So a while ago I posted about the use of white phosphorus on the people of Fallujahuja. You know napalm. Now the marines have this crazy new weapon that ignites the very air! and makes a big mess. Nice if you want to blow up a bunker. Too bad we are using it in cities with lots of innocent people around. Oops.

Read the makers little flyer here

The rational for this approach was straightforward:
“Marines could employ blast weapons prior to entering houses that had become pillboxes, not homes. The economic cost of house replacement is not comparable to American lives…all battalions adopted blast techniques appropriate to entering a bunker, assuming you did not know if the bunker was manned.”

But in an era of precision bombs, where collateral damage is expected to be kept to a minimum, such massively brutal weapons have become highly controversial. These days, every civilian casualty means a few more “hearts and minds” are lost. Thermobaric weapons almost invariable lead to civilian deaths. The Soviet Union was heavily criticized for using thermobaric weapons in Afghanistan because they were held to constitute “disproportionate force,” and similar criticisms were made when thermobarics were used in the Chechen conflict. According to Human Rights Watch, thermobaric weapons “kill and injure in a particularly brutal manner over a wide area. In urban settings it is very difficult to limit the effect of this weapon to combatants, and the nature of FAE explosions makes it virtually impossible for civilians to take shelter from their destructive effect.”