@areactis @monsieuricon Agreed. The first thing to understand about Americans fighting war is they don't fight fair. They basically never have, and they've never really embraced, as a culture, the virtues of it. They'll respect some rules (if we think respecting them is either zero-cost or increases the odds of winning the war by minimizing complications). But this is the country that

• fought the Redcoats by attacking as irregulars and generally refusing to form lines

• fought the Civil War as Sherman did (as you've noted)

• brought the state-of-its-chemical-art to World War I

• did what everyone knows it did in World War II, which was so profoundly awful that it's one of the few times in the history of war that everyone vowed never to do that again and (please God let it stay true) actually didn't do again

• busted out the chemistry set again and came up with extremely novel defoliants (and carcinogens) for Vietnam

• mounted bulldozer shovels to the front of tanks in Desert Storm to turn enemy trenches into insta-graves

• used sea-fired missiles in Yugoslavia, intel be damned

• used drones in Afghanistan, intel be damned

Americans don't fight to win wars; they fight to end them, often by the shortest observable path. It's one of the things that makes them extremely dangerous and extremely awful if they're the ones that start the war.