Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to Boiling oil was widely used by medieval troops in the Middle Ages

The point is historical and military accuracy...
Larry J — (archived)

a point that seems lost on you and Raoul.

Frank mentioned shotguns being illegal for military use. I showed that they were widely used in the Vietnam war and may well still be in our inventory.

Raoul and others called napalm a WMD. That simply is false according to the definition of WMD that is accepted in the international community. If the truth means anything, then striving for accuracy is important. If the truth wasn't important to me, I'd be a Democrat.

As for how we kill people in wartime, the military objective is to kill the enemy as effectively and efficiently as possible while reducing the number of non-combatant deaths to the lowest possible level. That means we do things like drop laser-guided concrete bombs in urban areas to take out targets like tanks with minimal risk to innocent bystanders. Think about that for a moment - we're putting a laser guidance unit on a streamlined piece of concrete at a cost of thousands of dollars each in order to reduce civilian casualties. Dropping a dumb bomb is much cheaper (a few hundred dollars each). This illustrates another point - we're willing to trade treasure to protect our own military personnel's lives. We use very expensive weapons to take out the enemy as fast as possible with minimal losses of our own.

Ending a war quickly is an effective tactic for reducing the inevitable suffering all wars cause. At the same time, there are things we simply won't do. We could've taken out every Iraqi population center and military objective in less than an hour had we been willing to use maximum (nuclear) force. Such drastic measures were never considered. Back in WWII, both sides targeted civilian population centers because they didn't have the accuracy to hit small targets. Millions of civilians were killed. This happened in Vietnam, too. No more.

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