Compared to dumping white phosphorus over hospitals and refugee camps, killing 2 (?) children during an attack that targeted hundreds/thousands is many orders of magnitude more precise. I hate dead innocents as much as anyone, but you gotta admit the pagers were effective and included way less collateral damage than the methods Isreal has employed in recent history.
The point of the post isn’t to praise the pagers attack. It’s to point out that Isreal is capable of causing less collateral damage in Gaza but chooses not to.
If my goal was to kill exclusively enemy combatants and leave all civilians alone, it would be pretty effective to round them up and gas them, yes. I’d rather do that than indiscriminate fire.
Combatants tend to violently fight back, when you try to round them up. They also tend to hide among civilians in case of terrorist militia like Hezbollah.
It’s to point out that Isreal is capable of causing less collateral damage in Gaza but chooses not to.
That comes down to how often Hamas orders things that can reasonably have small bombs put inside them on a large scale and that Hamas are expected to have on their person’s most of the time, how secure their supply lines are, how paranoid they are about looking for that kind of thing, that sort of thing. It involves a lot more moving parts and rare opportunities than just dropping some bombs.
It’s an Obama type technique. Sure, you might blow up a few innocents, but the rate of eliminated enemies vs killed innocents is better than in traditional warfare, so a numbers guy would always go for that one.
Leaked official documents show that that wasn’t really the case as the public was led to believe
Quotes
The White House and Pentagon boast that the targeted killing program is precise and that civilian deaths are minimal. However, documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.
The documents show that the military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA — “enemy killed in action” — even if they were not the intended targets of the strike. Unless evidence posthumously emerged to prove the males killed were not terrorists or “unlawful enemy combatants,” EKIA remained their designation, according to the source. That process, he said, “is insane. But we’ve made ourselves comfortable with that. The intelligence community, JSOC, the CIA, and everybody that helps support and prop up these programs, they’re comfortable with that idea.”
The source described official U.S. government statements minimizing the number of civilian casualties inflicted by drone strikes as “exaggerating at best, if not outright lies.”
Well they’re still blowing up kids with these things so idk if it’s the most brilliant targeting technique
Compared to dumping white phosphorus over hospitals and refugee camps, killing 2 (?) children during an attack that targeted hundreds/thousands is many orders of magnitude more precise. I hate dead innocents as much as anyone, but you gotta admit the pagers were effective and included way less collateral damage than the methods Isreal has employed in recent history.
The point of the post isn’t to praise the pagers attack. It’s to point out that Isreal is capable of causing less collateral damage in Gaza but chooses not to.
Fucking weird comment.
Yeah. No I don’t.
Do you admit that mass gas chambers are an effective way to kill people ?
So much nuance, wow
Yes. A very large part of what made the holocaust so terrible was that it was very effective at killing people.
If my goal was to kill exclusively enemy combatants and leave all civilians alone, it would be pretty effective to round them up and gas them, yes. I’d rather do that than indiscriminate fire.
Combatants tend to violently fight back, when you try to round them up. They also tend to hide among civilians in case of terrorist militia like Hezbollah.
…are you implying that mass gas chambers aren’t an effective way to kill people?
so is climate change???
That comes down to how often Hamas orders things that can reasonably have small bombs put inside them on a large scale and that Hamas are expected to have on their person’s most of the time, how secure their supply lines are, how paranoid they are about looking for that kind of thing, that sort of thing. It involves a lot more moving parts and rare opportunities than just dropping some bombs.
you do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to them”
It’s an Obama type technique. Sure, you might blow up a few innocents, but the rate of eliminated enemies vs killed innocents is better than in traditional warfare, so a numbers guy would always go for that one.
Leaked official documents show that that wasn’t really the case as the public was led to believe
Quotes
Its accepting Israeli propaganda to say that this was a precision strike. This is like using cluster munitions.
Whenever Israel comes up with an idea for an assassination they do it because they can. Its a force of habit for them.
When your goal is genocide, a kill is a kill