So is the Nobel Peace Prize winner gonna start another war?

Boygabriel said:

The idea that we have technologies that are accurate enough to significantly reduce dead civilians while technically may be true, just feeds the lie that most Americans believe: our exploits minimize civilian deaths.

It's like calling new coal standards "clean coal".

It's marginally cleaner, but it is by no means clean.

The US armed forces take tremendous steps to minimize civilian deaths, but [perhaps because most people do not understand that the death of civilians is unavoidable in modern combat] they will never get credit for doing so.

That's a large part of the reason people in the military won't listen to anyone who says they are predominantly immoral people who do not go about their jobs in a way that causes the least harm to civilians.

By painting the military as "pro-war", the general public often fails to understand that just because 1000s of civilians were killed in a given conflict, the doesn't mean that tens of thousands could not have been.

People who believe that civilian deaths are always avoidable, or whom believe that their occurrence is always the result of disregard or carelessness, rarely take the time to get the other side of the story.

They rarely have an understanding of the military ethics and culture that the leaders of our armed forces strive to maintain.

Other than that, you are correct. The general public would be best off if accepted that (like coal), war will never be clean. We can either accept that number of civilians killed in wars will far exceed the number of soldiers, or we can stop finding reasons that are "good enough" to have a war.

Until we are able to implement the latter, it is time to look for strategies and technologies that can mitigate the former.

P.S. After we use up the US natural gas supply in 50 years or so years, Coal looks like it is the way to go. People really dislike nuclear. Wind, switchgrass and solar don't appear particularly viable.

Boygabriel said:

The idea that we have technologies that are accurate enough to significantly reduce dead civilians while technically may be true, just feeds the lie that most Americans believe: our exploits minimize civilian deaths.

It's like calling new coal standards "clean coal".

It's marginally cleaner, but it is by no means clean.

The US armed forces take tremendous steps to minimize civilian deaths, but [perhaps because most people do not understand that the death of civilians is unavoidable in modern combat] they will never get credit for doing so.

That's a large part of the reason people in the military won't listen to anyone who says they are predominantly immoral people who do not go about their jobs in a way that causes the least harm to civilians.

By painting the military as "pro-war", the general public often fails to understand that just because 1000s of civilians were killed in a given conflict, the doesn't mean that tens of thousands could not have been.

People who believe that civilian deaths are always avoidable, or whom believe that their occurrence is always the result of disregard or carelessness, rarely take the time to get the other side of the story.

They rarely have an understanding of the military ethics and culture that the leaders of our armed forces strive to maintain.

Other than that, you are correct. The general public would be best off if accepted that (like coal), war will never be clean. We can either accept that number of civilians killed in wars will far exceed the number of soldiers, or we can stop finding reasons that are "good enough" to have a war.

Until we are able to implement the latter, it is time to look for strategies and technologies that can mitigate the former.

P.S. After we use up the US natural gas supply in 50 years or so years, Coal looks like it is the way to go. People really dislike nuclear. Wind, switchgrass and solar don't appear particularly viable.

Until we get rid of those politicians, most of the military and country is ok with drones.

According to the eloquent experts, "They suck, but they suck less than the alternatives"

Living in it involves constantly choosing between the lesser of two evils.

...I read recently that the armed forces will soon get thousands more drones.

The quote I learned was very succinct:

"Everyone tries to minimize civilian deaths, especially the civilians."