[TheAlchemist]

While I somewhat agree, you should also look at the results of those precision strikes. Usually, when they kill a senior Iranian officer sleeping in his appartment, they level the building or at lest blow up several adjacent units, probably killing at last 10 innocent people.

[jandrewrogers]

That's an inherent limitation of precision strikes. The objective is minimizing the collateral damage required to achieve the objective, not avoiding it entirely. Even the various explosive-free precision-guided munitions the US uses have a non-zero damage radius.

One can argue whether or not it is a good idea for the bombs to be flying around in the first place, but there is no version of physics that allows anyone to avoid collateral damage as a practical matter.

[breppp]

This one from the 12 day war did https://www.twz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Iran-scientis...

[TheAlchemist]

I know. I'm just saying that the way we talk about 'precision strikes' in the west, make one feel like only the target is eliminated, while in reality we usually blow half of the building the target was in, along with all the people. I would actually be interested by a poll on what people in the US think about how many innocent people are killed in a precision or elimination strike on average - I bet it would be something like less than 1.

[jiggawatts]

Which is not “carpet bombing”.

Use words and phrases correctly, or expect an argument.

[pcthrowaway]

I agree that targeted strikes which miss or take out adjacent areas is not carpet bombing.

However, the above commenter suggested the U.S. has phased out carpet bombing, and while I'm suspect of that, we know with certainty that Israel will happily "carpet bomb" an area if it can string together a few words justifying it.

Even if it's true that what they've done isn't technically carpet bombing in the sense that they may not just dropping bombs out of planes indiscriminately, the same effect can be achieved with nominally "targeted" strikes now, especially with many of these being conducted by automated "targeting" systems.

Seriously, it's unlikely in this age of advanced weaponry that we'd see carpet bombing like we did in Vietnam, when the U.S. and Israel are capable of creating the same effect, but with thousands of supposedly tactical strikes over the entirety of some densely populated area.