Latif Nasser

He's trying to run a war overseas.

And it wasn't any good for him to have grumpy civilians at his rear.

And so Pershing has an idea, which he actually borrows from the Brits.

And that is he will use cash, money to right our wrongs.

And so he goes to Congress and begs for a statute.

And Congress obliges really quickly.

There's no sign this is a controversial thing.

But it was a genuinely new thing because for the first time in the history of war, as far as we could tell, you had a state compensating individuals.

Usually it's state to state.

Here you have state to individuals.

And so the U.S.

government starts systematically paying money for the loss of a non-American life in war.

How much?

Geez, I don't know.

It's actually surprisingly hard to find documentation mentioning specific amounts, but whatever the amounts were, it seems to have worked.

Pershing wrote in his biography that the swift and prompt settlement of claims had a great effect upon the people.

So it seemed to work really well.

And is this, I mean, is the idea here that, like, this is what we would do with the drone strike victims we talked about?

That we'd pay them money?

Well, it's actually, it's a bit trickier than that.