However, the moral justification of any of this was clear in the minds of these strategists: Better to kill a few civilians and get the war over with quickly than to observe scrupulously and meticulously a distinction between civilians and military and thereby doom both countries to a repetition of World War I. In other words, it was their ethical conviction that this was the most humane, indeed the only moral way to carry on a modern war. Fewer people would be killed overall, on both sides, from this approach.
