Comment by tptacek

I'm not sure I understand why this is "asymmetric warfare". I think that's a term that actually doesn't mean a whole lot, and mostly means "the things weaker adversaries use to level the field against stronger ones". I think a lot of what USSOCOM does/trains falls under the definition of "asymmetric", or would if you discarded the part of that definition that said "weaker opponent". Almost certainly†, conventional military tactics would kill far more civilians in Beirut than will ultimately end up dead in this attack.

I have another theory as to why we have very long threads on HN about how distressing these attacks are, but we don't need to dig into it on HN.

† Again, I'm cognizant that we're still getting details about this attack.