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Comment by jhoechtl | Hacker News Reader

> We've lost a significant amount of people in Russia/Ukraine, and now Gaza.

There must be this dick and today it's me. Warfare these days is mostly precise. It's no more throwing tanks at a problem but rather precise actions to destroy infrastructure. There is no dehousing strategy to break people's support for war.

Statistically seen, significant without numbers doesn't mean anything anyway. However as we are talking about people, any discussion like that is in danger to enter a terrain of technocracy. Ad an unaffected, we shouldn't lead such a discussion

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Precision warfare is a misleading propaganda term used to make people think that we can hit a target and minimize collateral damage to whitewash war crimes and make people accept often illegal and immoral acts of mass murder...

"Precision, outside of the confines of military manufacturers and strategists, has taken on a new meaning that implies exactness with minimal unwanted damage. A focus on the razzle-dazzle of high-tech precise weapons conveniently avoids inconvenient questions about the legality and success of aerial warfare. This adapted usage has been reproduced by mainstream media outlets, especially in the US and UK, with little scrutiny. We are left with the widespread use of a word, fuzzed up and detached from its initial definition, that serves to benefit those in power seeking the extension of their military might overseas. "

https://medium.com/@ambrosev/beware-the-deadly-vagaries-of-p...

Don't think this is only for civilian consumption and mass-media war propaganda.

Everyone is taken in by technological razzle-dazzle. Especially the generals and politicians.

That's how a certain country ended up spending an extra £100k per round to add high precision GPS targeting and guidance to wide dispersal flechette munitions. Now we can attack a square kilometre, with an accuracy of 50cm. Perfect for when you need to take out an enemy column right next to a school sports day, right?

Most of us are taken in by the merest technological puff and bluster, with words like "precision", "accuracy", "power", "security" having no common meaning whatsoever. It's why we're in such a mess with privacy, cybersecurity and the like, because those in charge are good at comparing numbers but haven't the least idea what they're talking about at the most fundamental conceptual level.

Misleading though the term is, it's much milder than it used to be. The current conflict in Gaza is hard to get propaganda-free figures for, but it's not "everyone", and in Ukraine likewise propaganda makes it hard but the estimates are in the tens to hundreds of thousands.

Disease is much much worse than war, even in the bad old days (WW1 17 million vs Spanish Flu 25-50 million), and today the comparison is with covid: even if Gaza was literally nuked with 100% fatalities, that's 2.4 million people, whereas Covid deaths, according to wikipedia, are:

> 6,988,666 (reported), 18.2–33.5 million (estimated)

"Precision" only means a little in densely populated areas, and there's not even a pretence at precision in the artillery exchanges taking place in Ukraine.

Not really sure why you'd make that point when you could argue with considerably more force that the number of people being bombed in both conflicts is a rounding error in terms of global population modelling.

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