Children at War

Children at war / P. W. Singer.—New York : Pantheon Books, c2005.
xii, 269 p. ; 24 cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index
ISBN: 0375423494

1. Child soldiers – History – 20th century. 2. Child soldiers – History – 21st century.

355.0083

Singer gives a sobering social and political analysis on the increased use of seven to seventeen year-olds to fight the civil wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It includes over thirty pages of endnotes and includes the words of former child soldiers who fought in Columbia, Lebanon, Liberia, Kashmir, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, and Sudan. It begins with a quote from a seven-year-old: “The rebels told me to join them, but I said no. Then they killed my smaller brother. I changed my mind.”

Why did the “recruitment and employment of child solders…one of the most flagrant violations of the norms of international human rights [and] contrary to the general practices of the last four millennia of warfare” suddenly become so prevalent? Singer cites three main causes. The first is poverty. The booming global economy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries left many people behind. “Indeed, three billion people, roughly half the world’s population, currently [2005] subsists on $2 or less a day.” He then goes on to translate this poverty into its results:, illiteracy, inadequate housing or the complete lack of housing, lack of access to safe drinking water, malnutrition, disease, and civil war.

The second is the technological advance in small arms: automatic rifles, land mines, and rocket-propelled grenades, are now light enough and simple enough to use and maintain that even a child can do it. “The ubiquitous and Russian-designed Kalashnikov AK-47, which weighs 10 ½ pounds, is a prime example. Having only nine moving parts, it is brutally simple. Interviews reveal that it generally takes children around thirty minutes to learn how to use one. The weapon is also designed to be exceptionally hardy. It requires little maintenance and can even be buried in dirt for storage…Thus, a handful of children now can have the equivalent firepower of an entire regiment of Napoleonic infantry.”

With the end of the Cold War a number of weak government began to totter as the funding they had been receiving from the superpowers disappeared. This made them more vulnerable to attacks by rebels. However, the rebels could no longer count on support from superpowers either, and so they turned to crime to generate income. Drug trafficking, kidnapping and protection rackets proliferated, and as they did so, ideological concerns began to disappear and war become “an alternate system of profit and power.” War becomes not a means to an end, but an end itself. “Highly personalized or purely predatory armed groups, such as warlords, which are focused on asset seizure, are particularly dependant on this new doctrine of using children.”

Most child soldiers come from the poorest part of the population. About a third of them are abducted by armed bands, the other two-thirds join to avoid starvation, occasionally encouraged by their parents because they are unable to care for them. “A good portion of girl soldiers who join as ‘volunteers’ cite domestic abuse or exploitation.” Many join to revenge the death of family member usually one or both parents. Once enlisted they are then indoctrinated. Their “training typically uses fear, brutality, and psychological manipulation to achieve high levels of obedience.” Abducted recruits are often forced, “to take part in the ritualized killing of others very soon after their abduction. The victims may be POWs for the other side, other children who were abducted for the sole purpose of being killed in front of the recruits, or, most heinous of all, the children’s own neighbors or even parents. The killings are often carried out in a public manner, such that the home community knows that the child has killed, with the intent of closing off any return.”

Having broken down the child down physically, and psychologically, he or she is then filled with basic infantry tactics. Some are given more specific duties as spies, or couriers, or suicide bombers. Girls are often assigned to be “wives” of adult officers. Generally all are sent out to attack civilian targets that are poorly defended. Typical orders are to kill everyone in a village and then burn it to the ground. Singer quotes a UNICEF worker who said, “Boys will do things that grown men can’t stomach. Kids make more brutal fighters because they haven’t developed a sense of judgment.” They are also assigned to be shields for their commanders or cannon fodder in what are termed human wave attacks. “The tactic is designed to overpower or wear down a well-fortified opposition through sheer weight of numbers. The very value of children is that they are extra targets for the enemy to deal with and expend ammunition upon.”

Singer concludes his book with recommendation on how to prevent children from becoming soldiers and how former child soldiers can be rehabilitated. He also warns that training for American soldiers must include how to fight them. “The hard reality is that our soldiers must be trained and prepared for what to do in the certain eventualities in which they will come face-to-face with child soldiers.”