From the Bret Stephens article
“Terms like “precision weapons” can foster the notion that it’s possible for modern militaries to hit only intended targets. But that’s a fantasy, especially against enemies like Hamas, whose method is to fight and hide among the innocent so that it may be rescued from destruction by the world’s concern for the innocent.”
and
“In World War II, Allied bombers killed an estimated 10,000 civilians in the Netherlands, 60,000 in France, 60,000 in Italy and hundreds of thousands of Germans. . . . We pursued an identical policy against Japan, where bombardment killed, according to some estimates, nearly one million civilians.
. . .
The bravery of the American bomber crews is celebrated in shows like Apple TV+’s “Masters of the Air.” Nations, especially democracies, often have second thoughts about the means they use to win existential wars. But they also tend to canonize leaders who, faced with the awful choice of evils that every war presents, nonetheless chose morally compromised victories over morally pure defeats.”
A victory over such belligerents as current Russia and Hamas, like the victory over the Nazis and the Japanese, makes the world a better place in the long run. Such victories come at a high cost for all concerned, but rewarding such belligerence by allowing it to continue is the immoral path.
The Germans and Japanese didn't have TikTok and the Allies were not fighting an insurgent force.
Civilians are going to die in wars. Especially wars like the one in Gaza. That can't be prevented. What can be done is to do all you can to limit civilian casualties, which precision munitions helps you do. A smart bomb will kill civilians, but it's going to get a lot closer to the intended target than a dumb bomb. A lot of the civilian casualties from daylight bombing in WW II happened because the US was using dumb bombs dropped from high altitudes by bombardiers who wanted to get rid of their bomb load and get the hell out of the flak zone over the target.
There was a phenomenon known as walk back. The first bomber might drop their load near the intended target, say a factory, then the next bomber would drop a little bit before the first and so on all the way back until the tail end bombers were dropping their load thousands of yards short of the target. In the age of jets dropping dumb bombs got even less accurate because instead of dropping the bombs from a plane flying 150 mph, they are being dropped at 600 mph. At the increased speed a variation of a few ms on toggling the bomb switch makes a big difference on where the bomb lands.
I haven't seen Masters of the Air (it's on the list to see one of these days), but I probably know more about WW II military history than any other time period.
Fighting a state military is different from fighting an insurgent force. It's something most military historians understand, but few others do. The US lost Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan because it was fighting an insurgent army and didn't understand how to win that kind of war. It still doesn't. An inside military fighting an insurgency by militants within their own country such as El Salvador or Nicaragua has some chance of winning. At the end of the day the government forces are the legitimate government of the country and the rebels are rebelling against the state. There are going to be a fair number of civilians who side with the government.
An outside force trying to put down an insurgency in territory that is not seen as theirs is vastly tougher. They are the invaders and the people of the territory are more sympathetic to the insurgents because the insurgents are their people. This day in age, an insurgency against an outside force almost always has some sort of state sponsor keeping the insurgents in the fight. The state forces are playing whack a mole. The state forces can win any stand up fight, but the insurgents conduct hit and run warfare. They blow something up, shoot a few people with a sniper, or something else similar, and then disappear into the native population.
The state forces get twitchy because they never know who is just a civilian and who is an insurgent masquerading as a civilian. An attack could happen anytime, anywhere.
I know someone who was a non-combatant in the USAF in Vietnam. He got three purple hearts in one month. He was installing radar installations on outlying islands and the first two came from guerilla attacks at night. The third happened in the middle of the day on the large US air base near Saigon. He was minding his own business and got shot in the jaw by a sniper with a long range rifle.
Israel is not going to get rid of Hamas. They have or will kill most of this generation of Hamas fighters, but the war has recruited many more who will be ready to go in a couple of years. Israel thinks of these sorts of operations as mowing the lawn, but they are inadvertently fertilizing while mowing. That's their biggest error.
