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August 6 was the 57th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Many people are of the opinion that America was wrong to nuke Hiroshima. I am not one of those people.
I am also not one of those people that gets terribly upset when it is reported that American troops in Afghanistan accidentally kill some civilians, or when Israeli soldiers kill civilians as an unfortunate side effect of valid military action.
I believe the only way to confidently make decisions that you believe are consistently correct is to use a clear set of principles. If your principles are sound, and you apply them correctly to the situation at hand, then you are guaranteed to arrive at the correct conclusion.
I don't know much about military strategy, but I think I could come up with a few obvious objectives for any justified military action.
1. Win.
2. Get as few of your guys killed as possible.
3. Kill as few of their civilians as possible.
4. Kill as few of their soldiers as possible.
5. Do as little material damage as possible.
6. Make sure other nations are happy with your actions.
These are in order of the relative importance I give to them.
I would evaluate any plan through the filter of these principles. It gives me an objective means for selecting the best plan. For example, I can weigh whether it's better to endanger another 100 American soldiers, but manage to avoid killing a million enemy civilians. I can decide whether to use a plan that involves significant damage to buildings and infrastructure and makes the UN happy, or a plan that involves covert operations and assassination but has little collateral damage and few civilian casualties.
I can even decide whether it's acceptable to kill 12 innocent bystanders, including 9 children, in order to kill 2 very bad men.
This objective decision making system gives me a assurance that I'm doing what is right. It eliminates the endless second-guessing of myself that would otherwise necessarily follow any tough decision that involved people getting killed. I would not have to be tortured by the endless barrage of tear-jerking personal accounts of those affected by my difficult decision.
This also gives me a clear way to debate my actions with those who disagree with me. We can discuss which of my objectives are wrong. We can discuss the relative weight each objective should receive. We can talk about how well a given plan meets each objective. We can identify missing objectives and see how they affect the decision. We might even be able to come to an agreeement on the correct course of action.
When I look at the atomic bombing of Hiroshima using these objectives, it appears to me that we made the right decision.
Posted by Robert at August 07, 2002 10:13 PM | TrackBack