Collateral Damage

Often attributed to economist Thomas Schelling, who used the phrase in his 1961 article "Dispersal, Deterrence, and Damage" in Operations Research to describe civilian destruction resulting from strikes on nearby military targets. The term entered widespread military usage during the Vietnam War and became entrenched in U.S. armed forces jargon over subsequent decades. By the 1990s, it had become controversial as a euphemism; in 1999, a German jury of linguistic scholars named it the "Un-Word of the Year" for its use by NATO forces during the Kosovo War.