I can’t say I agree that broiling those Yeerks was tactically necessary. The Animorphs ended operations like the hospital all the time without slaughtering the unarmed.
First of all, since I’m realizing that it is, in fact, NOT immediately obvious, all of my backlogged Animorphs commentary was written on total sleep deprivation and thesis-powered anxiety, so my rhetoric is not always as clear as maybe it should be. That said, let me add real quick that ‘necessary’ in this context =/= morally or ethically ‘good’ in any way, nor does necessary mean…like, the best available outcome? If that makes sense? It just means ‘the action that the characters believed to be needed in order to both survive and accomplish their goal.’ I should have been clearer about this in the original post and that’s on me, but, again, sleep deprivation is one hell of a drug.
But like hear me out here. Because the potential for this hospital is…frankly horrific, in this book. If the Animorphs didn’t take steps to definitively end the plan, if they had just run for it (because let’s be real…by this point in the series they really haven’t had a definitive win, they’ve mostly just lived through some battles), they would have felt complicit in the massive enslavement potential for the hospital. The hospital is a revolving door of war crimes and human rights (beings’ rights?) violations. Whether or not they would be right to feel that complicity is a different conversation (and a short one because they’re six people, everything else aside they’re only six people against an army, they’re not complicit just because they couldn’t perform a miracle), but they would absolutely feel it. So in the moment, they have to do something more than run, because they can’t face the idea of just bailing on this mission. And in the moment, under the gun, this is all Jake can think to do. They don’t have the materials to destroy the hospital to any respectable degree (even an elephant could only do so much and they don’t have any other big wrecking-ball morphs yet, like the rhino), they don’t have the materials to stop the closing through any tangentially proper channels (like they stop the logging venture in the woods with the superpowers of Skunks And Bureaucracy), and even if they did just wreck the hospital…that would kill a lot of people. It would probably kill all the Yeerks in the pool, too. The casualty count of this was always going to be high, and Jake…this is the thing that establishes Jake’s stance most viscerally.
Jake is ultimately a utilitarian general to the fucking bone, I think I talk about this in a later book, but that means that he takes a very specific viewpoint on casualty count. Lowest casualties of ‘his side,’ highest casualties of ‘their side,’ and this is a rare opportunity to have all the casualties be Yeerks, rather than a potentially innocent host. He sees this as the only available way to both accomplish their goal (he knows they’re all high ranking Yeerks who presumably can’t just be magically replaced, meaning it will get them a better delay on the Hell Hospital) and get all of his people out alive–as brutal as it sounds…it’s a distraction. Jake could have made it really quick, electrocuted the pool or something similar that would kill all the Yeerks cleanly, but he’s gambling that the staff will be in such a desperate rush to try to save the Yeerks in the pool that the Animorphs will be able to get out, so he drags it out. He makes similar plays throughout the books, and again, they’re not morally or ethically ‘good’ nor are they the best available outcome…but that’s not really the point.
So like…yeah, that’s my logic. They absolutely do get out of situations like that without similarly atrocious acts on other occasions…but it’s a loss. It always means they lose that round. Their wins are awful. Hell, right in the next book, they literally take steps to starve every Yeerk in the vicinity to death. Destroying the Kandrona is the equivalent of poisoning every water supply for a human army (removing a critical substance without which survival is impossible), which is prohibited under the Geneva Convention. If a guerrilla squad did something like that in an Earth war they would IMMEDIATELY be slated as war criminals–not soldiers. And yet…the destruction of the Kandrona is necessary, because it’s all the Animorphs can think to do to buy themselves that critical bit of extra time, to strike even a tiny blow against their enemy. It’s not the morally sound play. This is why Cassie struggles so much throughout the war–she’s the only Lawful Good player on an entire Chaotic Neutral team. The Animorphs more often than not don’t have a morally sound option available to them, which is…frankly sort of the point.