Somewhere there has to be an objective function that military planners are optimising — which involves minimal total deaths traded off with ruin risk. (So some paths might have a lower final possible death toll, but higher chance of things going wrong and everyone perishing.) Each choice has different costs (e.g. military lives), rewards (e.g. preservation of infrastructure or culture), and risks (e.g. genetic poisoning of the population). Eventually you get to ethical dilemmas, not military planning problems. Humanity right now feels like a collection of children having to be watched over and kept safe; we're not in a position to "guard the guardians". Yet somehow there has to be accountability for those decisions, even if it's not "law of war" type stuff. Is it pre-decided by hermetic principles and (meta)physics? I am curious about how this war is constructed and its intentional semantics.