established mandatory residential boarding schools for Indigenous children, in which thousands of children died across the US and Canada (AP News 2021; National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition N.d.; Newland 2022). Many of these deaths were due to infectious diseases, and many were due to violence or neglect. Even in cases where the children didn’t die, colonizers accomplished cultural assimilation, the process of members in a subordinate group adopting cultural aspects of a dominant group. In this case, the colonizers valued their white European culture as superior to Indigenous cultures and forced other groups to conform. These pictures below tell of cultural assimilation at the Chemawa Indian School/Forest Grove Indian Training School.

The first photo portrays a group portrait of students from the Spokane tribe at the Forest Grove Indian Training School, taken when they were “new recruits.” In the second photo, “Seven months later – the children pictured are probably the Spokane children who, according to the school roster, arrived in July 1881: Alice L. Williams, Florence Hayes, Suzette (or Susan) Secup, Julia Jopps, Louise Isaacs, Martha Lot, Eunice Madge James, James George, Ben Secup, Frank Rice, and Garfield Hayes” (Francis 2019).

“Images” from A Tragic Collision of Cultures are in the Public Domain; courtesy of Pacific University Archives; caption © Mike Francis is in the Public Domain

In the Pacific University magazine, Mike Francis writes about these photos in more detail:

"An 1881 photo of new arrivals from the Spokane tribe shows 11 awkwardly grouped young people, huddled together as if for protection in an unfamiliar place. Some have long braids of dark hair; some girls wear blankets over their shoulders; some display personal flourishes, including beads, a hat, a neckerchief.

A second photo of the group is purported to have been taken seven months later… the same children are seated stiffly on chairs or arranged behind them. The six girls wear similar dresses; the four boys wear military-style jackets, buttoned to the neck.

Further, one girl is missing in the second photo — one of the children who died after being brought to Forest Grove… The girl’s name was Martha Lot, and she was about 10 years old. Surviving records tell us she had been sick for a while with 'a sore' on her side and then took a sudden turn for the worse.

The before-and-after photos of the Spokane children were meant to show that the Indian Training School was working: Young native people were being shaped into something 'civilized' and unthreatening, something nearly European. But today the before-and-after shots appear desperately sad – frozen-in-time witnesses to whites’ exploitation of Indigenous children and the attempted erasure of their cultures" (Francis 2019).

The video The Forest Grove Indian Training School, 1880–1885 tells more of the story if you wish to learn more.

The function of education in the case of Indigenous boarding schools doesn’t stop with cultural assimilation. White colonizers intentionally used boarding schools to strategically disrupt families and cultures. Beyond that, the government policies and practices related to the education of Indigenous children were part of a wider strategy of land acquisition. As early as 1803, President Thomas Jefferson wrote that discouraging the traditional hunting and gathering practices of the Indigenous people would make land available for colonists. Jefferson wrote:

"To encourage them to abandon hunting, to apply to the raising stock, to agriculture, and domestic manufacture, and thereby prove to themselves that less land and labor will maintain them in this better than in their former mode of living. The extensive forests necessary in the hunting life will then become useless, and they will see advantage in exchanging them for the means of improving their farms and of increasing their domestic comforts" (Jefferson 1803, quoted in Newland 2022:21).

By removing people from the land and children from families, the US government made the land available to colonists, who were mainly from Europe, using education as one method of enforcement. Additionally, because children were forcibly removed from their families, they and their descendants lost the rights to inherit any family land that may have remained. This is generational inequality in action. Indigenous students still have the lowest educational attainment of any group in the United States (Martinez 2014).

Moreover, tens of thousands of Indigenous people were killed by white settlers and US troops, and countless others died from diseases introduced by European settlers, which the immune systems of Native peoples were not equipped to manage. Scholars claim that this mass killing of Indigenous people – a reduction in their population from an estimated one million before colonization to about 240,000 in 1910 – amounts to genocide (Brown 2009).

Another example of genocide that overlaps with expulsion involves Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. There is a long history of Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is beyond the scope of this discussion; however, we will briefly review how this is considered both a form of expulsion and of genocide. Increasing conflict between the Arab and Jewish populations in the region in the 1930s and 40s resulted in the United Nations (UN) splitting Palestine into two states, one for each population, including the formation of the State of Israel. Armed conflict ensued then transformed into war, leading to the Nakba. According to the UN (n.d.), "the Nakba, which means 'catastrophe' in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war." This is expulsion. Even today, "Palestinians continue to be dispossessed and displaced by Israeli settlements, evictions, land confiscation and home demolitions." The Palestinian people are concentrated in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank areas. 

The conflict escalated in October 2023 when Hamas, an armed Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip, brutally attacked Israel in October 2023. Hamas killed approximately 1,200 Israeli people and took 251 hostages. Hamas "has described the attack as a response to what it says are decades of Israeli oppression, the killings of Palestinians and years-long blockade of the Gaza Strip" and as "a reaction to what it claims are Israeli efforts to take over the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem – Islam's third holiest site" (BBC 2025). Israel responded with a deadly military offensive that has resulted in millions of Palestinian people experiencing forced displacement and tens of thousands dying (nearly 65,000 as of late 2025), with a large proportion of those being women and children. Additionally, Israel has blockaded the Gaza Strip, halting the flow of food, medicine, and other necessities in the area and limiting Palestinians from leaving (BBC 2025). The blockades have led to widespread famine and an immeasurable health crisis in Gaza. 

Because of these deaths, displacements, and consequences of the blockades, the some nations or organizations in the international community have accused Israel of committing genocide. For instance, South Africa brought a genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory declared that Israel has in fact engaged in genocide against Palestinians. 

US President Trump facilitated a ceasefire deal in October 2025 in which the 20 living Israeli hostages and 2,000 Palestinian prisoners were released; however, ceasefire deals have been violated and the future of this conflict is unknown.

As we have seen, there is overlap between patterns of conflict including expulsion, genocide, and war. We discuss war in more detail next, focusing largely on US involvement in war. 

  

War

More than 100 million soldiers and civilians are estimated to have died during the international and civil wars of the twentieth century (Leitenberg 2006). Hope arises from historical evidence that the number of international wars, civil wars, and other types of armed conflict has declined over the centuries, with the number in the past half-century being smaller than in centuries past (Pinker 2012). Reflecting this decline, a smaller percentage of the world’s population died in armed conflict during the past century than in earlier eras.

To illustrate this trend, compare two periods of history (Pinker 2012). The first is the thirteenth century, when the Mongol Empire under the initial leadership of Genghis Khan became an empire in Asia and Eastern Europe through wars and conquest in which it killed 40 million people. The second period is 1939–1945, when World War II killed 55 million people. Although 55 million is more than 40 million, the world’s population in the thirteenth century was only one-seventh its population during the World War II period. A quick calculation shows that about 11% of the world’s population died from the Mongolian wars, while 2% died from World War II. In terms of the risk of dying in war, then, the Mongolian wars were five times more deadly than World War II.

Although World War II killed an estimated 55 million people, a smaller percentage of the world’s population died in armed conflict during the twentieth century than in earlier eras.

Reid Kasprowicz – A Flag for the Fallen – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Looking further back in world history, the death rate in prehistoric times from tribal warfare was extremely high. If this high rate had held true during the twentieth century, 2 billion people would have died in twentieth-century wars rather than the 100 million who did die (Pinker 2012). Although wars, other armed conflicts, terrorism, and genocide certainly continue, and 100 million is a terribly high number of deaths, the world overall is in fact more peaceful now than in the past.

That is the good news and a cause for hope. However, patterns of conflict, war, and terrorism continue. Even if they are less frequent and less deadly than in the past, that is of little comfort to the tens of millions of people around the world during the past century suffered in war and other armed conflict and who live in fear today of becoming a victim of armed conflict. Additionally, nuclear weapons pose a great threat today. The thirteenth-century Mongolians killed their 40 million with battleaxes and other crude weapons; the World War II deaths resulted from gunfire and conventional bombs. At the end of that war, however, the nuclear age began when the US dropped two atomic weapons on Japan that killed tens of thousands instantly and tens of thousands more from radiation exposure.

Those two weapons were small in both number and size compared to nuclear weapons today. More than 20,000 nuclear warheads now exist, with 4,800 being operational and almost 2,000 (held by the US and Russia) on high alert, ready to be used at any time (Federation of American Scientists 2011). Each of these warheads is an average of at least twenty times more powerful than each of the atomic bombs that decimated Japan. The Union of Concerned Scientists (2009) summarized their danger bluntly: “Nuclear weapons remain the greatest and most immediate threat to human civilization.” However more peaceful the world is today, the threat of nuclear annihilation endures.

The United States at War

The history of the US has been written in war. The nation began with the colonial war against England. The American Civil War, also called the War Between the States, then occurred less than a century later. Between 1861 and 1865, at least 618,000 and perhaps as many as 750,000 soldiers in both the Union and the Confederacy died on the battlefield or from disease. The minimum estimate almost matches the number of American deaths in all the other wars the US has fought, and the maximum estimate greatly exceeds this number (see the table below).

U.S. Participation in Major Wars

War	Number of troops	Troop deaths	Troops wounded
Revolutionary War	184,000–250,000	4,435	6,188
War of 1812	286,730	2,260	4,505
Mexican War	78,218	13,283	4,152
Civil War	3,867,500	618,222–750,000	412,175
Spanish-American War	306,760	2,446	1,662
World War I	4,734,991	116,516	204,002
World War II	16,112,566	405,399	671,846
Korean War	5,720,000	36,574	103,284
Vietnam War	8,744,000	58,209	153,303
Persian Gulf War	2,225,000	382	467
Iraq and Afghanistan Wars	2,333,972	6,251	47,566
Note: Deaths are from combat, disease, and other causes.

Sources: Fischer 2005; Hacker 2011; Martinez 2011; US Department of Defense 2012

The US has been at war in about a fifth of the years it has existed (Bumiller 2010). Between the end of the colonial period and 1993, the US military was involved in at least 234 declared wars, undeclared wars, or other situations abroad involving actual or potential armed conflict (Collier 1993). Since then, US armed forces have waged war in Iraq and in Afghanistan and also joined international military operations in such countries as Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Libya. By any measure, then, the US military has played a fundamental role, for better or worse, in the nation’s foreign affairs historically and today. Supporters of this role say that the military has both protected and advanced the political and economic interests of the US, while critics have charge that the military has been an instrument of imperialism and devastation.

  

Terrorism

There's an old saying that “one person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist.” This saying indicates some of the problems in defining terrorism precisely. Some years ago, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) waged a campaign of terrorism against the British government and its people as part of its effort to drive the British out of Northern Ireland. Many people in Northern Ireland and elsewhere hailed IRA members as freedom fighters, while many other people condemned them as cowardly terrorists. Although most of the world labeled the 9/11 attacks as terrorism, some individuals applauded them as acts of heroism. These examples indicate that there is only a thin line, if any, between terrorism on the one hand and freedom fighting and heroism on the other hand. Just as beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, so is terrorism. The same type of action is either terrorism or freedom fighting, depending on who is characterizing the action.

Americans would overwhelmingly agree that the 9/11 attacks in 2001 were in fact terrorism. This event remains in the nation’s consciousness, and some readers may know someone who died on that terrible day. The attacks also spawned a vast national security network that now reaches into almost every aspect of American life. This network is so secretive, massive, and expensive that no one truly knows precisely how large it is or how much it costs (Priest & Arkin 2010). However, it is thought to include 1,200 government organizations, 1,900 private companies, and almost 900,000 people with security clearances (Applebaum 2011). The US spent an estimated $3 trillion the decade after 9/11 on the war on terrorism, including more than $1 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan whose relevance for terrorism has been sharply questioned. Strategies of how best to deal with terrorism continue to be debated, and there are few, if any, easy answers to these questions.

The 9/11 attacks spawned an immense national security network and prompted the expenditure of more than $3 trillion on the war against terrorism in the decade that followed.

Michael Foran – 9/11 WTC 32 – CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

However, foreign terrorism is not the only terrorist concern in the US. The FBI warned somewhat recently that domestic terrorism may be a greater threat to the nation than foreign terrorism. In a statement to the House Homeland Security Committee in 2019, Michael McGarrity, Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division at the FBI, stated: 

"We believe domestic terrorists pose a present and persistent threat of violence and economic harm to the United States; in fact, there have been more arrests and deaths caused by domestic terrorists than international terrorists in recent years. ... Individuals adhering to racially motivated violent extremism ideology have been responsible for the most lethal incidents, however, and the FBI assesses the threat of violence and lethality posed by racially motivated violent extremists will continue."

In particular, white nationalist extremist terrorism is the greatest concern. White nationalism is "a political and ideological movement advocating for the preservation of a white national majority within historically white nations" such as the US. Motivated by white supremacy, it centers on the belief that white people are superior to people of color, though it adds that white people are "deserving of national pride" (Caffrey 2023). The advent of the internet has resulted in the radicalization of individuals who come to align with this ideology (Caffrey 2023; McGarrity 2019). Radicalization refers to a "process through which an individual changes from a non-violent belief system to a belief system that includes the willingness to actively advocate, facilitate, or use violence as a method to effect societal or political change" (Department of Homeland Security 2022). Others are socialized into white nationalist ideology during childhood such as with Derek Black, heir to the KKK discussed earlier. 

The domestic terrorism threat is concerned with violent extremism associated with white nationalism. According to the Department of Homeland Security (2022), "Violent White Supremacist Extremists (WSE) are defined as individuals who seek, wholly or in part, through unlawful acts of force or violence, to support their belief in the intellectual and moral superiority of the white race over other races." These extremists often target racially and religiously marginalized groups, and solo (white) men are the typical offenders. Examples of violent WSE attacks include when Dylan Roof murdered nine people at a Black church in 2015, when Fraizer Glenn Miller murdered three people outside of Jewish centers in 2014, and when Wade Michael Page murdered six people at a Sikh temple in 2012. Firearms were the weapon in all of these examples, and shootings are the most common type of attack in recent WSE incidents (Department of Homeland Security 2022). 

  

Consequences of Conflict, War, and Terrorism

Some of the patterns of interaction in conflict are consequences themselves. For example, expulsion has the consequences of forced displacement and loss of one's home or homeland, and genocide has the consequences of the loss of culture and even of life. Thus, in this section we focus on other consequences, primarily of war and terrorism. We discuss casualties, which includes both injury and death. In some of this discussion we focus on death casualties specifically, whereas in others we may include those injured. We also discuss sexual assault as another horrendous consequence of conflict and war, as well as other consequences. 

Civilians

As discussed above, there have been hundreds of thousands of troop deaths in American wars. The nation rightly grieved these deaths when they occurred and built monuments, such as the Korean and Vietnam veterans memorials in Washington DC, that list the names of the dead. However, John Tirman, director of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has worried that Americans have neglected the civilian victims of war. He applauds the Korean and Vietnam memorials in Washington, but laments that “neither mentions the people of those countries who perished in the conflicts ... When it comes to our wars overseas, concern for the victims is limited to U.S. troops” (Tirman 2012).

Tirman notes that approximately 6 million civilians and soldiers died in the Korean, Vietnam/Indochina, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars. Most of these victims were civilians, and most of these civilian deaths were the result of actions by the US and its allies. These deaths stemmed from bombs and other weapons that went astray, from orders by military and political leaders to drop millions upon millions of bombs on civilian areas, and sometimes from atrocities committed by US personnel. In World War II, Tirman adds, the US dropped two atomic bombs that killed tens of thousands of civilians, and it joined its allies in the carpet bombing of German and Japanese cities that also killed hundreds of thousands.

The two atomic bombs dropped by the US over Japan during World War II killed tens of thousands of civilians. Scholar John Tirman worries that Americans have generally ignored the civilian victims of US wars.

“Victim of Atomic Bomb of Hiroshima,” Wikipedia

The carpet bombing, atomic bombing, and other actions in World War II that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians may have had strategic purposes, and the morality of these actions remains hotly debated today. But Tirman also notes that the Korean and Vietnam wars included many atrocities committed by American troops against civilians. To be blunt, American troops simply shot untold hundreds of Korean and Vietnamese civilians in cold blood.

Tirman describes one Korean incident in which machine gun fire from US warplanes killed about one hundred civilian refugees who were resting on a road. The remaining several hundred refugees hid and were shot at for three days by US ground soldiers. Tirman writes, “Surviving Koreans from the onslaught described in detail the chaotic panic they experienced; having believed the Americans were protecting them, they then saw the U.S. troops fire indiscriminately at men, women, and children at the scene” (2012: 107). At the end of the three days, about four hundred civilians lay dead.

Tirman explains that in Vietman, American troops and planes routinely razed villages to the ground, killing villagers indiscriminately, and then evacuated any survivors. Once they were evacuated, their villages were designated 'free fire zones,' and then often bombed indiscriminately once again, killing any villagers who managed to remain in these zones despite the evacuations. All these killings were outright slaughter.

In one example of what Tirman (2011: 153) calls a typical massacre, US soldiers arrived at a village that had just been bombed and ordered surviving residents to gather at the center of the town. After they did so, US ground troops shot them and left a pile of dead bodies that included 21 children. As this brief discussion indicates, although the massacre of 347 Vietnamese at the hamlet of My Lai is undoubtedly the Vietnam massacre that is best known (and perhaps the only known) to the American public, massacres were far from rare and in fact were somewhat common.

A central part of US military strategy in Vietnam involved destroying rice fields and the rest of the countryside to make it difficult for the Vietcong forces to engage in guerrilla warfare. To do so, it routinely deployed chemical weapons such as Agent Orange (dioxin, a known carcinogen), napalm, and white phosphorous. Planes sprayed and bombed these chemicals. These actions did destroy the countryside, but they also destroyed humans. The Children and Our Future box below discusses this issue in greater detail.

Children and Our Future

Napalm Sticks to Kids

The book "Napalm Sticks to Kids" has emphasized that children are often the innocent victims of various social problems from the time they are born, with important consequences for their futures. There are also many innocent victims in wartime, but when children are victims, our hearts especially go out to them. The Vietnam War marked a time when many Americans became concerned about children’s suffering during wartime. A key focus of their concern was the use of napalm.

Napalm is a very flammable jellylike substance made out of gasoline, soap, and white phosphorous. Napalm bombs were used in World War II to set fire to cities, military bunkers, and other targets. When napalm ends up on human skin, it causes incredibly severe pain and burns down to the bone, with death often resulting. Because napalm is very sticky, it is almost impossible to wipe off or remove with water once it does end up on skin.

Bombs containing napalm made by Dow Chemical were routinely used by the US military and its South Vietnamese allies during the Vietnam War to defoliate the countryside and to attack various targets. Some 400,000 tons of napalm were used altogether. When a napalm bomb explodes, it ignites an enormous fireball that burns everything in its path. Inevitably, Vietnamese civilians were in the path of the fireballs generated by the US and South Vietnamese militaries. An unknown number of civilians were burned severely or, if they were lucky, died. Many antiwar protests in the United States focused on the civilian suffering from napalm. Protesters at Dow Chemical’s New York office carried signs that said, “Napalm Burns Babies, Dow Makes Money.”

One of these civilians was a 9-year-old girl named Phan Thi Kim Phuc. An Associated Press photo of her running naked and screaming with burns after her village was napalmed was one of the most memorable photos of that war. Although she survived, it took seventeen surgeries to improve her condition.

A poem about napalm, reportedly written by members of the US First Air Cavalry, surfaced during the war. Some verses follow.

We shoot the sick, the young, the lame, We do our best to kill and maim, Because the kills all count the same, Napalm sticks to kids.

Ox cart rolling down the road, Peasants with a heavy load, They’re all V.C. when the bombs explode, Napalm sticks to kids.

A baby sucking on his mother’s t*t, Children cowering in a pit, Dow Chemical doesn’t give a s!#t, Napalm sticks to kids.

Blues out on a road recon, See some children with their mom, What the hell, let’s drop the bomb, Napalm sticks to kids.

Flying low across the trees, Pilots doing what they please, Dropping frags on refugees, Napalm sticks to kids.

They’re in good shape for the shape they’re in, But, God I wonder how they can win, With Napalm running down their skin, Napalm sticks to kids.

Drop some napalm on the barn, It won’t do too much harm, Just burn off a leg or arm, Napalm sticks to kids.

Sources: Ledbetter 2011; Vietnam Veterans Against the War 1971

Veterans

The attention given to civilians should in no way obscure or minimize the fact that veterans are also casualties of war. The Korean and Vietnam veterans’ memorials in the nation’s capital and so many other memorials across the nation remind us of the hundreds of thousands of brave soldiers who have died serving their country. But veterans are casualties in other ways. They may suffer terrible physical and mental wounds that can maim them for life (Dao 2012).

Veterans of the Vietnam War came back to a nation that often did not greet them as heroes. Many came back addicted to heroin and other drugs, many were unemployed, and many experienced houselessness. Many veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have also come back home with these problems. Their unemployment rate was 13.1% in late 2011, compared to only 8.5% for the general public, and the unemployment rate for veterans ages 20–24 was near 30% (Dewan 2011; Zornick 2012).

Many veterans experience posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), marked by nightmares, panic attacks, and other symptoms (Dao 2012). Veterans with PTSD may end up with marital or relationship strain and are more likely to commit violence against their spouses or partners. When these problems occur, they may worsen the psychological state of these veterans.

A related problem is suicide. One estimate found that for every 100,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who received health care from the Veterans Administration, 38 died by suicide. The suicide rate of the general population is only 11.3 deaths per 100,000 population. Thus, the suicide rate of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans was more than three times higher than that of the general public (Martinez & Bingham 2011).

Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan War have a higher suicide rate than that of the general public.

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Evidence from a national survey of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans underscored the problems they face (Pew Research Center 2011). Almost half of survey respondents said that their family relations were strained and that they often felt irritable or angry, 44% said that they had problems reentering civilian life; and 37% said that they suffered from PTSD.

One Iraq veteran with these problems is Tom Marcum, who came home with a brain injury, PTSD, and fits of violence and short-term memory loss. His wife April had to quit her teaching job to take care of him, and their life savings slowly dwindled. April missed the man she used to know: “The biggest loss is the loss of the man I married. His body’s here, but his mind is not here anymore. I see glimpses of him, but he’s not who he was” (Einhorn 2011). As the Marcums’ situation indicates, spouses and other family members of veterans also are victims of war. Indeed, the Marcums’ situation is far from rare among the families of the 2 million veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. As a news report summarized these families’ experience: 

“Ms. Marcum has joined a growing community of spouses, parents and partners who, confronted with damaged loved ones returning from war who can no longer do for themselves, drop most everything in their own lives to care for them. Jobs, hobbies, friends, even parental obligations to young children fall by the wayside. Families go through savings and older parents dip into retirement funds” (Einhorn 2011).

Families of deployed troops also face many difficulties. There is the natural fear that loved ones will never return from their overseas involvement in armed conflict. This fear can take a psychological toll on all members of these families, but perhaps especially on children. One teenager recalled the tensions that arose when his father was in Iraq: “I was in eighth grade when my dad deployed to Iraq. A kid walked up to me and said, ‘Your dad’s a baby killer.’ I didn’t handle that well. We both wound up suspended for that one” (Ashton 2011). A recent study found that adolescents with a deployed parent are more likely than those with civilian parents to feel depressed and suicidal. They are also more likely to engage in drug use and binge drinking. Reflecting on these findings, an author of the study said, “It’s really time to focus on the children that are left behind” (Ashton 2011).

After World War II, the GI Bill helped millions of veterans to go to college and otherwise readjust to civilian life, at least if they were white as people of color did not receive the same benefits. But many observers say that the US has neglected the veterans of later wars. Although education benefits and many other services for veterans exist, the nation needs to do much more to help veterans, these observers say (Baker 2012; Shusman 2012).

The high unemployment rate of the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans has made this need more urgent over the last couple decades. As one business writer put it, “Collectively, it is our patriotic responsibility to help our nation’s service[people] thrive in today’s economy” (Gerber 2012). Advocates for veterans with severe physical or cognitive problems also urge the government to greatly expand its very small program of monthly cash payments to these veterans’ families to help replace their lost incomes (Einhorn 2011).

Rape and Sexual Assault

Women soldiers and veterans face a special problem – sexual assault. At least one-fifth and perhaps as many as 84% of all military service women are raped, sexually assaulted, or sexually harassed by other military personnel (Turchik & Wilson 2010). In 2010, more than 19,000 US military personnel were raped or sexually assaulted, most of them women (Stalsburg 2011). Only about one-seventh of these survivors reported these incidents. Of reported cases, only one-fifth went to trial, and only half of the defendants were convicted. As these numbers make clear, military personnel who commit rape and sexual assault almost always avoid punishment.

Women veterans say that when they do report rape and sexual assault, military officials typically either blame them for what happened, ignore the crime altogether, or give the offender a very mild punishment such as not being allowed to leave a military base for a short period. When one woman who was raped by two soldiers in Iraq told her commander, he threatened her with a charge of adultery because she was married (Speier 2012).

Women veterans who experience rape or sexual assault often suffer PTSD. In fact, rape and sexual assault are the leading cause of PTSD among women veterans, while combat trauma is the leading cause of PTSD among men veterans. Women veterans who have these experiences also have higher rates of harmful drug use, unemployment, and houselessness. One veteran recalled being gang raped by her drill sergeant and four other soldiers, who then broke several bones in her body and urinated on her. Several years later, she was still having many health problems. She explained, “When I looked at the American flag, I used to see red, white, and blue. Now, all I see is blood” (Herdy & Moffeit 2004: 4).

In addition to psychological and physiological trauma, rape and sexual assault impose huge economic costs on the military because of medical expenses for helping survivors and for prosecuting their assaulters. Health care expenses for survivors amount to almost $1 billion annually, and the cost of prosecution amounts to $19 million annually (Stalsburg 2011).

Applying Social Research

Determining the Prevalence of Military Sexual Assault

As the text discusses, most military women who are raped or sexually assaulted do not report these crimes to military authorities. As a result, reported rapes and sexual assaults compose only a very small percentage of all military rapes and sexual assaults. To get a more accurate estimate of how many such crimes occur, sound social research is necessary.

Despite this need, research on sexual assault in the military was scant before the early 2000s. This type of research accelerated, however, after several scandals involving sexual assault and harassment occurred during the 1990s on military bases and at military academies. The primary mode of research involved survey questionnaires given anonymously to samples, many of them random, of military members. The samples are almost entirely of women, given their higher risk of being sexually assaulted.

In these surveys, between 10% and 33% of women report being raped (including attempts) while they were serving in the military. When sexual assaults and sexual harassment are added to the crimes mentioned to respondents, between 22% and 84% of women report being raped, sexually assaulted, and/or sexually harassed while serving. Very few studies include men in their surveys, but one study reported a 3% rate of sexual assault victimization for men while they were in the military.

One major problem in this research literature is that different studies use different definitions and measures of sexual assault. Regardless of these problems, this growing body of research documents how often rape and sexual assault in the military occur. It also documents the psychological and health effects of military sexual assault (MSA). These effects are similar to those for civilians, and include anxiety, depression, PTSD, poorer physical health, and poorer job performance (in this case, their military duties).

In shedding light on the prevalence of military rape and sexual assault and on the many negative effects of these crimes, social science research has performed an important service. Future research will no doubt build on existing studies to further illuminate this significant problem.

Source: Turchik & Wilson 2010

Other Consequences of War

When we think of the impact of war, the consequences for civilians and veterans as just discussed come most readily to mind. But not all civilians are affected equally. One of the many sad truisms of war is that its impact on a society is greatest when the war takes place within the society’s boundaries. For example, the Iraq war that began in 2003 involved two countries more than any others, the US and Iraq. Because it took place in Iraq, many more Iraqis than Americans died or were wounded, and the war certainly affected Iraqi society – its infrastructure, economy, natural resources, and so forth – far more than it affected American society. Most Americans continued to live their normal lives, whereas most Iraqis had to struggle to survive the many ravages of war.

As historians and political scientists have described, wars have a significant economic and political impact. Many examples of this impact exist, but one well-known example involves the defeat of Germany in World War I, which led to a worsening economy during the next decade that in turn helped fuel the rise of Hitler. War can also change a nation’s political structure, as when the winning nation (for interstate wars) or group (for intrastate wars) forces a new political system and leadership on the losing nation or group. Other political and economic changes brought by war are less obvious. World War I again provides an interesting example of such changes. Before the war, violent labor strikes were common in Britain and other European nations. When the war began, a sort of truce developed between management and labor, as workers wanted to appear patriotic by supporting the war effort and hoped that they would win important labor rights for doing so. Although the truce later dissolved and labor-management conflict resumed, labor eventually won some limited rights thanks partly to its support for the war. As a historian summarized this connection:

“By the end of the war, labor’s wartime mobilization and participation had increased its relative power within European societies. As a result, and despite the fact that endeavors to reward labor for its wartime cooperation were, in general, provisional, partial, and half-hearted, it was nonetheless the case that labor achieved some real gains” (Halperin 2004: 155).

Other types of less obvious social changes have also resulted from various wars. For example, the deaths of so many soldiers during the American Civil War left many wives and mothers without their family’s major breadwinner, as women at the time were typically relegated to the role of homemaker. Their poverty forced some of these women to turn to sex work, resulting in a rise in sex work after the war (Rafter 1990).

In a positive example, the involvement of Black Americans in the US armed forces during World War II helped begin the racial desegregation of the military. This change is widely credited with helping spur the hopes of southern Black Americans that racial desegregation would someday occur in their hometowns (McKeeby 2008).

Consequences of Terrorism

The major impact of terrorism is apparent from its definition, which emphasizes fear and intimidation. Anyone around for 9/11, especially those who happened to be in or near New York City, will always remember how terrified the populace was to hear of the attacks and the fears that remained with them for the days and weeks that followed.

Another significant impact of terrorism is the response to it. As mentioned earlier, the 9/11 attacks led the US to develop an immense national security network as well as the Patriot Act and other measures that some say threaten civil liberties, to start the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to spend more than $3 trillion in just one decade on homeland security and the war on terrorism. Airport security increased, and Americans grew accustomed to having to take off their shoes, display their liquids and gels in containers limited to three ounces, and stand in long security lines as they try to catch their planes.

Hardly anyone likes standing in the long airport security lines that are a result of the 9/11 attacks. Some experts say that certain airport security measures are an unneeded response to these attacks.

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People critical of these effects say that the 'terrorists won.' As one columnist wrote on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, “And yet, 10 years after 9/11, it’s clear that the ‘war on terror’ was far too narrow a prism through which to see the planet. And the price we paid to fight it was far too high” (Applebaum 2011). In this columnist’s perspective, the war on terror imposed huge domestic costs on the US. It also diverted US attention away from important issues regarding China, Latin America, and Africa, it aligned the US with authoritarian regimes in the Middle East even though their authoritarianism helps inspire Islamic terrorism, and it diverted attention away from the need to invest in the American infrastructure: Schools, roads, bridges, and medical and other research. In short, the columnist concluded:

“in making Islamic terrorism our central priority—at times our only priority—we ignored the economic, environmental and political concerns of the rest of the globe. Worse, we pushed aside our economic, environmental and political problems until they became too great to be ignored” (Applebaum 2011).

To critics like this one, the threat to Americans of terrorism is 'over-hyped' (Holland 2011b). They acknowledge the 9/11 tragedy and the real fears of Americans, but they also point out that in the years after 9/11, the number of Americans killed in car accidents, by air pollution, by homicide, or even by dog bites or lightning strikes has greatly exceeded the number of Americans killed by terrorism. They add that the threat is overhyped because defense industry lobbyists profit from overhyping it and because politicians do not wish to be seen as 'weak on terror.' And they also worry that the war on terror has been motivated by and also contributed to prejudice against Muslims (Kurzman 2011).

However, the threat of foreign terrorism may be inflated while the threat of domestic terrorism may not be as pronounced as it should be. If Americans envision terrorism as perpetrated by foreign actors, particularly in racialized ways (such as by imagining that people of Middle Eastern descent are the threat), they neglect what experts say is a threat today – white nationalist domestic terrorism – as discussed above. 

In this chapter, we've mentioned the costs of war and terrorism to the US government and its taxpayers. On the following page, we return to this consequence, focusing on the US military budget and a concept called militarism.