Moral Courage

[kandrathe]

Hmmmm go back a bit further. In WW1 errant bombs killed thousands of soldiers.

The city where I live in now was bombed in WW2 (the allied forces thought it was a german city) etc.

I think the killing of innocent people by accident is getting less and less. The bombs they use now are often not much heavier than they used to be, most of the (smart) bomb is propulsion and electronics.

In that sense the allied troops (with modern armies) are contradicting themselves. First they say that with there modern weaponry there are less and less civilian victims, but we keep hearing about wrong bombings.

For outsiders it is very hard to find out the truth. Take the bombing of the chinese ambassy (kosovo wasn't it). What tells me it wasn't bombed on purpose?
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Accuracy has certainly improved, utilizing GPS, and laser designators, but so have the explosives (MOAB, and variations of compact high explosive) and means of delivery (eg. cluster munitions, hypobaric, thermal). Tactical intelligence in selecting and bringing in the aircraft is also better.

In WWI, Gotha bombers carried 12-14 fifty kilogram bombs, for an entire bomb load of about 1000 pounds.

From Jane's Fighting Aircraft of WWI;

In all, there were 57 airship raids(564 killed and 1,370 wounded), and 27 aircraft raids (835 killed and 1,990 wounded) on Great Britain in the First World War. A total of 9,000 bombs (280 tons)was dropped.

I'm thinking of the errant bomb that is mistakenly dropped in the wrong place. In WWI, and WWII losses from friendly fire were very common, and sometimes a tactic of warfare. Think of how the infantry used to follow in an artillery barrage, taking between 5% and 20% self inflicted casualties due to overrunning it, or shorts depending on the era and army.

I think our dilema today is multi-facted; we have come to expect very little collateral damage, we use much bigger ordinance and bunker busters (designed to take out a hardened missile silo, not a terrorist house in Falluja), we sometimes choose targets based on faulty, incomplete, or old intelligence, and when a mistake is made every news outlet in the world covers it on page one.