MENA_Conflict

the difficulty of fighting an opponent like ISIS without risking friendly (military) lives on the ground and I'm no unsympathetic to them. There is no war that leaves civilians completely untouched. And my attitude that we should up our stomach for losing our own service members

in the pursuit of avoiding CIVCAS doesn't match national attitudes. And I can't change that. So we can set aside the whatabouting of "But the US bombed the hell out of Raqqa" because I probably agree with you, we should have found a way to do it with less civilian suffering, even

if that meant higher casualties for us. So let's talk Grads, 107s, IRAMs and area bombing, and why it's horrific. The very concept of area saturation is to so densely fill a given area with explosive effects that the enemy cannot find safe harbor there. On the battlefield, the US

has opted for a more precision technique that favors expensive guided munitions like the HIMARS or guided aerial munitions, or smaller numbers of highly trained artillery and mortar crews while the Russians, and their friends (namely the Syrian military in this context) continue

to mass firepower via towed and driven multiple launch rocket systems like the Grad or Type 63 and area bombardment with IRAMs, mortars, artillery, and gravity bombs. It's not that accuracy *cannot* be achieved with some of those systems (namely tube artillery and to a lesser

extent gravity bombs), it's that it isn't the primary objective. With an (often) lower priority on hyper accurate strikes, the Syrian/Russian emphasis in the kinetic space is to so thoroughly inundate the area an enemy, or his support (to include civilian pop. and infrastructure)

that they cannot sustain life. In this context, the highly expensive US methodology is inefficient, requires intensive reconnaissance and surveillance, clear and thorough communication between observers to gun lines, and doesn't produce the volume of fire that is needed to

simply wipe a grid square off the map. And it requires a lot more training and coordination. So what is a third world dictator to do if he can't afford/manage either the systems necessary or the training required to target the actual bad guys instead of just the area they are

expected to be in? Area saturation fires. For the role, the massed fires of 20 and 40 barrel rocket launcher are ideal. You aren't aiming to hit a single potential rally point or defensive structure. You're aiming to obliterate everything within a give 1000m x 1000m (or however

large) square. Precisely aimed howitzers, GPS guided rockets, laser guided missiles and bombs all require specific targets to hit. You don't need any of that if you've accepted "everything in this given zone can be destroyed". The end result is highly demanding on munition

stockpiles, and means the area you're trying to recapture will be absolutely destroyed when you get there. But if you consider everyone and everything forward of your front line to be hostile, be they man, woman, or child, who cares? I understand the tactic, while finding it

appalling. But what I can't fathom, are the people watching such behavior and nodding approvingly as though such behavior is to be lauded because "terrorism" or whatever your rationale is. Seizing land from opponents of the state, be it ISIS, Syrian rebels, or (and you know it's

coming) Kurdish YPG/SDF, is no easy task for the Syrian gov, even if they were a competent military force. But at what price is "victory" if all that's left are burnt and crumbling shells of towns, with a large portion of the infrastructure gone, and civilians dead. With all the

technological might the Russian military can bring to bear, it is still the volleys of rockets, rain of incendiaries and cluster munitions, and nonstop artillery bombardment of populated areas that enables each advance. When the dust settles and the last coals of Idlib have gone

cold, it will not be the superior fighting ability of the SAA that wins the day. It will be the burnt out husks of villages and cities, and the piles of bones of their inhabitants, that sapped the will to fight. Before you cheer on the next clearing of *wherever* in Syria, look