Reasonable discourse with whom? Birgitte who was screaming insults and doesn't give a crap about anything beyond wrapping Elayne in unnecessary swaddling clothes? Birgitte's ideas would have produced as many deaths, only pointlessly, because she would never have let Elayne come near the Black sisters, and they would have slaughtered the search party and got away clean. Or maybe you mean reasonable discourse with Sareitha and Careanne who were untrustworthy since one or both of them were known to be Darkfriends? Elayne cannot even trust their objections. Or perhaps the vengeance-obsessed Vandene would have been one for a reasonable discussion with the allies of her sister's murderer in striking distance? You are absolutely ridiculous and seem to have completely missed all pertinent facts about the characters involved. Finally, you are overlooking the most important part - NO ONE trustworthy made YOUR objection! All the people involved, whatever protests they made to Elayne were of different natures, except for the rookie and the Darkfriend. Congratulations - you had the same idea as the sister with the WORST judgment in Elayne's entourage (Sareitha was clueless about the ramifications of Elenia & Naean's "rescue" & needed Elayne to explain it to her, liked and defended Doilan Mellar despite Elayne realizing he was a planted enemy after a half-second glimpse of him and regarded his dangerous actions during the seige as heroic despite Elayne explaining the risks of his choices, irrationally opposed the Kin's claims of age and was urging flight from Caemlyn upon feeling the Cleansing taking place). Even if Elayne wasn't already in the habit of shooting down Sareitha's idiocy and tendency to cowardice, she still could not afford to trust her or Careanne's counsel regarding this situation, because at least one of the pair was a Darkfriend.

Except this does NOT follow. When she went in all risky-like in Tanchico, she succeeded with no losses. When she brought soldiers & Kinswomen for escorts in Ebou Dar, large numbers of them got killed without doing anything effective. So going by her experience, SHE WAS RIGHT THIS TIME. In BOTH operations, zero Aes Sedai died. In the operation where she took Kinswomen & soldiers, they died without contributing anything. And you are still obstinately refusing to look at the point that EVERYONE who went into the house besides her died! The more people she took the more dead there would have been, and the Black Ajah's weapon stunned four women with one shot, and they boasted about how selective it was. More caution serves no purpose.

How could they have made more certain? You just keep using non-specific phrases like this but what happens if she orders MORE searching (How DO you check if a darkened room is empty or not? How the HELL is she supposed to find out if there ARE lots more Black Ajah packed into the house? The ONLY way to ascertain that information was by going in! You can peer into a darkened house all you want. YOU CAN'T SEE BECAUSE IT IS DARK!! Or do you suggest some sort of eavesdropping weaves that would reveal channelers are spying on the occupants, causing them to scatter?

They had exhausted all other options. They had checked the place out as thoroughly as it was possible from the outside and the only way to check further WAS to go in.

How much more certain do you want her to be, and as the only one of you two chicks with anything vaguely resembling military knowledge or training, I think she would be the better judge of that.

Ooooo! You used the word "op"! I guess you're some sort of expert! Because she was not carrying out a "sting op." She was attacking an enemy force within her perimeter and she took the only forces capable of fighting them. She had sufficient forces for what she faced and even if she KNEW there were more Black sisters operating in Caemlyn besides Shiane's two (which she had sufficient, and in hindsight, valid & accurrate, reason to believe was the maximum number in that group), she could not have done anything differently aside from splitting up her forces to allow them to be defeated in detail. Suppose someone was able to tell her that there was a group of half a dozen more blacks in town. What then? Leave Shiane's cell free to keep murdering her people and make use of the Darkfriend she has in place in the Palace holding a high rank with access to Elayne's person? She HAD to move, and you concede the necessity for moving quickly, but in order to satisfy your ridiculous condition, she would have had to slow down and wait. Waiting gives them more time to act, more time to learn that she has already begun to move against them (since Mellar had already been arrested), and no guarantee that they will find anything out. Taking more people means more bodies. Only the Warders could have given warning at a distance, since the Blacks sisters could silence them instantly, but we see from the Warders' PoV that the stun gun does not tell someone on the other end of a bond anything useful. They would probably think the Warders were getting bored or tired, if they noticed anything along the bonds at all, what with the need to concentrate on the two Darkfriends they were holding shielded. The Warders would have been primarily focussed on the bond, since that was all the contact they had with their Aes Sedai, but they still did not notice anything that really worried them. The only other way guards might remotely be of help might have been your suggestion in a prior post that they be able to warn by the thump of their falling bodies, but if they would be close enough to hear that, they are already zapped by the stungreal. You can make all the vague assertions you want that Elayne should have done something better, but there is not one single tactic you can propose that cannot be demonstrated to have even worse results.

And they would never have been able to do it if not for Elayne. Every step that made the victory possible could not have been done without Elayne's actions setting it up. She herself said in the previous book that it was not her task to do the fighting and take the personal risks. She only went on the frontline for the Black Ajah because there was no one else who could do the job as well as she. Sure she dragged other people in to take the risks and do the fighting, or else ordered them to their deaths but what the hell do you think an army is for? That is why they assemble large groups of men to fight - so that some of them can get killed! Every man who died charging the wagons and the Black sisters was doing EXACTLY what he signed up for! Soldiering is a highly lucrative job in WoT for the very reasonthat it is so dangerous(As much as it might offend your sensibilities, that is also part of the reason why men earn more money than women in the real world - we do the most dangerous and dirtiest jobs). Any man who died because he followed Birgitte through that gateway could as easily have died that same morning holding the wall or the gate that was being attacked at the same time. Likewise, the sisters would have died no harder whenever Chesmal, Asne & friends DID choose to strike at Elayne to capture her. They actually had a better chance (slim as it turned out to be) to fight back getting attacked when they were in action, rather than complacent in the Palace when the Blacks chose to strike.