Bret Devereaux

"We should have murdered an awful lot more people to achieve victory, we just didn't kill enough and destroy enough of a foreign country to achieve the peace of the grave we needed." What is wrong with people.https://twitter.com/GrayConnolly/status/1402166591588945926 …

These sorts of takes - beyond their moral deficiency - always underrate the strategic implications of such 'exemplary' violence: degraded will to continue in an appalled American populace and the diplomatic catastrophe that international reporting of such would cause.

Rome always gets used an example for the 'make a desert' method and as @GabrielDBaker notes, Roman mass violence did further their strategic objectives. But in COIN it was far more important that the Romans committed long-term. Time-limited COIN is very difficult, it turns out.