Quote Originally Posted by Showtime View Post
I meant IS when I said terrorists. Just wanted to point out the typical incompetence you can expect from US forces in the middle east, not that they're just as much murderers as IS. The best thing for them to have done is leave it to the Syrian armed forces, because as of now it seems that they're dishing out just as much unintentional collateral damage.
An inevitable consequence deriving from asymmetric conflict. You saw what happened the last time a conventional military went toe-to-toe with NATO in 1991. Even in 2003 for the reprise Iraq deployed Fedayeen from day one, limiting the "conventional" character of the conflict.

Any opponent of NATO that chooses a conventional warfare approach loses hard and fast. Since they are NOT, on average, stupid, they tend to choose a non-conventional strategy when fighting NATO. Guerrilla (pronounced as /gwair - EE - yuh/ btw, not like the animal as most yanks do) tactics and terrorism are the tools of choice for asymmetric warfare. So, by design, our opponents are more or less always mixed into a larger mass of civilians, un-uniformed, and often posing as (or NOT posing as but actually being) civilians except when actively involved in an operation.

Such conflicts are necessarily more messy and a greater percentage of civilians die in the crossfire. This, for the faction having chosen asymmetric tactics, is actually a plus as there is propaganda/public relations value in dead civilians who lost their lives at the action of the conventional (NATO) power.