Collateral damage

Collateral damage is a general term for unintentional deaths, injuries, or other damage inflicted incidentally on an unintended target. In military terminology, it is frequently used where non-combatants are unintentionally killed or wounded and/or non-combatant property damage results of an attack on a legitimate military target. The unintentional destruction of friendly targets is called friendly fire.

Critics of the term see it as a euphemism that dehumanizes non-combatants killed or injured during military operations, used to reduce the perception of culpability of military leadership in failing to prevent non-combatant casualties.

Etymology

The word "collateral" comes from medieval Latin collateralis, from col-, "together with" + lateralis (from latus, later-, "side" ) and is otherwise mainly used as a synonym for "parallel" or "additional" in certain expressions ("collateral veins" run parallel to each other and "collateral security" means additional security to the main obligation in a contract). The first known usage of the term "collateral damage" in this context occurred in a May 1961 article written by T. C. Schelling entitled "DISPERSAL, DETERRENCE, AND DAMAGE".

SE

Se, se, or SE may refer to:

Education

Electronics and computing

Geography

Call of Duty

Call of Duty is a first-person shooter video game franchise. The series began on Microsoft Windows, and later expanded to consoles and handhelds. Several spin-off games have been released. The earlier games in the series are set primarily in World War II, including Call of Duty, Call of Duty 2, and Call of Duty 3. Beginning with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which is set in modern times, the series has shifted focus away from World War II. Modern Warfare, released November 2007, was followed by World at War and Modern Warfare 2. Black Ops, released November 2010, takes place in the Cold War, while Modern Warfare 3, released November 2011, takes place in a near-future setting. Black Ops II, released November 2012, takes place mainly in the year 2025. Call of Duty: Ghosts was released in November 2013. In May 2014, Advanced Warfare was announced. On April 9, 2015, Treyarch announced Black Ops III.

The Call of Duty games are published and owned by Activision. While Infinity Ward is still a developer, Treyarch and Sledgehammer Games also develop several of the titles with the release of the studios' games alternating with each other. Some games have been developed by Gray Matter Interactive, Nokia, Exakt Entertainment, Spark Unlimited, Amaze Entertainment, n-Space, Aspyr, Rebellion Developments, Ideaworks Game Studio, and nStigate Games. The games use a variety of engines, including the id Tech 3, the Treyarch NGL, and the IW engine.

Gears of War

Gears of War is a video game franchise created by Epic Games, developed and managed by The Coalition, and owned and published by Microsoft Studios. The series focuses on the conflict between humanity, the subterranean reptilian hominids known as the Locust Horde, and their mutated counterparts, the Lambent. The franchise consists of four third-person shooter video games, which has also been supplemented by a comic book series and five novels.

The first installment, titled Gears of War, was released on November 7, 2006 for the Xbox 360. The game follows protagonist Marcus Fenix, a soldier in the Coalition of Ordered Governments tasked to lead a last-ditch effort to destroy the Locust Horde and save humanity. Two subsequent titles, Gears of War 2 (2008) and Gears of War 3 (2011), continued Fenix and humanity’s ongoing conflict with the Locust Horde and Lambent forces. In 2013, Epic Games and Microsoft released Gears of War: Judgment, a prequel to the series’ first title, which instead focuses on Damon Baird, one of Fenix's squad-mates. At E3 2015, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition was announced for Microsoft Windows.

Modern warfare

Modern warfare is warfare using the concepts, methods, and military technology that have come into use during and after World War II and the Korean War. The concepts and methods have assumed more complex forms of the 19th- and early-20th-century antecedents, largely due to the widespread use of highly advanced information technology, and combatants must modernize constantly to preserve their battle worthiness. Although total war was thought to be the form of international conflicts from the experience of the French Revolutionary Wars to World War II, the term no longer describes warfare in which a belligerent use all of its resources to destroy the enemy's organized ability to engage in war. The practice of total war which had been in use for over a century, as a form of war policy, has been changed dramatically with greater awareness of tactical, operational, and strategic battle information.

War in modern times has been the inclusion of civilians and civilian infrastructure as targets in destroying the enemy's ability to engage in war. The targeting of civilians developed from two distinct theories. The first theory was that if enough civilians were killed, factories could not function. The second theory was that if civilians were killed, the enemy would be so demoralized that it would have no ability to wage further war. However, UNICEF reports that civilian fatalities are down from 20 percent prior to 1900 AD to less than 5 percent of fatalities in the wars beginning in the 1990s.