The reason the US doesn't aim at civilians is because, as of the last ten or twenty years, they have the technology, money, and strategy that make such an approach possible.
Only a few decades ago, they didn't have the technology in sufficient quantity, and at that time nobody inside the armed forces or government suggested that there was any moral issue with collateral damage, that was not outweighed by the military objectives being pursued.
It's a pure luxury to avoid civilian casualties; the US was a functioning democracy when they nuked two cities in Japan to send a message to Russia; and when they and the UK (also a democracy) embarked on a deliberate campaign of fire-bombing German and Japanese cities for the express purpose of destroying worker's homes.
The moral niceties are a convenient opportunity for propaganda, when you have the power and the wealth to excercise them; but don't kid yourself that they are important to the military beyond their propaganda value. If a military objective requires it, the USAF have no more qualms than any other armed force in history about a few dead women and children.
Minimising civilian casualties is a 'nice to have', not a primary goal.
Apparently you don't understand the word "aim".
In times past we haven't had the ability to single out the targets of interest from the civilians around them. That doesn't mean we were aiming at civilians, it means we hit a lot of civilians in addition to the targets we were after.
I will not fault a low-tech army for the use of inaccurate weapons. I will fault them when the aim point is not a valid target.
During WWII, the RAF and later the USAAF had a clear and well understood policy of targeting German civilians. This policy was claimed by its proponents to be necessary due to the difficulty of targeting stuff as small as individual factories or military facilities from high altitude (particularly at night), given the technology available.
The reason the US doesn't currently aim at civilians is because, as of the last ten or twenty years, they have the technology, money, and strategy that make such an approach possible.
Only a few decades ago, they didn't have the technology in sufficient quantity, and at that time nobody inside the armed forces or government suggested that there was any moral issue with collateral damage, that was not outweighed by the military objectives being pursued.
It's a pure luxury to avoid civilian casualties; the US was a functioning democracy when they nuked two cities in Japan to send a message to Russia; and when they and the UK (also a democracy) embarked on a deliberate campaign of fire-bombing German and Japanese cities for the express purpose of destroying worker's homes.
The moral niceties are a convenient opportunity for propaganda, when you have the power and the wealth to excercise them; but don't kid yourself that they are important to the military beyond their propaganda value. If a military objective requires it, the USAF have no more qualms than any other armed force in history about a few dead women and children.
Minimising civilian casualties is a 'nice to have', not a primary goal; The US avoids bombing civilians today for political reasons, not moral ones; and those political reasons were sidelined in favour of military strategy until the technology existed to make it possible to engage in precision attacks.
All low-tech armies - including your country's - have targeted civilians. In war, there are no 'good guys'. There are people who are aiming at you, and people who are aiming at someone else - but the people who are aiming at someone else are not 'good', they are just 'on your side'.
Indeed this desperate need for a 'good vs evil' narrative is a large part of the reason we still have war - until people like you wake up to the reality that there is no such thing as absolute good or absolute evil, and that every single human being who has ever lived could reasonably be described as both, then from some perspective, there will always be needless bloodshed.
Even Adolf Hitler was kind and generous to his friends, and loved his dogs. Even Gandhi was racist against Africans, and referred to them as 'Kaffirs' (Incidentally, Gandhi was something of an admirer of Hitler). The world is not a simple place, and by pretending that it is, we get very sub-optimal attitudes and outcomes. Even the bad guys are good; and all the good guys are, and always have been, capable of horror beyond compare in support of 'doing the right thing'.
Area Bombing Directive was a directive from the wartime British Government's Air Ministry to the Royal Air Force which ordered RAF bombers to attack the German industrial workforce and the morale of the German populace through bombing German cities and their civilian inhabitants.
