Replies

Here's where we part company: we have watched the videos - very large bombs were used to nail Hamas sites and the other large explosive charges were used to attack hardened facilities. These are the techniques one uses to reduce enemy facilities and fighters at least cost to your own troops. It's a valid tactic but the equation is use a massively larger force to reduce the numbers of infantry losses in exchange for a large number of innocent bystander losses.

Gaza is a very tightly compressed area with very few places to go to escape. I lived there for about two weeks and even then, it was denser with bodies than anyplace I 've ever been to.

The other point is that the Israelis, while I understand their anger and thirst for revenge from the October 7th atrocities, have always considered brutal, indiscriminate force appropriate to the Gazans, all Gazans when their blood is up.

Some West Point swell can say "how wonderfully low" the casualties are among the ordinary people but the videos of those massive explosions - and the lack of food, shelter, and medicines for the civilians are indicators of excessive callousness.

I've done this stuff for a living my whole career, so it may be worthwhile to listen to a nice, humble battalion commander who never went to West Point.

[The other point is that the Israelis, while I understand their anger and thirst for revenge from the October 7th atrocities, have always considered brutal, indiscriminate force appropriate to the Gazans, all Gazans when their blood is up.]

The difficulty for Israel is that, relative to its small population, it has already suffered Vietnam-scale losses on top of literally decades of Palestinian terror attacks that cumulatively amount to additional Vietnam-scale losses. For Israelis, they haven’t suffered the impact of what, in the US context, is 1,500 dead. What they’ve suffered, given that the US population is ~40x Israel’s, is the equivalent of 58,000 US dead in Vietnam.

At this body count in the Pacific, the US was burning Japanese cities to the ground, with Operation Meetinghouse razing a section of Tokyo and killing 100K residents in a single 24-hour period. For Israelis, the trauma is real and cumulative over decades.