Not many practices in civilian life that routinely miss their mark by 20 to 40 feet would be considered "precise" - and especially not those involving the use of hundreds or thousands of pounds of high-explosives: That the expenditure of six kilotons of explosives in aerial attacks (and more than this in ground attacks), some involving guided weapons and some not, should gain the moniker of "precision warfare" reflects a singular triumph in branding.

Insofar as the claim by the US that civilian casualties cannot be known, the study calls it "casualty agnosticism". It found that the US administration distorted the casualty issue by depreciating the value of information flow from recent battlefields, categorically dismissing hundreds of detailed casualty reports and positing an unnecessarily high standard for what constitutes a useful degree of precision in aggregate casualty estimates. In regards to that standard, the study noted: "The proposition that it is impossible to calculate a casualty figure that is both absolutely certain and exact is true. True but facile.