It's not like Gladwell doesn't criticize LeMay. He even accuses the entire US strategic command of waving away the responsibility of considering the morality of

It's not like Gladwell doesn't criticize LeMay. He even accuses the entire US strategic command of waving away the responsibility of considering the morality of such a brutal firebombing campaign. I didn't come away from the audiobook thinking LeMay had "won" even the battle, let alone the war (meaning ultimately precision bombing has won the argument in modern times). Granted, I already knew plenty about this before, but my impression in the end from Gladwell was that both Hansel and LeMay were wrong in different ways, just that LeMay's aggressive firebombing looked like it was "doing something" to the higher ups. The technology of the time simply did not allow the precision bombing approach to "look" like it was even "doing something" (and it was certainly failing by its own primary metric, hitting the target). Indiscriminate bombing is easy, so you can point at photos and say you succeeded in doing it. Gladwell of course simplifies it a lot and wraps it up in a bow, because his strength is telling a story, not conducting a detailed analysis. At the very least, perhaps a lot of people will become aware of these events and be made to think about them. Fact is, no one really knows if the firebombing hastened Japanese surrender or convinced the Japanese population that they really had lost. Maybe it did, and maybe it was important. Or maybe not. And it was certainly horrifying. Gladwell doesn't dwell enough on the uncertainty, but he doesn't forget to mention the moral issues.