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Comment by cyanbane | Hacker News Reader

"which is aimed at reducing the 3000 casualties which in 2007 resulted from inexact air-drops in militarily sensitive environments such as Afghanistan."

Is that saying 3000 casualties just in 2007? That number is a lot higher than I would have expected it to be. I didn't realize this was such a problem.

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Another part of the problem was using the same colour packaging for food-aid air drops and cluster munitions. About 10% of cluster bomblets don't explode.

https://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/arms/cluster-bck1031...

http://www.landmineclearance.org/page2.html

http://www.rawa.org/cluster2.htm

Yeah, not only that, but they look like big soda cans. If there's one thing little kids have eyes for, there it is.

    But most telling is the political and military calculation that 
    underlies the Afghan civilian bloodletting. 
    "Close air support" bomb attacks called in by ground forces - 
    which rose from 176 in 2005 to 2,926 in 2007 and are now the 
    US tactic of choice - are between four and 10 times as deadly 
    for Afghan civilians as ground attacks, the figures show, and 
    air strikes now account for 80% of those killed by the 
    occupation forces.

From http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/16/afghani...

I believe that number includes casualties caused from retrieving the package, but it still seems high to me too

There were 7,700 people killed in the war in Afghanistan in 2007. Forty percent were due to inexact airdrops?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war...

Casualty is a military word that includes the sick and the wounded. Doesn't mean they died.

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