Thanks for point-by-point.

Your first two quotes are about targeting in the Iraq War; specifically how the breakdown in careful analysis, precipitated by the new systems, led to the exact mis-targeting they were trying to solve. That’s what the entire article is about.

And your third quote is from an ex-official commenting on the event after the school strike happened.

These quotes contradict your original point, ie they show how careful analysis has been designed out of the system.

> We killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?

This sounds incredibly naive. For starters, plausible deniability due to diffuse responsibility is a thing.

“Of course we don’t target schools and kill children, this was a system error.” But the message gets sent regardless and meanwhile we have people arguing back-and-forth over grains of sand because they took an action with deliberate plausible deniability.

For a historical analog that involved killing US children “unintentionally”, you can read up on the Ludlow Massacre - https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rockefe...

Of course they didn’t intend to kill the children, they only intended to disperse the strikers by setting their tents on fire. It was simply a mistake.