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Really? The US military kills lots of civilians in all prior wars, even up to the very end of the Afghan war they were accidentally hitting random people with suspicious tubes in their truck.
Suddenly they've developed incredible accuracy and precision, in the last couple of years? Under the watch of Hegseth 'slash and burn, oohrah, real manly warfare no legal bullshit', just as they cut the office who's supposed to be preventing this? And they can manage this precision in a country with much more sophisticated air defences than Afghanistan or post-invasion Iraq, where ISR drones can and are being shot down?
How can this be? AI? Israel makes great use of AI and they killed lots of civilians in Gaza in some combination of neglect and malice.
Killing civilians is part of the nature of war, that's the risk taken on when starting a war, just like how losing soldiers is inevitable.
It's not going to be just a single incident, come on. Weapons miss, intelligence is faulty, fog of war is fog of war.
The conditions and scrutiny of most recent US military campaigns would be totally insane by any historical metric. 'You must only hit confirmed military targets in a hostile populace who have every incentive to deliberately misreport the status of casualties and have a bunch of weapons that can be profoundly lethal out of nowhere plus you have an aggressive media operation actively jumping on any excuse' is not a proposition that could really exist in any prior period.
I didn't say 'you must only hit confirmed military targets'. I say that this innate risk must be taken into account, wars must not be whitewashed as squeaky-clean 'precision strikes' against just the buddies. There is no 'sci fi precision' killing just combatants, there is no 'literally every single casualty is military' outside a propaganda reel.
I don't think even Hegseth would disagree with me here, if he were being honest.
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It appears the Trump administration has completely surrendered the propaganda war. All the MSM including the Wall Street Journal is assuming the administration doesn't know what they're doing and the war is hopelessly lost, and that everyone at the DoD is murdering war criminals who killed an ever-increasing number of schoolchildren and nothing else while ignoring the Straits of Hormuz because no one even thought of it. Maybe they just figure there's no way to win that one so they're not bothering. Only way out for them is a decisive victory in the real war, and honestly, I can't see one -- there's no Iranian organization able to take advantage and revolt, so without troops on the ground, there's no way to take down the regime or even force them to the table for real.
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