Civilian Casualties In War Have Grown Over Time

In the 20th century war underwent a revolution. It was technological mostly and the effect of this change was that increasingly in war it was civillians that ended up doing most of the dying whereas before it was mostly soldiers. It is estimated that during World War 1 the total number of civilians killed during the conflict represented about 10% of the total who died. By World War 2 just twenty years later the total of civilians killed was estimated to be about 50% of those who died in that conflict. During the Vietnam War 70% of the people killed in the war were civilians. In the current War In Iraq that total is now estimated to be about 90%.
The reason for this change as mentioned before is technological. In conflicts like World war 1 the fighting usually was between soldiers and soldiers alone for the most part. You had to get pretty close to your enemy and engage them in a much more personal manner than in the later conflicts although this even during World war 1 was beginning to change.
By the time World war 2 began to rage the enemies in the conflict had fully developed Air Forces which allowed for the ability to bomb entire parts of cities and wipe out civilian populations in just hours in some cases by the thousands. This ability and reality continued into the Vietnam War later in the century and now in the War in Iraq. As war progressed during the 20th century technology made it possible for an army to no longer need to "see the whites of their eyes" when it came to their enemies. You could simply launch missiles at them from hundreds of miles away and just "fire and forget" and in the process take a good many innocent civilians out of this life. The pentagon has a nice, clean, antiseptic phrase for it, "collateral damage." That phrase is usually double speak for "innocent dead civilians."