[pclmulqdq]

Russian military doctrine favors collateral damage. I think part of the US's love of precision weapons comes from the fact that they media will go nuts if the US kills non-targets.

20 civilians dying in Iraq to a helicopter that thought their camera was a gun was a national embarrassment. For Russia, 100 civilians dying in a mass artillery bombardment is a normal workday.

[guappa]

USA doesn't kill many civilians because Obama defined that "if you die in a drone attack you weren't a civilian".

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/opinion/2012-05-29/ana...

[hnbad]

Specifically, the US considers anyone who is male and "of fighting age" not a civilian - and the "male" part is often optional.

This does somehow still result in a lower ratio of dead civilians than when applying the same definitions to Russia or Israel. This shouldn't be seen as a way to excuse the behavior of the US but rather as a way to recontextualize the actions of the latter two, whether you support or oppose their military operations.

[guappa]

I don't think it helps anyone to separate what israel does from what USA does. Everything that israel does is authorized and aided by the USA. It'd all stop the very second the USA told them to stop.

Related reading. https://chomsky.info/20210512/

[mcphage]

> It'd all stop the very second the USA told them to stop.

What makes you think that? And which “the USA”, since Netanyahu has been in discussions with both Biden’s administration, and Trump.

[guappa]

The fact that they'd have no weapons if not for USA?

[throwaway2037]

That's not true. They buy weapons from a variety of nations. Also, they have a large domestic military industry to produce them.

[sgc]

> For Russia, 100 civilians dying in a mass artillery bombardment is a normal workday.

More specifically, it is a success to them. They clearly use civilian casualty and the terror it brings as a tactic to dishearten their victims.

[jajko]

Last week I've seen russian military coming from 'official' TG channels boasting how they dropped grenades on civilians, Donetsk IIRC. Literally civilians driving in their cars or walking on pedestrian crossing with shopping bags, having grenades dropped on them, killing many including women. Sarajevo tactics all over again, just not serbs anymore (although both societies share a lot in common).

Also during beginning of the war there were videos of russian soldiers setting up machine gun posts next to bigger roads and literally gunning every single unsuspecting civilian car that came along... not much better behavior than hamas attack last year. Bucha, civilian mass graves with people having hands tied behind their back with wire and headshot found on territories won back from them.

Shows how depraved that society is that this doesn't even cause any upheaval, instead is something to boast about back home and to whole world. Now do a simple projection for next decades.

I know China is #1 topic for US right now, but China views US rather as a competitor. Russia views whole west and US specifically as existential threat to actively fight against (and it did in asymetric subversion warfare for past 2 decades). Not whole russian population, they don't give a fuck whether whole world burns as long as they can drink vodka into desperate oblivion, but all their rulers and that's all that matters there. Now how to tackle and survive that due to all the resources required from that land I don't know but future in that regard looks bleak.

[bluGill]

they use it to hearten the folks back home. Civillian deaths mostly make civillians want to support the war and so is not a good idea. In turn this is why the us doesn't

[bitkrieg]

What the US public opinion is and what the US government does are two different things. Americans are hilariously self-delusional in that regard. Just compare the civilian death tolls between the first two years of the invasion of Iraq and the first two years of the invasion of Ukraine.

For the last twenty years in the Middle East alone, the number of civilian deaths in which the US is either directly or indirectly involved is easily in the millions

[pclmulqdq]

Unless you're counting a lot of definitions of "indirect involvement" (eg including things Israel does on its own and any proxy wars the Saudis start), you're going to have a hard time counting to 1 million civilians with any authoritative sources. Most of the civilian deaths in the US's "war on terror" were to IEDs and other devices set up to kill Americans.

People who create studies suggesting those wars killed 5 million people include a lot of ludicrous definitions of "killed" to get numbers that big.

[rjurney]

When you topple a foreign government, destroy all the infrastructure for pointless "shock and awe" and then send the ethnic majority but recently oppressed armed forces home... you bear responsibility for the millions of extra deaths that follow when traumatic civil war rocks the nation. You are the exact example of the delusional American he means.

[pclmulqdq]

You are the exact kind of person to demonstrate why the US builds the best precision weapons in the world and doesn't kill civilians if at all possible. If you are going to blame every single death in a conflict, including indirect deaths (eg excess heart attacks) and deaths at the hands of the other party (IEDs laid by the other side), on the US, there's no reason to give you any more ammunition or make your argument seem rational.

[jychang]

> You are the exact kind of person to demonstrate why the US builds the best precision weapons in the world and doesn't kill civilians if at all possible.

Wait is that a good thing or a bad thing?

[pclmulqdq]

No value judgment, but he's a good demonstration of why the US does the thing he's accusing the US of not doing.

The US goes out of its way to minimize collateral damage because it gets accused of causing all collateral damage in the first place.

[guappa]

I mean, USA could stop doing wars everywhere in the world no?

It's not like iraq had tanks by the USA border, ready to roll in no?

It also didn't have any of the terrible weapons that USA claimed they had.

[pclmulqdq]

When you are the world police and you stop "doing wars everywhere," everywhere starts doing wars with you (usually through your weaker/looser allies). Hence Ukraine, Hong Kong, the Mexican cartels, Iran's proxy wars, and let's not forget 9/11.

In all cases, the US has demonstrated a level of weakness on the foreign stage, and terrible people have come to exploit that. Like it or not, those little wars in Iraq were the long arm of the Pax Americana, which is ending now, to the tune of the first land war in Europe in quite some time. And one of the bloodiest conflicts in recent history.

This is what happens when you are a world-spanning empire. An empire, by the way, that Europe, India, China, and the rest of the civilized world has benefitted massively from in the form of free security and safe transport of goods. When there is no dominant empire, the world gets messy.