He vowed to вЂњmake Georgia howl.вЂќ In the Second World War, Allied and Axis commanders deliberately attacked civilians, in the hope that they could be terrorized into demanding peace. During the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman, who set fire to Atlanta, believed he was entitled to do anything in pursuit of victory, because he was fighting against an enemy that had begun an unjust war. In the United States, generals took a page from Clausewitz, applying maximum force to secure military objectives. For Clausewitz, the Prussian military theorist, the whole point of fighting was not just to repel the enemy but to destroy it theoretically, at least, war knows no limits. In the first two Punic Wars, Rome and Carthage fought in battlegrounds outside their population centers in the third, the Romans contrived an excuse to lay siege to Carthage, and slaughtered its inhabitants.

Killing is what armies do, and, in the usual course of things, the more they kill the sooner their wars end. The dilemma posed by Moyn belongs to the modern age. вЂњAmericaвЂ™s military operations have become more expansive in scope and perpetual in time by virtue of these very facts.вЂќ Ours is an era of endless conflict, whose ideal symbol is the armed drone-occasionally firing a missile, which may kill the wrong people, but too far removed from everyday American life to rouse public objections. вЂњThe American way of war is more and more defined by a near complete immunity from harm for one side and unprecedented care when it comes to killing people on the other,вЂќ he writes. In his book вЂњHumane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented WarвЂќ (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), he suggests that this new form of warfare is so civilized that it has reduced our incentive to stop fighting.

Samuel Moyn, a professor of history and of jurisprudence at Yale, believes that we have less to celebrate than we might imagine. Most people would consider this a positive development. Improvements in bomb accuracy have made it easier to focus on military targets. Shifting international standards, codified in treaties like the Geneva Conventions, have mirrored a trend among military commanders to choose targets carefully, and to spare civilians whenever possible. In the past half century, war waged by states has become more humane. undertook such a campaign these days, worldwide revulsion would be intense and long lasting. In the words of the raidвЂ™s architect, Major General Curtis LeMay, the Japanese were вЂњscorched and boiled and baked to death.вЂќ Five months later, the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered. In six hours, as many as a hundred thousand civilians were killed, and a million others were left without homes. The bombing ignited a firestorm that sent smoke miles into the sky the glow was visible for a hundred and fifty miles. The B-29s were headed for Tokyo, and carried napalm, chosen for the mission because so many of the cityвЂ™s inhabitants lived in houses made of wood. On the evening of March 9, 1945, the United States sent an armada of B-29 Superfortresses toward Japan, which for months had resisted surrender, even as a naval blockade brought much of the population to the brink of starvation.

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