"the best way to deal with hostage-takers is to prioritize killing them over rescuing the hostages"

Wow, this mindset would make for a pretty lousy police hostage negotiator. I would prefer the police try to rescue me before simply lobbing grenades everywhere and killing everyone. But according to the logic in the article, that's OK because it would still be a 'humanitarian' operation as long as a greater percentage of those killed were 'bad' guys.

So... if 2 robbers take 1 hostage robbing the bank, calling in an air strike and killing all 3 is mission success according to this logic because you've prioritized killing the bad guys and got twice as many of them.

Luckily, I doubt this is actually the approach experts take.