Big bombs vs. little bombs is more than just a difference in quantity. There’s a quality difference as well. Little bombs need to be targeted or they’re useless-to-counterproductive. Big bombs, just hit the general area and run for cover. Huge bombs and there’s no such thing as targeting. You absolutely will hit unintended targets, and you just shrug and say oh well.
Now I’d agree with the criticism of our modern-day fascination with so-called smart bombs. Your bombs that drop down air ducts in a building and pop out over the targeted toilet. The problem with smart bombs isn’t the tech itself, which works well enough, so much as the application. It used to be nobody would use ordinance like that in a city environment, because it’s crazy to do that. You have to send in ground troops, there’s just no other way. But now to avoid casualties on our end, they throw “smart” ordinance into a totally inappropriate urban setting, civilians are killed, but we claim innocence because we used the “smart” pixie dust to justify a really bad decision that absolutely did not seek to minimize civilian casualties.
The morality of it all, assuming you’re okay with the morality of war in general, really all boils down to civilians. You absolutely never target them. You minimize collateral damage through careful targeting. And you minimize war in general by using other means to resolve conflicts. And sometimes that’s still not enough, and war happens, and civilians die. We’ve been doing pretty badly on all fronts for a while, but I guess there’s something particularly awful about not even pretending to try.
