I think an interview with a Palestinian summed it up. “We paid too high a price and can’t stop until we’ve gained something from it.”
It’s like a textbook example, in the political rather than economic sense.
Well, sometimes they just knock politely.
(Also: hummus, not humus. One yummy and good for people, the other yummy and good for plants.)
Israel has been accused of using flechette shells in Gaza. These use an airburst to spread a shower of small darts over a broad area. Even with accurate shelling and bombing I believe insufficient consideration is being given to the kill radius of stuff that blows up. GPS-assisted shells, bombs, and missiles can be wicked accurate, but a kill radius ranging from 30 meters for a 82mm mortar round to 60 meters for a 500lb bomb. A lot of unintended consequences can happen in that sort of area.
I would like a further explanation of that, it being the question asked in the title. 
But it seems a common diversion used by US spokesmen talking about similar situations in Afghanistan.
I know that strategic bombing in WWII was woefully inaccurate, but did they need to firebomb an entire city to get that one plant?
There’s a reason many textbooks call it the sunk cost fallacy
As I understand it, that was caused by the immense fire. Bombing from high altitude was very inaccurate, and the huge fire created in the large area near the factory engulfed the city.
My favorite composer, Richard Wagner, wrote an opera entitled, “The Mastersingers of Nurnberg.”
That doesn’t make it better when the US does it, either.
Was this a mispost, or am I missing a ton of context?
Note what that quote was responding to. Callous military commanders can be found anywhere.
I’m feeling charitable tonight, so I’m going with mispost.
The city center–think Manhattan or London’s City–was the target. The factories in the suburbs were not. A good place to bomb if you want to mess up railroad traffic, but it’s not where the larger factories were.
The Israelis do have bombs that employ dense inert metal explosive, which as I understand can be dropped anywhere without causing damage to nearby buildings. Flesh, on the other hand, is shredded and limbs are taken off at the joints. This would still kill civilians but would not cause damage to infrastructure, so no more children getting killed when a tank shell hits their school. However, since the tungsten micro-shrapnel causes inoperable wounds, it isn’t much better for civilians than the tank and howitzer shells showering Gaza right now.
I think Israel would be a logical country to develop super-surgical precision strike capabilities.
I’m just waiting for the Israelis to realise that the civilian / military distinction is no longer relevant.
What we have here are two populations in conflict and they will remain in conflict until one side is pretty much gone.
The target in Dresden was the rail marshalling yards, you’re probably thinking of the Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission. Either way though the bombing of Dresden is in no way “widely acknowledged (with the lens of history) to be a war crime because it targeted civilians.” The rail yards were a legitimate military target, flat out targeting of enemy civilians for bombing was accepted military practice by both sides under total war theory at the time, and the scale of the casualties was deliberately grossly inflated by the Nazis:
Apropos of nothing really, but the movie Memphis Belle was on cable a month or two back. I couldn’t help but get a morbid chuckle as the Memphis Belle aborts the bombing run because they couldn’t get a clear view of the target, an aircraft assembly plant, and there is a hospital or school (I forget which) located near the target so they circle around for another bombing run. Needless to say, the movie was only very loosely based either on fact of the actual Memphis Belle or reality. It may as well have been a WWII homefront propaganda film on the accuracy of precision bombing with the Norden bombsight, which was in actual fact anything but precise.
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These would be tank rounds rather than artillery rounds as I referred to. However with either one, it’s certainly possible to aim precisely and still kill civilians.
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True, this is another besides the several reasons I gave, still not an exhaustive list, why guided weapons could, and obviously do, still cause civilian casualties. In the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and drone strikes, the US as employed smaller and smaller guided weapons (like Griffin for example rather than Hellfire) to try to counter this. Also there are versions of the standard bombs with simply less explosive filler (and the rest inert material). Also versions of bombs with composite casing to not generate fragmentation effect like a steel casing, just blast effect which has a smaller danger zone. But these reduced collateral damage weapons aren’t used in all cases, and even when they are, by no means guarantee the safety of civilians. This would seem pretty obvious: if you drop bombs and fire HE shells it’s extremely dangerous to be in the vicinity of the targets and in warfare situations where civilians are in these areas along with combatants, some will die. Nothing can fundamentally change that, only ameliorate it to one degree or another.
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Further explanation of ‘dumb bomb, smart airplane’. The avionics systems of modern attack a/c from circa 1970’s (the A-7E was the first example in the West, the Israel only A-4N version of the A-4 had a similar outfit) could achieve circular error probable (CEP, circle within which 1/2 the bombs fall) with dumb bombs in dive bombing attacks of only a few 10’s of meters (compared to perhaps 10 or less for geolocation weapons and a few m for laser guided weapons). This wasn’t a historic first, since much slower WWII dive bombers in expert hands could achieve similar CEP. But it was a big improvement over previous jet CEP’s of up to a few 100m and didn’t only apply to the few most capable pilots. Still as of the 1991 war in Kuwait/Iraq such systems with dumb bombs (eg by the large F-16 portion of the US force, A-7’s were also still around, etc) were extensively used alongside laser guided bombs. But that was also before GPS/INS guided bombs. Since then dumb bomb use in advanced AF’s has declined to little. Given how much it costs, all in (plane, pilot, fuel everything) to mount a modern strike sortie, the cost difference between a dumb bomb and a GPS bomb is pretty negligible.
It is never acceptable to target a school or hospital in war. It is always acceptable (provided the underlying war is justified) to target a weapons emplacement. If the weapons emplacement is so close to a school or hospital that it is impossible for the enemy to attack the weapons emplacement without collateral damage to the school or hospital, then that is the fault of whoever placed the weapons.
Hey, Harry Dresden is EXTREMELY concerned with avoiding civilian casualties.
It’s a cannon either way. Tanks are mobile artillery pieces to any but the pickiest nit picker. The rest of your post was interesting and informative.
My first thought was that it was a comment on something in the novels. 
I agree with the points Malthus is making in this thread. In the context of Dresden, the Allies had an obvious jus ad bellum against Germany. In fact for some of the Allies (like the United States), Germany actually had declared war first, and thus the United States had little choice as to whether it was going to be in a war against Germany or not.
But the firebombing of Dresden is a separate question from that, and I do believe the specifics of the Dresden firebombing were unjustified morally, and violated appropriate conduct of war in terms of the legal considerations of what’s valid war conduct vs illegal war conduct. (I’ll just note, I don’t believe in war crimes or international law as concepts, but I can discuss them for the purposes of this and similar threads.) Dresden was firebombed intentionally to terrorize the German population, and was primarily chosen because it had been relatively unscathed and thus was seen as a good target for such activity. You can argue that Germany had done the exact same thing during the Battle of Britain, but Germany breaking the laws of war doesn’t mean it’s okay for the Allies to do the same thing.
The firebombing of Dresden was unjustified conduct thus for a few reasons:
- Advanced limited / no valid military aims
- Was primarily conducted in order to terrorize and kill civilians (civilian terror / casualties were the primary goal)
- Was conducted indiscriminately, with no regard for who would be targeted
I would actually argue the firebombing of Dresden is clearly a violation of understood laws of war, whereas you can have a more rigorous debate about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. While civilians were with certainty going to die en masse from the attack, at least part of the calculation there was indeed general preservation of life. Not just American soldiers (that was the primary, but valid, goal), but Japanese civilians and infrastructure.
Israeli strikes on hospitals being used as launch pads for rockets is to me dissimilar from Dresden in terms of a jus in bello question, because the Israeli strikes have a primarily military goal, and primarily a military target. If the only legal military action is one that not only targets valid military targets, but which you must be certain cannot kill civilians, then no war can be legal. Maybe a nice idea but since wars will always happen, for “laws of war” to have any meaning at all such a regime doesn’t work.
I think instead if the strikes meet a few criteria such as:
- Efforts are taken so that the military objectives can be achieved while minimizing civilian casualties
- The primary target is military in nature
Then whether or not Hamas has human shields or is using civilian buildings as military launch facilities is irrelevant as to whether or not the Israeli action is appropriate. I don’t know enough about each bombing the IDF has carried out to know how many fit these guidelines. If they’re using fragmentation weapons in civilian areas, it would probably violate the concept of taking efforts to minimize civilian casualties. But the fact that they do issue warnings is evidence they’re taking some efforts to minimize civilian casualties. To me a smart-bomb going after a rocket launch site that happens to be a hospital, as long as the bomb isn’t say, over-powerful and thus going to be a needless risk to surrounding civilians, is fine.
I do think the scale of the casualties has been exaggerated by some. But I’m not really a believer in the 1953 USAF Report, which I think can be called a “white wash.” Yes, there were valid military targets in Dresden, identified in a report prepared 8 years after the fact and whose creation was intended solely to justify the attack. But almost none of these targets were actually targeted in the bombing, many of them were actually well outside of Dresden proper. It’s questionable how using incendiary bombs on civilian neighborhoods, which would be certain to cause a conflagration, has much to do with military and infrastructural targets many miles away, many of which were not/never targeted by the bombing at all.