when precision bombing meant wiping out several city blocks in order to (hopefully) hit a factory somewhere in the area. The British had it even worse - they had to drop daylight bombing early in the war following high casualties. When they switched to night bombardment, they deliberately targeted population centers because that was the only thing they had a chance of hitting. For the first couple years of the war, only about 20% of the bombs landed within 5 _MILES_ of their intended target.

The British attitude was summed up by a couple attitudes. First, the public wanted to "Hit'em back" for the Blitz. Air Marshall "Bomber" Harris, head of Bomber Command, put it this way, "It takes 3 years to build a factory and 20 years to grow a factory worker."

Lest this come across as British bashing, nothing could be further from the truth. We used "daylight precision bombardment" when we could. Starting in 1944, we often used radar guided bombardment that wasn't much more accurate than what the British were doing. We participated in the wholescale bombardment of Hamburg and Dresden where tens of thousands of civilians were killed a matter of a few days. In 1945, we switched to area fire bombing against Japan where the intention was to kill as many people - civilian or not - as possible. There's also the issue of Hiroshima and Nagasaki where civilian deaths vastly outnumbered military deaths. No, definitely no British bashing from me. I've very grateful they're our Allies.

Like I said, contrast what we did in WWII with the current bombing campaign. There really is no comparison. Precision today is so much better than what was possible back them. A single F-15E can hit a target with greater chances of success than squadrons of B-17s, B-24s, or B-29s could do back them. Back then, we were doing good to hit a city block. Today, the question is "which window"?