>>>We can't dismiss mistakes in war as simply a cost of doing business.
When you are putting fallible human beings into the most stressful and demanding situations imaginable, it's unreasonable to NOT factor in a baseline level of human error.
>>>I feel like a lot of these mistakes are avoidable with better procedures, training,
What specific procedures would you like to adjust? Escalation of Force? Rules of Engagement? The entire Joint fires killchain?
>>>I'm not expecting a war to go perfectly but is tens of thousands of accidental civilian killings the best we can do?
Against adversaries that actively use the civilian population as human shields, or who pretend to be civilians themselves to exploit our ROE? Yeah, that's a decently low casualty rate for TWO DECADES of dropping bombs on a country, across countless thousands of aircraft sorties.
> it's unreasonable to NOT factor in a baseline level of human error.
I'm not saying human error doesn't exist, but that the amount we tolerate is too high.
> Yeah, that's a decently low casualty rate for TWO DECADES of dropping bombs on a country, across countless thousands of aircraft sorties.
It's easy to reduce that casualty rate: stop dropping bombs on a country for two decades. My point is that the cost of a civilian death is too low. If we considered the moral cost and not just the strategic cost, our calculations would conclude that we can't afford to start this war. The dubious moral reasons for doing it are not outweighed by the moral harm that would result.
I get that you're addressing the technical aspects of collateral damage in a war, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In a justified war, we can tolerate civilian deaths as a necessary evil, but if the war is not just, then aren't all such deaths an unnecessary evil?
When you are putting fallible human beings into the most stressful and demanding situations imaginable, it's unreasonable to NOT factor in a baseline level of human error.
>>>I feel like a lot of these mistakes are avoidable with better procedures, training,
What specific procedures would you like to adjust? Escalation of Force? Rules of Engagement? The entire Joint fires killchain?
https://warontherocks.com/2017/05/its-about-time-the-pressin...
>>>I'm not expecting a war to go perfectly but is tens of thousands of accidental civilian killings the best we can do?
Against adversaries that actively use the civilian population as human shields, or who pretend to be civilians themselves to exploit our ROE? Yeah, that's a decently low casualty rate for TWO DECADES of dropping bombs on a country, across countless thousands of aircraft sorties.
It's still led to some technical solutions to the problem of collateral damage, which is why we have the Small Diameter Bomb family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-39_Small_Diameter_Bomb
and also the R9X variant of the Hellfire missile: https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/ag...