a) Thank you for your extensive and helpful response

b) In the (certainly plausible) story line you're drawing here, I agree that the current circumstances of U.S. military strategy as well as military strength offer no chance at a positive result in, say, Lagos. Also holy shit, I didn't know there were that many people in Lagos. God damn.

Yet, it's not Dresden, fine... now it's Operation Market Garden. Now it's Napoleon and Garibaldi marching on a target and creating, wait for it, the aforementioned full-scale war, nation against nation, the United States against the Nigerian people unified by perfectly justifiable anti-U.S. sentiments. So-- and don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to refute or disagree with what you're saying because I think we're coming to the same page-- by the end of your story we end up with an equal or greater military opposition and we now have no regard for civilian protection because we've made them all take arms against us. So just going off modern history here, we massacre and exterminate a population for defending itself and/or protecting its interests and we say something like- oh I don't know- "It was for the greater good." It seems to all come back around is all I'm saying. (To clarify again, I am veering away from the topic of numbers and going back to the point regarding dresden.) I don't think anything would, hypothetically, be stopping us from making the exact same mistakes and committing the exact same atrocities we have in all the wars of our past. Globalization and the U.N. will pressure us to ensure the protection of human rights/prosecute our war crimes? Come on, the Allies were tight back in WW2 too.