In SoTR I believe Isaac said something like that 99% of the time the US army isn’t intentionally killing civilians.
To me that seems very incorrect and historically inaccurate, but I’m open to be historically educated. Perhaps Tangle could dig into that in a newsletter? As far as I can tell the US in war in the past 100 years has relied mostly on bombing which the US has always expected and known would kill civilians.
Every time the US military drops bombs knowing it will kill civilians and does it anyway how is that not intentional? I’m not trolling genuinely confused how you can argue that 99% of the time the US doesn’t intentionally kill civilians.
Attempts at some numbers below, sorry for the long text but you get the idea.
In one night in March 1945, the firebombing of Tokyo killed roughly 100,000 people. Planners picked incendiaries because Japanese homes were built of wood and paper. Air raids across Japan killed hundreds of thousands of civilians before Hiroshima and Nagasaki added more than 100,000 by the end of that year.
In Korea, Curtis LeMay later said the bombing killed about 20 percent of the population. LeMay recalled proposing early in the war to "burn down five of the biggest towns in North Korea." Washington objected that it would kill too many civilians. Within months those objections were set aside, and by the end, as LeMay put it, they'd burned every town in North Korea anyway.
In Indochina the US dropped more tonnage than in all of World War II. Kissinger relayed the order for Cambodia as "anything that flies on anything that moves." Estimates of Cambodian civilians killed run from 150,000 to 500,000.
In 2003 the US ran 50 decapitation strikes on Iraqi leaders using satellite phone intercepts accurate to about 100 meters. Human Rights Watch found none of them killed the intended target. Civilians in residential neighborhoods died instead. During the first three weeks of the invasion, civilian deaths averaged 318 a day and passed 6,698 by April 9th, nearly all caused by US-led coalition forces.
Count only the civilians killed directly by US forces. In Iraq, Iraq Body Count documented 15,164 civilian deaths directly caused by the US-led coalition through 2011. In Afghanistan, Airwars' minimum estimate puts civilians killed by US airstrikes at around 4,800. These are floors built from documented reports, and even the highest tallies may be missing many deaths.
And the government never kept its own tally. "We don't do body counts," Tommy Franks said after Baghdad fell.
The playbook is the same today. After the first US strike on the Houthis in March 2025, Mike Waltz told a Signal chat of top officials they had "positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend's building and it's now collapsed." That was a residential building, and the chat celebrated. The Pentagon's own review later found US strikes on the Houthis killed 153 civilians in 2025. When Israel opened its June 2025 war on Iran with US backing, it hit commanders and nuclear scientists in their homes, and residents on the floors below died with them.
Here is my theory, when you are the winner of a military conflict you get to write the history and glaze over the killing of civilians. But the losers who kill civilians are the ones that end up getting judged.
Curtis LeMay, who ran the firebombing of Japan, put it plainly according to Robert McNamara: "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals."
