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Comment by shabble | Hacker News Reader

> By the way, it's a really crappy air force that can't do an air strike with sleeping-gas bombs.

I daresay that would be a lot less effective than you might expect. See the Moscow theater hostage situation[1][2] for what happens when trying to use it on a fixed target with ground level access. Imagine how much harder that would be from an air-drop, and the concentration gradient you'd end up with. Individual dispensers, cluster-bomb style might help a bit, but I still think you'd end up killing anyone close-by if you wanted it strong enough to permeate buildings.

Calling in a heavy smoke/CS drop and then retreating might be a sensible option, although I don't think there's nearly enough (public) information for anyone to judge definitively on the correct course of action in this instance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis

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The Moscow situation is not comparable to Afghan countryside.

If "effective" includes "not killing innocent civilians" then sleeping gas would work much better than what they are dropping now.

If smoke or CS would work better, well it's the military's responsibility, not mine, to the the R&D to pick the right tool to protect civilians as required by law.

It doesn't look like they give a fuck.

> The Moscow situation is not comparable to Afghan countryside.

Precisely. If anything, it's a much more easily controlled environment for gas diffusion, and allowed almost immediate entry by the special forces to clear the area. Even then, there were significant hostage fatalities (although in a large part due to medical staff not being timely informed of the nature of the gas, or provided with the antidote)

Achieving that level of consistency of dose (enough to work, not enough to kill) in a rural village environment, via air-dropped containers, is, IMO, utterly impossible.

I'm arguing against your suggestion of 'sleeping gas bombs' only, not that the indiscriminate bombing is/was the correct choice.

In addition, R&D only determines what you will have available maybe some time in the future. If you're in combat right now, you don't have the luxury of waiting 3-5 years for promising test-bench stuff to make it to your rucksack/support units.

If all you have is high-explosives, eventually everything looks like rubble.

"what you will have available maybe some time in the future"

Are you kidding me? Vietnam ended forty years ago!

They've had decades to come up with something better.

They just don't give a fuck about civilians.

Hell, they don't even care that much about US grunts, if the "hillbilly armour" and servicewoman-rape scandals are anything to go by.

If "effective" includes only "not killing civilians", opening a hot dog stand nearby would work as well. However, if it also includes "stop 400 Taliban fighters from shooting at us", the situation become a bit more complex. Smoke would just remove visibility. But Taliban don't need much visibility - they already know where the forces are, they were fighting for the whole day in the same setting, and they probably know the village inside out anyway. And they also don't care if they hit a civilian by mistake, so they can just keep shooting in general direction. And if you use some real active chemistry, the civilians - especially children - would be the ones hit the worst.

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