100% agree.
I was just listening to Jocko Willink's podcast and the question of 'collateral damage' came up. Jocko was the Seal commander in charge of "task force Bruiser" during the Battle of Ramadi and his unit is the most decorated special forces unit in history. He was pretty matter of fact about it. Described the kinds of things that the US forces did to minimize civilian casualties - things that put themselves in tremendous danger. But at some point, with the enemy using innocent citizens as human shields, those casualties were unavoidable. His snipers had such control over some avenues, for instance, that the bad guys started using children as shields when they wanted to cross the street. Literally grab a child and hold him/her as a shield from the snipers. He still had them take the shots and sometimes kids got killed. It was tragic and the snipers paid the psychological price for it. (Chris Kyle was one of his guys).
But he contrasted the criticism of these casualties with WWII, where we firebombed entire cities in order to defeat the Nazi's. Or Viet Nam, where we napalmed entire stretches of jungle or entire villages on sketchy evidence that the enemy was there. GOP candidate rhetoric aside, we don't carpet bomb cities anymore because we have more precise ways to kill the bad guys. Do some innocent people die from drone strikes and smart bomb attacks and door-to-door 'take and hold' urban warface tactics? Sure. Is it anywhere near the 'collateral damage' that would have been caused a generation or two ago, where we might have just bombed the city to rubble? Not even in the same neighborhood. A generation or two from now, we may have smart bullets that never miss and precision drones and who knows what else that make the current military tactics may seem barbaric. But not today.
Context and perspective.
SABRMatt sez,
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You know...I just read a fantastic article on the history of the notion that Ty Cobb was some sort of inhuman animal/monster with deep racist views and such - the piece made the case that, actually, his whole family was full of avowed abolitionists who'd been run out of town more than once because they supported ending slavery and desegregation, that he, himself favored the inclusion of black ballplayers at the major league level, and that his contemporaries didn't despise him the way the press has us believe they did today. In fact, most of them had a deep respect for his aggressive style of play and there was no evidence that he ever tried to intentionally spike anyone. The whole story started when one crooked, drunkard writer fabricated it to sell books.
I wonder what his legacy would look like if he had twitter. I'm guessing, modern schoolchildren would compare him to Satan disfavorably.
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