I'm not sure if this has come up on this website or not. I know it's come up in discussion with friends, and even in college.
Are we too nice in war? Reading military.com's most recent article about how the U.S. took needed risks in Iraq to avoid civilian casualties.
I think back to the "scorched earth" tactics of York in the Civil War. And yet, somehow people in Atlanta don't scream for "Yankee blood".
I think back to WWII, and carpet bombing German cities. German's are screaming for American blood.
WWII again, and Japan, we drop 2 nuclear bombs on cities and some how Japan is one of our closest allies in the region.
Are we too PC, to "safe" in the way we fight wars now? Are we too concerned to keeping the enemy (the guy trying to kill us) happy that we miss the basic idea, kill enough of them that they see more benefit in bowing to our wants and needs than continuing to fight us?
What has changed since the 1940s, when carpet bombing was generally accepted to the 2000s, when one missed target in a war zone is an international incident?
It generated some good conversation in class.
IMHO, what has changed since the 1940's is not war itself as war has always had a degree of combatants hiding among civilians resulting in unintended casualties. By and large, the degree to which we are threatened by a situation has always dictated the degree to which we balance civilian casualties versus the risk to the mission. Trust me, if one of our drones ID'd Osama Bin Laden speaking in front of a crowded mosque and we thought we could recover enough DNA to prove the remains were his, I believe the CIA would tolerate several hundred civilian deaths and the destruction of a holy place to get that target.
What has changed is the amount and way the story is being told from the battlefront. The whole concept of front-line journalism is an invention of the 1940's. Sure, before that people wrote and published their experiences of war, but typically this occurred well after the issue was settled and played no role in the actual event. The advent of video journalism as developed in WW II, allowed the first "real-time" (usually delayed from a week to a month as producing and transferring the media took time) information delivered that could actually affect the home front during the actual event. And even this stuff was culturally filtered and yes, censored, to deliver a message that was meant to uplift the home front. In effect, it was propaganda, as it was deliberately one-sided and intended to motivate.
Moving forward through Viet Nam, (where the advent of same-day coverage became possible through more technically advanced communications) we learned that the filters imposed on the battle front (not just military censorship but the journalist ethics of doing thorough investigation before reporting) could be compromised in the competitive rush of covering the story as fast as your competitors could. The North Vietnamese began the first exploitation of their opponent's media by an opponent known to civilization (yes, I am discounting Tokyo Rose as she was not particularly effective).
The military actions/wars of the 1980's and 1990's witnessed that the instigator of a brief military operation could use the advantage of surprise and speed (much like the military blitzkreig of WW II) to win the war before the opponent could get traction. Americans were as much the intended viewers of "shock and awe" as our opponents when it was brought into our living rooms within hours of an event.
However in our current military operations, our opponents were given plenty of opportunity to prepare their media/propaganda operations in advance of the actual action and in the case of the Radical Islamist
Extremists, the September 11th hijackings were a picture perfect piece of using the other side's media to rally their side. When you step back, I don't think anyone on either side ever thought that they would win a military war. They seek to be the first side to get a superior military to surrender by undermining its home support as the primary means. At least the North Vietnamese actually militarily took and held ground effectively. And in fact all of the parties who don't want us defending our interests have taken to the same strategy, staging trumped-up "civilian" casualities for the camera whether they are Al-Queda or just another corrupt tribal chief wanting to protect his empire.
And we have let them do this to us. While our First Amendment is a wonderful thing, our lack of respect for the concept of abuses of it through allowing enemies of it to falsely cry "Yankee murderer", much like crying "fire" in a crowded theater has created a hazard to our ability to defend this concept around the world.
If the under-educated masses don't quite understand that underfiltered (and manipulated) media is destroying the concept of free speech as envisioned by our forefathers this isn't news. Hitler managed to take a whole civilization down that path and almost destroyed a continent doing it.
So while we (and other nations) allow and protect the spread of this unverified and unfiltered propaganda and allow it to dominate sectors of the world's communications, we hamper our ability to win this war against the Islamist Extremists.
If we are truly serious about winning this war, we must shut down their media (internet included) and infiltrate and disrupt the houses of worship where mullahs preaching suicide bombing as a method for social change. We must not only win the battle on the ground, but the battle on both homefronts to ensure a lasting change to the way the civilizations relate to each other.
To answer your question, it isn't whether we are too nice on the battlefield or not, it is are we too lenient in the control of manipulative media by our enemies.
Sorry for the long rant...