I think this is really a hard thing. I've also never been in the armed forces, let alone a special forces type branch, so I don't know what it's like. But who

I think this is really a hard thing. I've also never been in the armed forces, let alone a special forces type branch, so I don't know what it's like. But who is going to question these decisions, then? Can we trust the elected leaders to do so? I don't think so (not being partisan here, this goes for Trump, Biden, Obama, Bush, whomever); they don't want to look bad in the eyes of voters, so they're going to keep these sorts of outcomes classified if they can. Can we trust non-political military leadership? To some extent, I think so, but they (especially those involved in planning and approval for these missions) will still have incentives to downplay any failures. This is a classic problem, of course: you can never fully trust the people involved to police themselves. But I also agree that most civilians won't have the experience, context, and training to evaluate what happened and come to a reasonable and fair conclusion. So... I'm not sure what the solution is. The bottom line is that collateral civilian deaths are a tragedy. The fact that it happened is awful, and that operation should be gone over with a fine-toothed comb to determine if the soldiers involved could and should have done something differently in order to avoid those deaths. Whether or not that will happen, in an objective, unbiased manner, by people who are qualified to do so, is unknown. I'd like to think there were better options here, and that those people didn't need to die, but I really have no idea.