Point. But then, the Brits taught us how to do this stuff.
By the thousands? No. And I agree, from my perspective as an American, we’re not intending to kill civilians at all. But that really doesn’t matter much in the long run. Given the paucity of observable results from the drone campaigns, it’s reasonable for the rest of the world to view any collateral damage as unjustified, from a strictly utilitarian point of view. And it’s not totally beyond the pale for people to make an at least potentially viable argument that the whole point of the drone campaign overall is, in fact, to terrorize and kill Muslims. Not an argument I agree with, but you can see, I think, how this becomes viable, when the USA refuses to acknowledge any real culpability, continues to deploy force with few observable results, and also continues to highlight every case of a Western death and downplays most cases of non-Western (and often, non-white) death.
Civilians are a valid target in Warden’s Five Rings, which is part of the strategic playbook of the US, so keep that in mind. The fact that the US hasn’t actively engaged in deliberately inflicting civilian casualties doesn’t mean it wouldn’t if it felt like it had to.
And I know it’s in the past, but the most devastating attack (with hundreds of thousands of casualties) against civilians in history was done by the US.
Eh, yes and no. You’re making some misinterpretations here.
In Warden’s theory, the 4th ring is indeed “population”, but this isn’t really with the goal of just killing civilians. Rather, the theory is based upon the idea that you can take out any of the fundamental structures of an enemy organization by taking out any of the rings inside of it. At the center, you have the leadership, then key materials/production, then infrastructure, then population, and then at the outside you have the military itself. The main idea is that fighting the military hardware straight up is generally the least effective way to disable it, and rather you should try to take out the internal systems which support the military.
While the population is obviously a supporting structure in Warden’s theory, saying that civilian populations are acceptable targets to the US military is objectively false. While this isn’t represented in Warden’s theory, that’s because Warder’s five rings is merely one part of the US military’s overall process.
The five rings are merely one theoretical school of thought which have influenced US military decisions for the past few decades. Warden’s theories are not by any stretch of the imagination a holistic view of US military decision making. Even when his theories have been heavily influential, such as the Iraq war, at no point did the US ever devolve to the point of intentionally attacking civilian populations.
I think that things have changed quite a bit since the total war scenario of WWII. At that point in time, the civilian populations themselves were pretty integral to the war efforts, and technology didn’t enable the same kind of precision that the US is currently able to employ. We no longer need to level an entire city to destroy its industrial production.
This was Spicer. It was walked back later. He clearly didn’t know what a barrel bomb was or that they are used every day. I didn’t either, but I’m not the mouthpiece for the WH.
Barrel bombs are pretty terrible… basically just a big ass barrel full of shrapnel, designed specifically to kill civilians when used as Syria’s using them. Personally, dying from getting blown up by a barrel bomb seems just as bad as dying from Sarin gas, so the distinction seems kind of absurd to me.
But ya, he clearly didn’t realize that Syria drops tons of barrel bombs every single day. I think they dropped like 13,000 of them in 2016.
You raise many good points, but “population” in the five rings is related to morale . And that ultimately means causing suffering to the general population so they act as a deterrent to war instead of support for it.
Let’s put it this way - you know how modern military doctrine dictates that hurting one enemy soldier is better than killing one, because when you hurt someone, you basically take two (or more) people out of combat? So yeah, the same works with the “population” thing in the rings. You want to cause suffering, not kill them outright (most of the time). But is that really all that better?
All those things are as old as war (just look at the “catapult the heads of beaten soldiers into the city in a siege so people will be disheartened and surrender” and other examples), and no nation is above those things because war is, at some level, the “suspension of civilization” (depending on how much it’s about survival). So don’t think for a minute that the US wouldn’t do such things - it just didn’t feel the need to, at least not in scale; and it’s never been a problem for the US to accept civilian casualties as “collateral damage”, at least not that I know of, which only hammers the point that such things could happen if something gets bad enough.
Times have changed though. Unrelated to traditional strategies, news is nearly instantaneous now. Social media and the capability for anyone with a smart device to become the equivalent of an embedded journalist mean than civilian casualties must be give a greater pause that in the past.
I do think leadership takes more pause of it now. It may not (yet?) be reflected in taught/book strategies. But the same could be said for traditional marketing/PR books. That doesn’t make what is happening to United Airlines any less important.
As pessimistic and angry I get, I don’t think that is true. It just isn’t. I think if you talked with a lot of people that have been in Iraq and Afghanistan that our ROE (Rules of Engagement) was heavily followed and in many cases very restrictive for the guys moving house to house. They would say it often got in the way of killing bad guys, but likely saved many many civilians.
I just don’t see it ever happening.
I don’t think destroying industrial production was the actual reason behind many of the more deadly aerial attacks of WW2.
Good. I hope you’re right.
Me too. I really do hope so.
Depends on the raid. Most US raids in Europe targeted factories and the like. Of course Dresden is infamous for a reason. And then there are the firebombings of Japan which killed more people than the nukes did several times over yet got a lot less press than Dresden.
But for the most part if you wanted to bomb a factory or train yard in WW2, you were going to blow up some houses and people. Now we can take out a power station fairly well with fairly minimal loss of civilian life in the area. Carpet bombing isn’t used on population centers anymore.
I think a lot of that stuff changed in the Vietnam era. Increased video and photograpic coverage of the war increased the public scrutiny of acceptable collateral in war. And that is a very good thing.
The US hit industrial targets, including transportation and petroleum facilities as well as manufacturing sites. The whole purpose of the Norden bombsite was, ostensibly, precision daylight bombing from high altitude, so that we could in fact hit specific targets. It, um, didn’t work too well in practice, but the intent was there for sure.
The RAF…that was different. Deliberate de-housing campaign, at night, against city centers. On purpose, to destroy morale and repay the Germans for the Blitz. Plain and simple terror bombing, no ifs, ands, or buts about it really.
In the grand scheme of things, the efficacy and morality of the combined bomber offensive remains something hotly debated.
It is a good point. Drone strikes for us American are basically background noise, reported on a paid attention to in about the same way as we react to the Dow losing or gaining a 100 points. However, I’m sure that isn’t true in Yemen, Pakistan, or Afghanistan. The fear that one of my guest is considered to be a Taliban, or ISIS leader and maybe a missile will wipe out the wedding party is probably real for those countries. I can understand how it would be terrifying.
Totally not hypocrites.
Watch the alt-right sources on this. The Infowars and Daily Stormer folks are using this as an anti-semitic angle to explain who is corrupting the pure intent of DT and how those evil Jews in the White House are destroying us. Because he promised to be America First and non-interventionist.
Well, all of us Evil Jews ™ get a handbook, straight from Jerusalem, written by the Elders, you know. It tells us how we can influence all sorts of people to fulfill our nefarious agenda. Quite handy.