Success Quote by Stuart Symington

The line lands like a shrug dressed up as strategy: a cold admission that moral calculus in war often collapses into accounting. Symington’s phrasing is revealingly bureaucratic - “be killed” in the passive voice, as if deaths simply happen, like market fluctuations. Then comes the possessive pronouns, doing the real work. “Their civilians” and “our civilians” turn human beings into national inventory, a grim echo of the businessman’s worldview: losses are regrettable, but what matters is whose balance sheet takes the hit.

The specific intent is transactional deterrence. It’s the logic behind hardline postures in total war and Cold War brinkmanship: if violence is inevitable, push the cost outward so your own public stays insulated. That insulation is political as much as ethical. Leaders who can keep “our civilians” safe maintain legitimacy; leaders who can’t face backlash. Symington’s sentence is frank about the unspoken driver of many hawkish policies: domestic stability, not abstract righteousness.

The subtext is also defensive. By accepting civilian deaths as a given, he dodges the harder question of whether the policy causing those deaths is justified or avoidable. The statement doesn’t argue for necessity; it argues for preference. That gap is the moral tell.

Context matters because Symington lived through an era when civilian targeting became thinkable at scale - strategic bombing, nuclear planning, “credibility” as a doctrine. The quote captures the chilling normalization of catastrophe: once civilian death is assumed, the only remaining debate is where it should fall.