The area bombing doctrine, which is basically to point out a target and indiscriminately damage, destroy, and kill as much as possible, can be considered justifiable under certain circumstances. It depends on the kind of war you are in and what kind of impact it makes on the enemy's war effort. In the case of Barbarians at the gate (not just as an idle expression, but as in "actual savages who want to enslave and murder our entire population are winning"), I consider it quite acceptable, and so did the Allies in WW2. We were indeed up against some pretty nasty customers and precision bombing simply didn't make any meaningful impact.
In WW2 the shift from precision to area bombing was not simple. It was a gargantuan process that could not easily be reversed once implemented. That meant that as it was becoming less justifiable, you couldn't just snap your fingers and do something else. As the war neared it's end, it was obviously becoming less justifiable as there weren't all that many worthwhile targets left, and killing 10,000 civilians to destroy a small sausage factory can be somewhat difficult to explain away. However, area bombing was an entire doctrine and it was what the strategic air forces of the US and Britain had been built and trained for. Operations would have to be more or less grind to a halt while the doctrine was updated, and we simply weren't going to do that. It would mean giving the enemy a breather, spending resources on huge arsenals that were not being used to defeat the enemy, and worst of all, that some of the top brass might be out of a job and have their ranks and pensions endangered.
So we kept bombing until it was clear to everyone that we were were just killing a bunch of civilians, and then we stopped.
In the case of Dresden, the bombing was senseless because the Germans were already beaten. War production was limited, and the transport hub at Dresden was not shipping massive amounts of supplies and reinforcements to the front because there were no such supplies or reinforcements to be sent. In the case of Tokyo it was justifiable at the time, as it was a major production hub (not just for airplanes), but Japanese war production was made completely irrelevant six months later with the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, meaning that all the weapons produced there would never see use against us. I doubt if the generals who planned the bombing knew that at the time, but nonetheless it was a distinctly bitter situation for the Japanese civilians who lost their homes and families in the raid. Which is why I called it senseless. A lot of brutality that turned out to be for almost nothing.
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