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Comment by setquk | Hacker News Reader

Actually they do. Only because collateral is a PR nightmare.

No they don't. Collateral damage is a function of inefficient lethality (killing people who are not your target is wasteful and inefficient).

Increasing lethality decreases collateral.

No that's not quite right.

Lethality is the effectiveness of desired outcome. Was the target eliminated?

Collateral is the side effects of the desired outcome. Was anyone or anything else eliminated?

They are two different metrics. Consider two contrasting analogies which break your understanding:

Ballistic missile: high lethality, high collateral probability.

Polonium tea: high lethality, low collateral probability.

About 20 years ago, I was working in the defence sector, on guidance systems, as an engineer. Sat through many a powerpoint about how collateral could be marketed away. Turns out they won that battle eventually...

Incidentally I bailed out when I saw what a fucking mess of a world I was creating.

This is bad logic.

By your metrics, the most lethal thing in the world is a rusty spoon stabbed into some ones eye; either it kills the target instantly or kills them later due to infection. Very close to 100% death rate. Very lethal. No collateral damages, either.

And yet no professional militaries are armed with rusty spoons

I don't know what logic you're seeing but that's not an accurate description. A spoon is low lethality, low collateral.

That's because the lethality of a rusty spoon is actually very low... The lethality of having been stabbed in the eye might be high, but not of spoons themselves since it is hard to successfully wound the eye of an enemy soldier with a rusty spoon at a distance when said enemy soldier is armed with ranged weaponry, and it is still difficult to do even in melee range relative to how easy it is to wound with bayonets and combat knives.

They had swords that did that. Then they found out that guns had higher lethality with lower risk to the attacker (another primary metric). Collateral wasn't much of a problem back then. No one gave a shit.

What is a bullet if not a very carefully shaped rusty spoon stabbed into someone via a complicated launching mechanism?

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