Civilian casualty mitigation and the rationalization of killing/
Brian Smith
- 2021
This article will employ a line of criticism that Hannah Arendt used against the strategists behind the US policy in Vietnam. What she found so troubling about these policymakers was the degree to which they allowed themselves to become mere appendages of the simulations, models, and machines from which targeting decisions are derived. Their hypothetical posits about the world surreptitiously transformed into facts. The virtually unconscious conflation of posits to facts led to a kind of self-deception and a tendency to misrepresent the very effects of the targeting decision under question.