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Originally Posted by OneToughHerring
Even if you're in favour of the war there is still the many questions of how the war is actually being fought. Now I'm sure a lot of people here in Subsim know a thing or two about warfare etc. and also understand that even in a war there should be an attempt being made to mitigate civilian losses, right?
There are many tactics the US military is using that are causing civilian casualties and the inaccurate drone bombings are just one of these tactics. Whenever the US causes civilian casualties there are people, usually Americans, saying that "it's just how war is".
Well that's not the case, troops from other countries are managing without killing civilians in Afghanistan, now how can this be? And it's not just a question of smaller area of responsibility, they just are not killing civilians. It's called being carefull and going after hearts & minds. The US is waging the war as if the Afghan civilians are the enemy. No wonder Karzai has been saying "US troops out" for a long time.
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The US does as much as possible to mitigate civilian deaths, period.
It's not US tactics that cause needless deaths, it's the enemy not following the rules of war, and operating out of uniform in areas mixed with civilians.
If the US wished to cause civilian deaths, there'd be MANY MANY more of them. We could in fact virtually wipe out all the civilians, but we
chose not to.
Setting unrealistic expectations—say, zero casualties—helps no one. We continually work to minimize the number. Another way to look at it is to imagine how many we could cause if we wished to kill civilians, then look at how many fewer we actually do. So if the number was 25,000 killed in 10 years, and we could have killed 25 million, then we're killing 1% of the number we could if we wished to.