Recall please that the atomic bombs America used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki took around 100,000 Japanese lives – but they also compelled that nation to surrender, forestalling the need for an armed invasion of the Japanese home islands. Estimates of US and Allied casualties in such an invasion were in the one million range, and those among Japanese military and civilian personnel surely would have been even higher. Those bombs saved lives by forcing a surrender and shortening the war. We can hope that MOAB or similar lethal technologies might do the same.
Coming on the heels of the US Tomahawk missile strike on the Shayrat air field in Syria, the MOAB drop will help convince those tyrants that the United States means business – that “red lines” will be enforced, and that our approach to conflicts has shifted from demonstrating our capability or attacking certain targets to “winning the conflict.” After all, why do we fight at all if we aren’t interested in winning; and why not win sooner rather than later: shortening the conflicts means fewer casualties.
During the Obama years, the US talked, and sometimes threatened to use force, and imposed sanctions (which often were circumvented). We usually halted just short of the massive type of force that the Trump administration has employed in its first 100 days. His budget aims to strengthen our military. Those are the types of messages that get the results we seek. There is nothing wrong with winning arguments through diplomacy or negotiation instead of by force, but it doesn't work against brutal dictators. All the time that the Obama administration was talking and building consensus and negotiating and trying to understand our enemies, they were expanding their power and enlarging their grasp. US policy was not working. Perhaps the sudden application of massive force will succeed where all those years of discussion did not.