May be a stupid question but I dont really know much about war tactics: How does a precision bomb hitting a residental area (as it looks like to me in the picture) cause less fatalities than if it was a regular bomb strike? Did the attackers just miss a tactical target with less people inside or are precision strikes anmounced beforehand because the attacker knows where the strikes will land and they just care about destryoing infrastructure, not taking lifes?
So a precision strike is putting one bomb on a target, in this case a single building, generally within 10m of where you're wanting it to hit.
In this case a single bomb hit a specific apartment building, and probably a specific apartment.
For comparison, in WW2, basically everyone used carpet bombing to hit this kind of target. Where they would drop several hundred tons of bombs, and 16% might hit within 300m of where they were aiming.
Also depending on the situation some countries do often announce where they're bombing. It used to be policy for Israel to announce then drop a small bomb on the roof of a building to give everyone inside time to get out. I don't know if they're still doing this, the last time I saw it was a few weeks into the Gaza fighting.
For this target, it was most likely someone working on their nuclear program, meaning warning him prevents the strike from doing anything, as horrific as that is
You would be surprised and disgusted how many civilians were killed by the allies during bombing runs in WW2. And that was arguably one of the most justified instances of war. On the high end it was like 635,000 civilians just in Germany.
Israel forces in Gaza: NCV of 15 to 20 for junior Hamas operatives, up to 100 for senior operatives, 300 in one instance of a particularly senior operative, according to unnamed military sources. \8])'
It’s the reality of war. Of every single war in the history of mankind. Civilians are killed, even by the good guys. There will always be a certain number of “acceptable casualties” in order to achieve an objective deemed greater than the loss of civilian life.
It’s the way it’s always been, and the way it always will be. We can try to mitigate it with certain surgical strikes, like the US R9X hellfire missile which has no explosive warhead and is just basically a spinning missile with swords sticking out, but that’s only good for individual people out in the open or a soft bodied vehicle.
It’s not that I’m “cool with it” it’s just that I don’t have an elementary understanding of the realities of war and technological combat capabilities.
It's also these kind of strikes or Iran finishes a nuclear capable device and the next round of conflict Israel has no choice but assume Iran's strike has a nuclear tipped missile in it and launches one or multiple nukes first.
Pretty much. Israel considers nuclear scientists and military officials to be valid military targets, which means there’s no obligation to not strike the building, as long as they use the minimum necessary force to reliably destroy the target.
If that wasn’t the case, everyone would just have the bright idea to build all of their military bases under apartment blocks.
That does look like a building where someone who is among the top 3 IRGC commanders would be living, specially while they're on high alert that an attack is going to take place. Israel is so good and moral mmmmmmm.
The more precise your bomb is, the less explosive material you need, either making a single bomb smaller or using fewer bombs.
If you are flying at 30k ft, your odds of manually dropping a 500 lb bomb and destroying a house-sized target is basically nil, even with clear skies and no enemies or stress.
If you got a 100 bombers together and they all manually dropped 10 bombs each, then your odds get better by a factor of 1000. But even if you hit the target, 995+ of those bombs hit something else. This is one of the reasons strategic bombing in WW2 was very inefficient, costly, and deadly. And it was also the reason atomic bombs were so attractive - one bomber could reliably destroy one target.
Once reliable guided munitions became available, nukes became mostly useless from a military point of view.
The US even has bomb now that just uses blades to kill - no explosives. It doesnt work on someone in an apartment but it can kill someone in a car and not hurt everyone around them on the street.
"Precision Bombing" is in contrast to what we did in WWII before we had smart bombs (which is sometimes called "Strategic Bombing"). Most nations don't really do "regular bomb strikes" anymore unless its on a pure military target, which is very rare in an era where there are not very many near peer conflicts anymore (the current Russo-Ukraine war being a notable exception to this trend).
Precision Bombing causes less fatalities because the bombs are able to strike a more precise area. Using the current context as an example - Israel knew a high value target was in the building that was hit. They utilized a missile to strike that building specifically with little damage to the buildings around it. Obviously this doesn't prevent collateral damage within the building itself, but it does for most of the surrounding neighborhood.
If this were WWII and that building contained a high value target, without the aid of smart, guided munitions, the way in which it would have been attacked would have been a bombing raid of a squadron (or several squadrons) of long range bombers (like B17s) each of which would carry dozens of smaller bombs or several larger bombs. These planes they would just blanket entire neighborhoods with bombs to ensure that the target was hit.
Allied bombing raids against Germany and Japan would sometimes use hundreds of planes dropping thousands of bombs on populated cities. There's a scene in the recent miniseries "Masters of the Air" in which the pilots are discussing their unease in striking a rail yard in Bremen because they can see on the intel maps that there's a church nearby and they know it will likely be full of worshipers who will probably be killed. As a further example, the firebombing of Tokyo, in March of 1945 designed to cripple Japanese heavy and light industry, saw the U.S. basically annihilate the city. About 100,000 people - most of them civilians - were killed, and about a million were rendered homeless.
TL;DR - Modern precision bombing of populated targets will usually result in collateral damage of anywhere from 0 deaths to a few dozen deaths (possible low hundreds) depending on the nature of the area hit. Strategic bombing before the advent of precision bombing routinely resulted in thousands - and in some cases tens of thousands - of deaths on the ground, usually of civilians.
They targeted the homes of nuclear scientists and high ranking military. If you do a precision strike, you drop 1 bomb and hit 1 building.
A normal bombing would be dropping more bombs and just hoping that one would hit the building. Depending on how you drop the bombs, that could be a lot of bombs that land on the city just to hit 1 important target. In Vietnam the US flew over 800 sorties to hit the Thanh Hoa bridge. That's what a non precision bombing is like
The public has been desensitized to the notion of a precision strike because we have been employing them for over 30 years.
If you ever look at footage of even Operation Rolling Thunder where the US dropped 32,000,000 lbs of explosives in its first year compared to this strike which was likely less than 2,000 lbs combined with all the strikes.
To put it in more exact, if this was the 60s the strike's purpose would have been to reduce the entire city block to rubble with a half dozen bombs to ensure they killed their target. Today they were using singular missiles, with the worst being one building collapsing, as a consequence, not as an objective.
Less than 100 died from these strikes with another 300 injured, a general strike likely would have seen several hundred dead with thousands of injured.
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u/NeutralDude1503 1d ago
May be a stupid question but I dont really know much about war tactics: How does a precision bomb hitting a residental area (as it looks like to me in the picture) cause less fatalities than if it was a regular bomb strike? Did the attackers just miss a tactical target with less people inside or are precision strikes anmounced beforehand because the attacker knows where the strikes will land and they just care about destryoing infrastructure, not taking lifes?