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Comment by cmdkeen | Hacker News Reader

Whilst you are correct, and every conflict has blue on blue engagements, the US military have a very bad reputation for being bloody dangerous to their allies. Mission videos that do emerge of incidents where US aircraft, helicopters and drones end up engaging friendly or non-hostile targets commonly show a marked desire to engage the enemy and view any and all information coming in as confirming that initial prejudice.

I'm not saying this applies to all US military personnel or that other militaries do not have problems.

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I honestly believe this is largely the result of the U.S. performing the vast majority of sorties flown.

Deploying air forces in an expeditionary capability is difficult and expensive. It's much more difficult than deploying a ground unit. Few forces have this capability.

When you're in Afghanistan, and 90% of the CAS sorties are performed by the U.S., then it stands to reason that if an incident occurs, it'll likely have been a U.S. aircraft based on odds alone.

I suspect you're correct. Issue is, from what I read, it would perhaps be better if most of those sorties were never flown. It seems that use of air power will tend to prioritise the lives of soldiers over civilians. ('Blue on blue' not withstanding, but then my point above was not really about that, but about the anecdotal nature of much of the conversation.)

If I'm reading you correctly and I take this to it's logical conclusion, one could correctly assume that in any war, regardless of the precautions, technology, and training, you will have civilian deaths. You'll have terrible incidents where friendly forced were shot at, or buildings misidentified and a family of four blown up.

It's probably drifting out of scope of this conversation, but it can probably never be reemphasized enough that these will be the consequences of any war, and as such, a war should never be seen as a favorable outcome. In that, I definitely agree with you.

Indeed agreed.

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