Israel bungled the strategy badly, though. The Israeli Air Force generals convinced the Prime Minister that the war could be won from the air. He made the mistake of believing them. The ground troops should have been sent in right from the start, instead of only sending them in later when it became obvious that aircraft couldn't do the job alone.
Israel's problem while fighting the war wasn't the casualties. The problem was time. The Israelis only had so much time to smash Hezbollah before world opinion finally forced them back out. And in that light, the decision not to commit ground troops was a critical mistake.
Afterwards, of course, people can and do find other aspects to complain about.
Someone elsewhere recently observed that the problem with the West probably isn't casualties. It's actually impatience, and a need to see clear progress. The US (and presumeably other Western nations) is willing to suffer high casualties, provided that the fighting doesn't last very long, and clear progress is made toward a definite goal. If you don't achieve those two, then people start to complain, and that invariably devolves down to complaints about the casualties.
There hasn't really been anything to test this against, though, as the only "wars" (and I use that term loosely) in recent memory that were short, with clear objectives, all had very low US casualty totals. We haven't had any short, high casualty wars.
And while that makes it difficult to test the theory, it's also a good thing from the casualty standpoint.
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