"Collateral damage" (i.e., killing civilians) in Afghanistan

David Dayen states clearly and succinctly the problem of civilian deaths in NATO attacks in Afghanistan. Afghan President Karzai is once again complaining about civilian deaths in a NATO air strike. And NATO is once again claiming they are concerned about it. But as David points out in Civilian Casualties Rankle Afghan Leaders FDL News 05/30/2011:

They may take Karzai's concerns very seriously, but I find it hard to believe that about the underlying issue. Because civilian casualties are a by-product of war, and while NATO and the US can talk about care and precision, short of stopping they bombing they won’t stop the killing. These are not "arbitrary and improper operations," as Karzai called them. They're the normal operations that NATO undertakes all the time. Sometimes they miss. Or sometimes they hit a target that turns out to be the wrong one. Last week, a NATO airstrike killed 20 men considered to be Taliban in local dress. It turns out they were all plainclothes police officers. The officers were investigating police checkpoints that Taliban overran and then abandoned before the airstrikes came. The checkpoints still flew the Taliban flag, so NATO bombed them.

Tags: air power, afghanistan war, david dayen

Vietnam War revisionism, isolationist version

Phyllis Schlafly, 2008

Historian Frances Fitzgerald in an article during the first year of Ronald Reagan's Presidency wrote on The Triumphs of the New Right New York Review of Books 11/19/1981. She discusses figures like Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Viguerie and Chester Ward, who wrote far-right books with Schalfly on defense. Fitzgerald explains their different isolationist-hawkish take on the Vietnam War from the one generally favored by the neoconservatives. It's a view that was popular inn the political orbit of far-right "anti-Communist" groups like the John Birch Society:

The Schlafly-Ward explanation of the Vietnam War, for example, is that the United States fell into the trap the communists laid at the Tonkin Gulf. The plan of Nitze, McNamara, and Kissinger was to make sure that the United States did fall into it so as to create the necessity for building conventional, as opposed to strategic, weapons. This would ensure a US surrender before an eventual Soviet nuclear ultimatum. The "gravediggers" — so the theory spins — escalated the war very slowly in order to allow the communists the time to build their nuclear forces; in releasing the Pentagon Papers Daniel Ellsberg (of "the Ellsberg clique") promoted the spurious notion that the conspirators were trying to win the war — and thus helped them to cover their tracks.

This theory about the Vietnam War is one commonly held in the ranks of the New Right —though not one articulated by sophisticated spokesmen like Viguerie. What is most interesting about it is that it is so much at odds with the analysis of the neoconservative intellectuals in Boston, Washington, and New York who write in Commentary or frequent the Georgetown Center for International and Strategic Studies. Neither Phyllis Schlafly nor Richard Viguerie, nor to my knowledge any member of the New Right, believes that going to war in Vietnam was a good idea. They believe that having gone to war, we should have won it, not with American boys (the veterans figure large in their constituencies), but through the concerted use of air power. As George Wallace's running mate, Curtis Le May, put it: Let's bomb them back to the Stone Age. The idea that we should have saved the Vietnamese from communism appeals to them vaguely, if at all.

The point is an important one, for it suggests the gap between the views of Schlafly and those of the bright-eyed stab-in-the-back theorists issuing forth from the Georgetown Center and other centers of neoconservative learning. In fact, the New Right has no foreign policy in the usual sense of these words. The Helms-Viguerie-Schlafly view of the world is that of fortress America (its ramparts now crumbling) surrounded by a pervasive but elusive communist conspiracy and completely friendless except for the Taiwanese, the white South Africans, and (this being a fundamentalist idea) the Israelis.

This is why I'm very cautious today about the allegedly antiwar and anti-militarism views of the "libertarian" far right. Often their antiwar sentiment is founded in a paranoid, inaccurate, militaristic and unilateralist views such as the ones Fitzgerald describes in that quote.

And it emphasizes the faith many of the far right - and not only the far right - have in the ability of American air power to win wars with minimal loss of American life.

Tags: air power, frances fitzgerald,, isolationism, phyllis schlafly

Air war: the invincible key to Victory

Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap, Jr., writes on Making Revolutionary Change: Airpower in COIN Today in Parameters Summer 2008. (Yes, I'm on a roll of summarizing those articles.)

He opens with a 2008 quotation from Tony Cordesman, a former national-security advisor to Sen. John McCain and now an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), "Much of the reporting on the Iraqi and Afghan wars focuses on the ground dimension. ... The fact remains, however, that Iraq and Afghanistan are air wars as well, and wars where airpower has also played a critical role in combat."

Dunlap's article explains that the current counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-24 for short, written under the direction of our Savior-General David Petraeus, did provide an accurate forecast of how COIN operations in Iraq proceeded in 2007-8. Because air power played a much larger role than FM 3-24 envisioned.

Dunlap is making a pitch for the usefulness of air power in COIN warfare. This is a pretty good statement of the undying faith of air power zealots in the infinite usefulness of their favorite service:

Was airpower omitted from the operations that produced 2007’s successes? Hardly. Of enormous significance is the fact that airstrikes in Iraq increased fivefold between 2006 and 2007. In addition, virtually every other aspect of airpower was exploited during the surge with great effect. In short, contrary to the assumptions bred by FM 3-24, ground-force commanders rather unexpectedly embraced airpower’s potential and created the modern era’s most dramatic revolution in COIN warfare.

This article examines why airpower became critical to COIN operations in 2007, a trend continuing today and one with huge implications for the future. Among other things, it will discuss the revolutions in precision and persistence that have so radically enhanced airpower’s value in COIN warfare. It will also outline the strengths and weaknesses of the Air Force’s new doctrine on irregular warfare which seeks to capture the service’s COIN approach. The author argues that while FM 3-24’s surface-force-centric approach to COIN can work, recent experience in Iraq demonstrates that leaders of all services want a more joint and interdependent concept that exploits airpower in all its dimensions. Such an approach can reduce the need for the enormous numbers of US ground forces FM 3-24 entails, freeing them to prepare for other kinds of conflicts. Airpower can help, this article contends, to provide options for decisionmakers faced with a COIN challenge that capitalize on systems which are also useful in other kinds of conflicts. (my emphasis)

This is basically the boilerplate argument for using air power in fighting counterinsurgency wars, in Iraq primarily against urban combatants. The claim is that "precision and persistence" minimize civilian casualties. But actual experience doesn't bear that out. And when the US Air Force is dropping 2,000-lb. bombs in crowded urban residential areas, it's almost certain that civilian casualties will result.

They also make the pitch that because air power can accomplish such magically effective things that it reduces the need for ground troops, and therefore minimizes American casualties. I'm convinced this is the thinking behind McCain's claims that Americans care only about American casualties, not the presence of American troops in Iraq.

In fact, we've seen over and over, in Vietnam and now in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the heavy reliance of artillery and air power actually has a major effect in undercutting the long-term possibilities of political stabilization.

You can guess the general line of Dunlap's argument from here. The Surge was successful - because it used so much bombing and shooting from air power. The Air Force has super-duper weapons that can practically obliterate a gnat on someone's arm while leaving the person unscathed. And we have golly-gee new technology like unmanned armed drones to kill people with. He even quotes defense analyst Loren Thompson those drones provide really neato-keeno intelligence, too, "almost like having your own little satellite over a terrorist cell."

And, besides, those backward natives are so dumb and barbaric that they're scared to death of our magic air weapons, which primitives like them can't possibly fathom:

The precision and persistence of today’s airpower creates opportunities to dislocate the psychology of the insurgents. Insurgents’ sheer inability to anticipate how high-technology airpower might put them at risk can inflict stress, thereby greatly diminishing their effectiveness.

Don't bother thinking too hard about what a phrase like "dislocate the psychology" of someone may mean. It's all a bunch of hype about how super-terrifying and superior our weapons are. Why, he says, "Airpower can unnerve even the fiercest fighters."

None of this is new. This has been the promise of air power since it was invented. In the 1930s, it was anticipated that bombing cities would cause public morale to crumple and make their side continuing the war impossible. There were similar claims in subsequent wars. The toys for the boys were different in Vietnam, but the optimistic claims were similar. In fact, no amount of disconfirmation of such theories by actual experience seems to phase the faith of the air power true believers.

This is a classic profession of faith:

As important as imposing this kind of "friction" on the minds of enemy combatants may be, it is also still possible in certain circumstances to use airpower kinetically to influence the civilian population, albeit not in the traditional way. Doing so can help win hearts and minds. For example, consider the effect when B-1 bombers destroyed an al Qaeda torture compound in early March 2008. After the facility was flattened, a former Iraqi victim declared, "I'm a lot happier now . ... It was like my mother gave birth to me again." Furthermore reports say that "[a]s Coalition forces left the area, villagers stood on the side of the road cheering and clapping to be rid of this remnant of al-Qaida." (my emphasis)

What? No flowers being showered underneath the planes' flight paths?

After this, I wouldn't have been surprised to see him write that air power helps paint schools and distributes candy to friendly kiddies, favorite images of the CENTCOM press office.

The realities of the effects of air power are so different from what Dunlap tries to convey here that it's almost a joke. But COIN in the "in" thing in the military right now. And, like during the Vietnam War, the Air Force doesn't want to come up short on the budget bucks. Budget dollars are no joking matter for them.

But in terms of what really happens, the notion that he outlines in the conclusion that we can successfully wage counterinsurgency warfare in foreign countries by relying mainly on blasting villages and urban neighborhoods from the air is just cracked:

Considering all the brutal realities of twenty-first century insurgencies it is imperative, as strategist Phillip Meilinger observes, to completely recast America's approach to COIN in an effort to achieve "politically desirable results with the least cost in blood and treasure." Doing so, Meilinger contends, requires the adaptation of a new paradigm that leverages airpower's precision strike and persistent ISR capabilities with US Special Forces and indigenous troops on the ground - much the formula employed with great success in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and northern Iraq in the early 1990s. Overarching this effort would be a reconceptualization of the entire fight against extremism, one that makes psychological operations the main "weapon" and posits an intelligence entity as the supported command.

To be sure, a COIN doctrine compatible with America's posture in the world, as well as its high-tech strengths, does not necessarily eliminate the need for "boots-on-the-ground." It does, however, emphasize that indigenous forces should comprise the bulk of the counterinsurgent force ratios outlined in FM 3-24. They can be supported by US Special Forces, along with specially trained Army advisers, but the "face" of the COIN effort interfacing with the local population should be native, not American. This blend of local ground forces reinforced with US advisers and sophisticated American technology can work; recent reports, for example, "showed the Iraqi Army to be considerably resilient when backed by Coalition airpower." Necessary for success, however, is not just any kind of airpower, but rather the high-tech precision and persistence-enabled airpower that has proven so effective since 2007.

Of course, the solution to any COIN situation will never be exclusively military. Yet at the same time it is a mistake to underestimate what military means can accomplish. In that respect, exploitation of the air weapon can contribute as never before. The experience of 2007 clearly demonstrates that its newfound precision and persistence have revolutionized COIN warfare. US doctrine must evolve to fully capitalize airpower's newly enhanced prowess. (my emphasis)

As Tom Englehardt and Nick Turse have argued for a long time, the mainstream press is doing a poor job on reporting about the air war. The fact that such potentially disastrous theories as the one argued by Dunlap are being taken seriously by decisionmakers is another reminder of how important it is for the press to start doing their job much better on this aspect of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tags: air power, air war, charles dunlap jr, counterinsurgency, iraq war

The Maverick and his 100 Years War

Via Josh Marshall at TPM, here's a January account from Hendrik Herzberg on the Maverick and A Hundred Years' War? New Yorker blog 01/04/08.

Herzberg gives his own extended transcript of the townhall that is so often quoted on the Straight Talker's 100 Years War position. TPM has been posting about this several times over the last few days, making the argument that it's not a distortion for war opponents to point to McCain's hundred years crack as reprsenting an open-ended commitment.

This is what struck me again about the Maverick's position in reading Herzberg's quotes from the Great American:

The fact is, it’s American casualties that the American people care about. Those casualties are on the way down, rather dramatically. ...

And what we care about is not American presence. We care about American casualties. And those casualties will be dramatically and continue to be reduced. ...

I can look you in the eye and tell you that those casualties tragically continue… But they are much less, and they are dramatically reduced and we will eventually eliminate them. And again, the option of setting a date for withdrawal is a date for surrender. And we will then have many more casualties and many more American sacrifices if we withdraw with setting a date for surrender. ...

Make it a hundred. How long—We’ve been in Japan for 60 years, we've been in South Korea for fifty years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me. ...

But I can tell you, I understand American public opinion, sir. I understand American public opinion will not sustain a conflict where Americans continue to be sacrificed without showing them that we can succeed.

As I've mentioned in this connection before, the Maverick is here endorsing one of the favorite themes of the air power zealots. The argument goes that the only thing that affects the American public's opinion of a war is American casualties. Nothing else. A war can go on indefinitely, they claim, without losing public support as long as American casualties are minimized.

This then becomes an argument for relying overwhelmingly on air power rather than ground troops, because this will avoid ground troops being killed in clashes with the enemy and America's technologically advanced whiz-bang air power from the various services will incur minimum American casualties.

What that translates into in what the bold Maverick identified in that exchange as "a classic counterinsurgency", in a country like Iraq where most of the guerrillas are urban combatants, is that you have American planes fire rockets and drop 500- and 2000-lb. bombs on suspected "terrorist hideouts" in heavily populated urban areas. This has been going on more heavily than usual in the Shi'a area of Baghdad called Sadr City over the last two weeks, as well as in Basra and other areas where the Iraqi government's setarian militia fought Muqtada al-Sadr's sectarian militia.

The result is massive destruction to residential areas and large numbers of noncombatant deaths and injuries. This tends to make people really hate the enemy who's inflicting these casualties, expecially a foreign occupier of a different religion.

The notion that the US can win counterinsurgency wars primarily through air power is loony. But I'm guessing that is exactly what McCain is talking about when he's emphasizing, "And what we care about is not American presence. We care about American casualties."

Aside from the destructive consequences of using that argument to justify counterinsurgency warfare by air power, the whole idea is based on a very shaky empirical basis. Not that today's Christianist Republicans care very much about that atheistic emphasis on perceiving reality.

But the reality-based may also be interested in my earlier posts:

Air power, the magic key to victory? 04/13/07

John Mueller's War, Presidents and Public Opinion 04/17/07

Counterinsurgency 04/18/07

The (Air) Force strikes back 06/08/07

Yes, Virginia, there were polls back then 07/22/07

Another general has some advice 09/18/07

More tempations to headbanging 10/29/07.

Tags: air power, air war, iraq war, mccain

Air power today

Robert Farley has a thought-provoking article in the 11/01/07 issue of The American Prospect, Abolish the Air Force. His proposal that is the basis of the provocative title is to roll all air power under the authority of the Army and Navy, instead of having a separate branch of the armed services, as it has had since 1947.

Toward the end, he briefly acknowledges that organizational solutions can't prevent bad policy choices. But his article is a good brief summary of the dubious record of "strategic bombing", which is the core of the Air Force's claim to having a separate, specialized service. There are a couple of points I would have described differently, but it's still a good summary. Strategic bombing is aimed at damaging the economic and physical infrastructure that supports the war effort of an enemy state, as distinct from "tactical" air power, which is used against enemy armed forces in order to support ground and sea combat operations by the Army and Navy.

Two factors in his argument I find particularly important. One is that the effective of strategic bombing has always been grossly overrated by the devotees of the air power faith. Another is something that rarely gets mentioned in public discussions though it's very much a major part of the consciousness of military officers: the fact that inter-service rivalry plays a big role in military policy decisions. As Farley puts it, "Although we won't have a complete picture until full campaign histories are written, the need to produce work for the Air Force in Iraq and Afghanistan has probably led to overuse of airpower."

This kind of article is the kind of thing of which we need to see much, much more in the coming years. Especially those taking a hard look at the actual effectiveness of air power.

Tags: air power, air war, robert farley

More on the Iraq/Afghanistan air wars

The Spanish conqueror Cortes and his native lover/collaborator Malinche, back in the days where technology really gave the white folks a leg up on the natives they wanted to kill, conquer and enslave

(You can tell this isn't a Republican site, because that painting shows what many might consider to be a heavy suggestion of an unclothed breast.)

Chris Floyd focuses on the USA Today report on the air war that I blogged about in my last post in his guest gig for Glenn Greenwald, Rain of terror in the U.S. air war in Iraq Salon 10/23/07. His prose gets pretty purple in places, but it's a good piece.

At one place he writes:

The military tactic of close air support in a firefight is not the issue here. The issue is why the U.S. military is engaged in this Iraqi urban warfare, with its inevitable killing of civilians, in the first place. And the reason is that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their cohorts have made the deliberate, conscious decision to engage in state terrorism in order to advance foreign policy and energy objectives they held long before 9/11 "changed the world."

That is the true context, and content, of the war. Anyone who supports its continuation - under any auspices, in any form, for any amount of time longer than it takes to remove all the troops quickly and safely - is advocating the perpetuation of state terror in the name of the American people. (my emphasis)

Given the importance of the issue, the purple prose doesn't faze me. (I indulged in a bit in the picture caption above, actually.) But I would take issue with his comment, "The military tactic of close air support in a firefight is not the issue here."

It seems that he's trying to sidestep the issue of whether such tactics "save American lives". And his basic point is sound: the clowns who planned for this war and those who cheered for it should have really thought through what this was really going to be like. But the "military tactic of close air support in a firefight" is at the core of the issue of how air power is used in situations like the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Sidestepping it leaves the field free for the conventional arguments of the air power zealots.

American military tactics for conventional war calls for heavy "close air support" to ground troops. In the conventional, army-vs.-army situation, that makes a lot of sense, playing to the huge advantage of the US in air war capability.

But in counterinsurgency, it's a whole different thing. I should note at this point that the air power true believers think that air power can do everything in war that's worth doing. It's faith, "the evidence of things not seen", in St. Paul's definition. No amount of real-world disconfirmation makes the faith go away.

But, unlike the R&D for the air power weaponry, the concept at issue is not rocket science. You drop a 2000-lb. bomb in the middle of a crowded residential district in Baghdad, civilian noncombatants are going to get killed. Lots of them, if it's done at the level of intensity that is being applied in Iraq. Everyone who loses a father, mother, daughter, son, brother, sister, cousin, neighbor, friend or even sees the bodies of people lying around who were clearly not combatants, gets a new reason to hate Americans with every noncombatant casualty. And, in a society that still relies heavily on clan links, the extended family of each victim has a solemn obligation to kill somebody from the tribe that killed their relative, i.e., Americans.

Whatever benefits the US gets out of counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq, those casualties work directly against seeing those benefits achieved. So, if the US is going to win whatever can be won in a war like this, the tactic of blowing up a building in the middle of a crowded urban residential area to get one sniper means that we become less and less likely to "win" with every incident of that kind.

But let's be clear. The argument for this approach is that more Americans are likely to be killed if it's not done. And that's true, at least in part. In any given firefight in an urban area like anywhere else, if American troops are penned down, close air support is often a faster way to take out the attackers than directed fire from ground forces. And because it's faster, in some individual combat situations, it's going to save American lives using aerial attack as opposed to not using it. If snipers are firing from an apartment building and a rocket from a helicopter or plane blasts the entire building to splinters right away, its most likely going to take out the attackers. And, in the immediate battle, the noncombatants of both genders and all ages that are taken out weren't a factor either way.

So, if wars were nothing but an aggregation of individual battles, the air power zealots' argument would be hard to dispute. But when members of 10 or 20 families are killed in one of those attacks in addition to the armed fighters carrying out the attack, that means that 10, 20, 30 or 40 more Iraqis feel the urge and even the necessity to go out plant IEDs, or take shots at Americans themselves, or pass information to the guerrillas that will help them kill Americans, or decide to withhold any cooperation whatsoever from the Americans or their local allies - how many Americans die because of that? Lots.

That's the kind of war Cheney and Bush got us into in Iraq. If it wasn't what they wanted, they and their supporters should have thought about this much more carefully than they did.

And the US badly, badly needs to get over this fixation on unconditional surrender as the only valid form of Victory. Afghanistan 2001 was a situation where the United States had a real need to fight a counterinsurgency. Let's pretend, totally counterfactually, that we actually had had a competent American government in power in 2001. In that case, the US would have presumably gone into Afghanistan with a two-pronged plan, the main one aimed at directly (i.e, using US forces) killing or capturing as many Al Qa'ida cadres as they could. The other would have been aimed at replacing the Taliban regime to facilitate the main goal of targeting Al Qa'ida, because the Taliban was so intertwined with Al Qa'ida in practice.

Once the maximum damage had been done to Al Qa'ida, a reasonable version of "winning" for the United States and NATO would have been installing a representative national government in Kabul and planning for a defined number of years, not longer than five years, to assist them with training and direct combat against hostile guerrillas in maintaining themselves in power. If they could achieve reasonable stability, we could help them with economic development, hopefully giving them better business options than growing opium to poison junkies in Western countries. If not, well, we would have given our best shot, and maybe have destroyed Al Qa'ida much more thoroughly than Cheney, Bush and Rummy actually did.

But the idea that the US or European powers can go into any country we decide needs a new government a run an effective counterinsurgency relying primarily on foreign troops is pretty much insane. When Spain and the other European empires were first colonizing the New World, they could pull something like that off. European armies had such an advantage in weapons technology and organizational skill that they could overwhelm natives who didn't want to be controlled by the foreigners. Especially since they were assisted enormously by the fact that the Europeans brought diseases for which New World natives had low immune resistance and therefore killed off staggering numbers of them.

European empires endured in various places in the world into the 20th century. But the fate of Latin America showed the future. Like Britain's American colonies, the colonists of the early 19th century had weapons technology, scientific knowledge and social/organizational skills that were good enough to kick out the European powers, except for minor pockets (e.g., British Guiana).

There aren't going to be any replays of the European conquest of the New World. It didn't work in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. And it's not going to work in Iran, or Syria, or the Sudan, or wherever else our neoconservative warmongers think it would be cool to take over. Hell, it's not even working in the West Bank.

The United States has a huge technological advantage over the insurgents in Iraq, just as we had a big technological advantages over Vietnamese guerrillas and North Vietnamese regulars. But the technological gap between the technology of the Iraqi resistance and that of the United States is relatively much, much smaller than that between the European settlers and the New World natives.

The US does need some capacity to wage counterinsurgencies wars. But "success" in doing so means keeping a very realistic view of how much - or, better, how little - is actually going to be accomplished directly in such conflicts by the US in other countries. And it also means recognizing that they have to be fought without such tactics as blowing hell out of residential neighborhoods in crowded urban areas as part of "close air support".

And, since I've been trying to squeeze as many blog posts as possible out of Walter LaFeber's The American Age (1989), it's worth quoting his description of one straight-up American victory. That was when St. Reagan sent in the armed forces to conquer the deadly threat from the Caribbean nation of Grenada, population circa 30,000. (Yes, that's thirty thousand.) That's a situation where you would think that even a police department from a large American city could bring to bear enough force to overwhelm any opposition, no matter how much the natives hated the American invaders. Here's LaFeber's one-paragraph account:

In one tiny Caribbean island, however, Reagan had his way. Grenada had become independent of Great Britain in 1974, then was ruled by a highly corrupt anti-Communist regime until 1979, when Maurice Bishop forcefully replaced it with a leftist government that soon cooperated with Fidel Castro. Between 1981 and 1983, Bishop opened secret talks with the United States. He offered to call elections and discuss Washington's concerns, but Reagan finally refused to talk with Bishop in mid-1983. When a more radical Bernard Coard overthrew and killed Bishop, then fired into pro-Bishop protesters, U.S. officials determined to invade. The official reason for the October 25, 1983, invasion was to protect 595 U.S. medical students supposedly endangered by Coard's forces. The more important reason was the opportunity to use U.S. fire power quickly and successfully on behalf of the Reagan Doctrine - especially after 241 U.S. troops had been killed by terrorists two days before in Lebanon. The invasion, however, suffered embarrassing problems of logistics and a failure of the Eighty-second Airborne Division (supposedly the crack U.S. fighting force) to overcome 700 Cuban engineers who fought back. American troops even discovered that they had to use 1977 tourist maps that had such points of interest as nutmeg factories on it instead of the grid coordinates needed in battle. After the invasion force was increased from 1,900 to 6,000, had lost 19 dead (116 wounded), and had killed 24 Cubans and 45 Grenadan soldiers, it finally conquered the island. (my emphasis)

Overwhelming technological superiority just ain't what it used to be.

Tags: afghanistan war, air power, air power, grenada, iraq war

Surging to another victory after another after another

USA Today's main front-page story Monday was U.S. military steps up war-zone airstrikes by Jim Michaels 10/22/07:

The U.S. military has increased airstrikes in Iraq four-fold this year, reflecting a steep escalation in combat operations aimed at al-Qaeda and other militants.

Coalition forces launched 1,140 airstrikes in the first nine months of this year compared with 229 in all of last year, according to military statistics.

Airstrikes are up in Afghanistan, too. Coalition planes have made 2,764 bombing runs this year, up from 1,770 last year. The figures don't include strikes by helicopter gunships.

In some ways, that's all you really need to know to see what's happening in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Because especially in Iraq, we're talking about urban warfare. The immediately following paragraph in Michaels' story says, "The increasing use of air power also stems from improved accuracy and smaller munitions that allow commanders to launch airstrikes against insurgents who travel in small groups and sometimes hide among civilians."

When you fire rockets from helicopters and drop 500-lb. and 2000-lb. bombs from planes into urban residential neighborhoods, it wouldn't be far wrong to assume that nearly every one of them kills a civilian. Or several. Or many.

And the comment that the "increasing use of air power" results from "improved accuracy" is hokum. Improved accuracy of air power in urban warfare like in Iraq - and I'm sure it's often the case in Afghanistan in villages as well as cities - means that the 2000-lb. bomb is more likely to hit the residential building at which it was aimed. That means more deaths of civilian noncombatants, not less.

Why, you may ask, is the military expanding the air war greatly, even though of course the war has been one victory after the other since the day of the invasion, at least according to the PR put out by our infallible generals and our great leaders in the Cheney-Bush administration?

Well, remember how Dark Lord Cheney in his speech Sunday told us that the Soviet Union knew how to deal with Muslim terrorists? We get a glimpse of what that meant in the Soviets' war in Afghanistan from the article "Afghanistan" by Patricia Gossman in War Crimes 2.0, Roy Gutman, et al, eds. (2007):

In the countryside, Soviet forces bombed routinely and indiscriminately; the aim was both to demoralize the civilian population supporting the resistance and to destroy its means of providing food and shelter to the mujahidin.

The mujahidin in Afghanistan those days were called "freedom fighters" in America; today we call such freedom fighters Muslim jihadist terrorists. Gossman continues:

Thus, irrigation systems, cropland and other rural resources were bombed as well as villages. The bombing killed countless civilians and devastated the countryside. From the early 1980s on, most refugees arriving in Pakistan reported they had fled because of the bombing. In all, some five million Afghans fled the country. In addition to the bombing, Soviet and [Communist] Afghan forces carried out reprisals against civilians, executing any they believed to support the resistance. Soviet forces also sowed mines throughout the country; many remain a threat to Afghans living in rural areas today.

Yes, you can see why the Dark Lord would appreciate the virtues of that approach.

And, like the Dark Lord told us Sunday, the Soviets were much more successful in dealing with elements like the heroic Afghan freedom fighters cutthroat Muslim terrorists than the wimpy American approach under all administrations prior to this one. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December, 1979. It only took them until 1986 to realize that they had triumphed were fighting a hopeless battle and start their pullout, which was completed in 1988. They left an allied Communist government in power in Kabul, which they supported financially until it fell in 1992 in the civil war that raged until the Taliban took over in 1996.

Great model, there, Dick.

A large part of Michaels' article is just typing up military Air Force propaganda about how they are indispensable in counterinsurgency warfare. You have to read all the way to the final three paragraphs to get this:

However, increased use of air power raises the chances of killing innocent civilians, said Mark Clodfelter, a professor at the National War College. Winning over the population is key to defeating insurgents.

"You don't want bombing to be a recruiting method for the insurgents," Clodfelter said.

Airstrikes in Afghanistan this year allegedly killed dozens of civilians, angering the population and drawing criticism from Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai.

To repeat, the increased precision (to the extent that such is not PR hype) when using bombs on cities and even villages means more civilian casualties, not less.

And, you know, it somehow seems to really piss people off when you blow up their family members and cousins and neighbors. One more inscrutable mystery of the Arab mind, I suppose.

Tags: air power, air war, iraq war

Another general has some advice

Wesley Clark has a long op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post that's well worth a read, The Next War 09/16/07. The most memorable passage is the one just posted as our quote of the day:

War is the last, last, last resort. It always brings tragedy and rarely brings glory.

Whatever else happens in the wake of the Iraq War fiasco, this cultural and (especially) political glorification of war that has become so prevalent needs to be seriously challenged.

It's appalling that we're at a place where it seems startling to see a national leader say something that that. Pitiful, really. It should be such a commonplace observation that people would hardly notice it.

But the neoconservative and Christian fundamentalist glorification of war and the preventive war doctrine that Cheney and Bush made official US strategic policy are strong rejections of that idea. It has often seemed during the Cheney years like the use of force and the threat of force are the only meaningful tools these people see in the foreign policy toolbox.

As Clark puts it in another memorable phrase speaking to that point:

How tragic it is to see old men who are unwilling to talk to potential adversaries but seem so ready to dispatch young people to fight and die.

Clark's article addresses his concerns about the threats of war against Iran. He lays out a similar military scenario to what others have described for the initial attack. And he continues, "But if its clear how a war with Iran would start, it's far less clear how it would end." As he indicates and others like Pat Lang and Larry Johnson have explained at some length, it's likely to end badly for the United States.

Clark talks about how the military's emphasis on high-tech conventional war left them significantly unprepared to fight the kind of counterinsurgency wars they are now prosecuting in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's also notable, given the GOP's current orgy of general-worship, that Clark doesn't consider his fellow generals to be above criticism or devoid of meaningful responsibility. After the obligatory reference to the US military being the greatest fighting force in the history of the universe, he writes:

But shame on political leaders who would hide behind their top generals. It was hard not to catch a whiff of that during last week's hearings. The Constitution, however, is not ambivalent about where the responsibility for command lies - the president is the commander in chief.

Surely here is where some of the most salient lessons from recent wars lie: in forcing civilian leaders to shoulder their burdens of ultimate responsibility and in demanding that generals unflinchingly offer their toughest, most seasoned, advice. Gen. Tommy R. Franks embarked on the 2001 Afghanistan operation without a clear road map for success, or even a definition of what victory would look like. Somehow, that was good enough for him and his bosses. So Osama bin Laden slunk away, the Taliban was allowed to regroup, and Afghanistan is now mired deep in trouble and sinking fast. ...

At the same time, the United States' top generals must understand that their duty is to win, not just to get along. They must have the insight and character to demand the resources necessary to succeed - and have the guts to either obtain what they need or to resign. If they get their way and still don't emerge victorious, they must be replaced. That is the lot they accepted when they pinned on those four shiny silver stars. (my emphasis)

I would add a caution here that there is virtually no tradition in the US military of resigning in protest. And I'm not convinced it would be advisable to have one get started.

For generals to resign in protest over a war policy they disagreed with could well further the politicizing of the officer corps, which has already become a serious problem. (See Saviour-General Petraeus.) Under our Constitutional system, it's the responsibility of Congress, first and foremost, and the President to decide what wars to fight and what the parameters of those wars will be. Clearly, Presidents have often taken more of a lead than the Founders envisioned. (And under Dick Cheney's theory of unlimited Republican Presidential power, the only role for Congress is to appropriate whatever funds Our Republican Leader needs for whatever war policies His Majesty chooses to implement.)

But that's not the role of generals. Even in the case of a general faced with an illegal order - even Saviour-General Petraeus surprisingly told Congress last week that if he were ordered to attack Iran without Congressional authorization the first thing he would do is consult his attorney - it's a genuine question whether resignation would be the right course of action. All members of the military are required to disobey illegal orders. Is resignation the appropriate response for a general? It isn't a simple question.

I also have some reservations about the following piece in Clark's article:

One of the most important lessons from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and Vietnam, for that matter - is that we need to safeguard our troops. The U.S. public is more likely to sour on a conflict when it sees the military losing blood, not treasure. So to keep up our staying power, our skill in hunting and killing our foes has to be matched by our care in concealing and protecting our troops. Three particularly obvious requirements are body armor, mine-resistant vehicles, and telescopic and night sights for every weapon. But these things are expensive for a military that has historically been enamored of big-ticket items such as fighter planes, ships and missiles. Many of us career officers understood these requirements after Vietnam, but we couldn't shift the Pentagon's priorities enough to save the lives of forces sent to Iraq years later. (my emphasis)

There's a complicated problem buried in what may sound like fairly straightforward ideas in that paragraph.

For one thing, I don't think it's empirically true that the American public is more likely to turn against a war "when it sees the military losing blood, not treasure". As the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed, all wars are popular for the first 30 days. But the American public has shown itself able to distinguish between bloody but necessary wars (the Second World War) and far less bloody but strategically disastrous ones (the Iraq War).

Also, that notion that emphasizing force protection is critical to maintaining public support for the war is actually an argument used heavily by air power true believers, who argue for the emphasis on high-tech weaponry that Clark is arguing against here.

The short version is, air power advocates say that a war will be more popular for the US public if it relies heavily on air strikes and bombing, because lots of foreigners will get killed but fewer Americans. In practice, that leads to what we see in Iraq now that is going virtually unreported by the Establishment press: trying to fight urban guerrilla warfare with rockets fired from aircraft and 2,000-lb. bombs. (For more on this, see my posts of 04/13/07 and 06/08/07.)

Also along those lines, I also have reservations about Clark's proposal to shift relatively more funding toward the Army and Marines and away from the Air Force and its high-tech toys (he discreetly avoids mentioning the specific inter-service rivalries involved):

Bulking up these forces, perhaps by as many as 100,000 more active troops, and refitting and recovering from Iraq could cost $70 billion to $100 billion.

Just as our Congressional representatives have to get a lot more willing to take our generals' claims with a genuinely skeptical and sensibly critical attitude, they also need to come to grips with the crazy fact that the United States alone spends half or more of the money spent on the military in the entire world.

I am sympathetic to the concept that Clark advocates here. We do need more readiness to fight "small wars" and less continuing preparation to fight the Soviet Red Army pouring through the Fulda Gap in Germany.

But military budgets should be driven by sensible foreign and military policy priorities. Are we going to plan to fight only conventional wars in the future, which is what happened after the Vietnam War? If so, then the President and the Congress need to realize that they don't have the forces prepared to go conquer and an Iraq and rule it for years. And that they will have to find other ways to deal with such perceived problems.

On the other hand, we all generally, and Congress in particular, need to face the fact that there is a certain "if we have it, we'll be tempted to use it" factor in military spending. Do we really want to plan and announce to the world that we're gearing our armed forces to take over other countries on a large scale like we are some aspiring 19th-century imperial power? And can we this time be a lot more realistic about how near-impossible that ground-up nation-building is, especially for the US acting unilaterally? To we really want to structure our military in a way that creates some incentive to try out the preparations in Iraq War-type conflicts?

And Congress needs to stop looking at military budgets as domestic job programs and "pork" for their home districts - far easier said than done, I know. But as Andrew Bacevich said a couple of years ago, if we set a goal of spending as much on the US military as the next 10 largest military-spending countries combined, we would still be making huge cuts in our military budget. I don't know what the "right" dollar amount is. Still, half of the entire world's military spending is just too dang much for the United States.

There's also the question of blatant boondoggles, like the Star Wars "missile defense" racket. That is just mainlining taxpayers' money into corporate treasuries with no real return in military effectiveness, while adding real additional risk to our strategic posture. If Congress wants a jobs program, fund a jobs program that does something useful instead!

The worst outcome on military spending would be a High Broderist "moderate" compromise, where the Army and its suppliers lobby for more spending on the Army, while the rest of the military budget stays intact or grows to "compensate" the other services and their suppliers for the additional emphasis on the Army, with no serious re-evaluation of overall military strategy.

A good start on changing overall strategy would be to drop the Cheney-Bush doctrine of preventive war, which anyhow is flat illegal under international law and disastrous in practice.

Tags: air power, military budget, military industrial complex, preventive war, wesley clark

The (Air) Force strikes back

True believers in air power never lose faith. No matter how many times experience in the real world fails to live up to their expectations. A new technological innovation like unmanned surveillance flights, a new approach like the famous "shock-and-awe" campaign, an adjustment of doctrine to allow even more bombing with even fewer restrictions, something has always just been developed or is just around the corner that will make air power invincible and ground forces obsolete.

Of course, in the world of military budgets and organizations, inter-service rivalry among the Army, Navy and Air Force play a major role in perception of which approaches are more effective. Sometimes, the results can seem very counter-intuitive. For instance, the Marines may point out embarassing deficiences in the performance of Army units, problems that the Army generals would prefer not to publicize any more than they have to.

I recently came across this classic case of air power True Faith, as applied to counterinsurgency operations. Counterinsurgency by air power, you ask? Faith knows no bounds. The article is America's asymmetric advantage by Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap, Jr. Armed Forces Journal Sept 2006. He begins in the first paragraph by sneering at advocates for ground forces:

Is air power the new face of successful war-fighting? Much to the dismay of the boots-on-the-ground zealots, or BOTGZ (pronounced bow-togs), the answer for today's democracies may well be "yes."

Bowtogs? You know a high-minded essay is under way.

He proceeds to say that while those pokey Army and Marine doofuses were screwing around and spinning their wheels, the Air Force was getting things done:

During the summer [of 2006], while U.S. ground forces in Iraq were distracted investigating potential war criminals in their midst, air power delivered a major success. The killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was, if not a decisive victory, still the best news of the season.

Of course, that "major success" seemed to have approximately zero effect on the course of the war. Other than that, it was spectacular. But notice also that in his first paragraph, he highlights the "war criminals" among the Army and Marines.

He does go on to call the Army and Marine "the finest ground forces in the history of warfare" - but from the true believers in air power, that's scant praise. In parts of the article, she sounds a bit like Noam Chomsky arguing against American imperialism:

As Tom Ricks' new book about Iraq, "Fiasco," argues convincingly, absent overwhelming numbers, it is virtually impossible for even well-equipped and conventionally trained ground forces to defeat terrorist insurgencies in the midst of sullen populations often sympathetic to the enemy. ...

... With respect to the overwhelming numbers scheme [of fighting counterinsurgency], there are daunting practical problems. Specifically, the end of conscription obliges the U.S. to provide costly incentives to populate our all-volunteer force. With personnel costs soaring, not even the wealth of the U.S. can support the hundreds of thousands of troops that, for example, flooded Germany and Japan at end of World War II to prevent resistance to occupation from taking root. Today, such numbers do not exist and it is unrealistic to believe they are politically feasible to recreate.

Plus, there's the eternal bogeyman of our generals, The Media:

As television screens fill with heartbreaking stories of dead and wounded soldiers and their families, such images over time often create political limitations as to how long a democratic society will sustain an operation like that in Iraq. This is true even though the casualty rates are, in purely historic military terms, relatively low. This media effect is a fundamental change from earlier eras.

Those assumptions are axiomatic for those who want the armed forces optimized for conventional warfare. But it's all based on bad assumptions, not least among them the notion that the US military "won" in Vietnam but were stabbed in the back by The Media and cowardly civilian politicians.

And here we get to the pitch for air power, based on those bad assumptions, that has been persuasive to military and civilian leaders alike - combined with another swipe at those undisciplined ground forces:

When thousands of troops are on the ground fighting an insurgency such as that in Iraq, it is, regrettably, all but inevitable that you will have situations such as Abu Ghraib and Hadithah arise from time to time — horrific and tragic, but predictable and even unavoidable. Yet, to a degree unprecedented in past conflicts, real and perceived illegalities are subject to exploitation not just by adversaries but also by legitimate political opponents. Regardless, the result is an erosion of the public support that democracies need to conduct any kind of protracted military operation. The point is that, again, information-age realities limit boots-on-the-ground options. (my emphasis)

Besides, it's no longer the good old days when the ground forces could just go in and massacre a bunch of natives and be done with it:

Most important, their hearts and minds are simply not amenable to the reasoned techniques that underlay classic counterinsurgency texts. They are not rational actors in the sense that they are propelled by some political or social ideology; instead, they are driven by unyielding religious fanaticism. In the past, such insurgencies did exist and were crushed the old-fashioned way: by annihilation. That is not exactly a viable option in a world where human rights groups, the media and others too often choose to find something good about the most sadistic terrorist organizations. (my emphasis)

Dang, boy, if it wasn't for all those sissy human rights organizations, we wouldn't have to worry about all this counterinsurgency crap!

Fortunately, a solution is at hand: air power!

So where does that leave us? If we are smart, we will have a well-equipped high-technology air power capability. Air power is America's asymmetric advantage and is really the only military capability that can be readily applied across the spectrum of conflict, including, as is especially important these days, potential conflict. Consider the record. It was primarily air power, not land power, that kept the Soviets at bay while the U.S. won the Cold War. And it was not just the bomber force and the missileers; it was the airlifters, as well. There are few strategic victories in the annals of military history more complete and at so low a human cost as that won by American pilots during the Berlin airlift. Armageddon was avoided. (my emphasis)

Yeah, the Berlin Airlift was pretty much like the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars except that, well, it wasn't.

But this is the pitch. Air power minimizes American casualties. And it doesn't risk so much bad publicity, because when you drop a 2,000-lb. bomb on a village or an urban neighborhood, you can claim that all the bodies lying around down there afterwards are terrorists, or Al Qaida, or Taliban:

Air power also doesn't have the multi-aspect vulnerabilities that boots on the ground do. It can apply combat power from afar and do so in a way that puts few of our forces at risk. ...

And, of course, bombs will go awry. Allegations will be made (as they are currently against the Israelis) of targeting civilians and so forth. But the nature of the air weapon is such that an Abu Ghraib or Hadithah simply cannot occur. The relative sterility of air power — which the boots-on-the-ground types oddly find distressing as somehow unmartial — nevertheless provides greater opportunity for the discreet application of force largely under the control of well-educated, commissioned officer combatants. Not a total insurance policy against atrocity, but a far more risk-controlled situation.

Then he soars into a mystic state of visionary bliss. Not only does air power save American lives and kill lots of foreigners without too much bad publicity. It puts the fear of God into those backward natives! Then they won't mess with us Americans any more. Hail, we didn't even need those useless ground forces for the initial invasion:

The advances in American air power technology in recent years make U.S. dominance in the air intimidating like no other aspect of combat power for any nation in history.

The result? Saddam Hussein's pilots buried their airplanes rather than fly them against American warplanes. Indeed, the collapse of the Iraqi armed forces was not, as the BOTGZ would have you believe, mainly because of the brilliance of our ground commanders or, in fact, our ground forces at all. The subsequent insurgency makes it clear that Iraqis are quite willing to take on our ground troops. What really mattered was the sheer hopelessness that air power inflicted on Iraq's military formations. (my emphasis)

This is part of air power dogma. Bombing breaks the will of the enemy, including the enemy population. Despite the fact that this theory got an extensive laboratory test in the Second World War, and even more so in the Vietnam War (where a greater tonnage of bombs was dropped than in the entire European theater in the Second World War), and it didn't work out that way - the dogma still has to be true. At least for the faithful.

He sees the same smashing success in Afghanistan:

So what explains the rapid collapse of the Taliban and al-Qaida in 2001? Modern air power. More specifically, the marriage of precision weapons with precise targeting by tiny numbers of Special Forces troops on the ground. The results were stunning. Putatively invulnerable positions the Taliban had occupied for years literally disappeared in a rain of satellite-directed bombs from B-1s and B-52s flying so high they could be neither seen nor heard.

This new, high-tech air power capability completely unhinged the resistance without significant commitment of American boots on the ground. Indeed, the very absence of American troops became a source of discouragement. As one Afghan told the New York Times, "We pray to Allah that we have American soldiers to kill," adding disconsolately, "These bombs from the sky we cannot fight." Another equally frustrated Taliban fighter was reported in the London Sunday Telegraph recently as fuming that "American forces refuse to fight us face to face," while gloomily noting that "[U.S.] air power causes us to take heavy casualties." In other words, the Taliban and al-Qaida were just as tough as the mujahideen who fought the Russians, and more than willing to confront U.S. ground forces, but were broken by the hopelessness that American-style air power inflicted upon them.(my emphasis)

Of course, if all this were true, no one would be fighting the Americans or our NATO allies today in Iraq or Afghanistan. But they are. And air power didn't succeed in nailing Bin Laden and his chief lieutenants in the Battle of Tora Bora. Bin Laden and most of his most trustworthy cadre got away.

In the end, this boundless faith in the terror-inducing power of bombing is the core of the air power gospel:

It is no exaggeration to observe that almost every improvement in the military situation in Iraq and Afghanistan is attributable to air power in some form; virtually every setback, and especially the strategically catastrophic allegations of war crimes, is traceable to the land forces.

So why give those clowns any budget dollars? Just send it all to the Air Force and we'll build a Star Wars missile shield and everything will be all right. And if some of the natives in far-away countries get restless, we'll just go crush them in sanitary strikes from the air by making them quake in fear at our power:

This illustrates another salient feature of air power: its ability to temper the malevolent tendencies of societies accustomed to the rewards of modernity. Given air power's ability to strike war-supporting infrastructure, the powerful impulse of economic self-interest complicates the ability of despots to pursue malicious agendas. American air power can rapidly educate cultured and sophisticated societies about the costs of war and the futility of pursuing it. This is much the reason why air power alone delivered victory in Operation Allied Force in Kosovo in 1999, without the need to put a single U.S. soldier at risk on the ground. (my emphasis)

The Kosovo War is superficially a case in which air power lived up to its potential. But it's not nearly that simple, as I plan to discuss in a future post. Let's just say here that it's been in the news this week that the Western powers and Russia are still disputing over Kosovo's independence. Substantial NATO forces - those useless ground forces - are still there keeping the peace. And the peace is reportedly pretty precarious. Eight years later, the absolute victory supposedly won by air power is still of uncertain prospects. Dunlap would probably assure us that had we just patrolled Kosovo with airplanes and occasionally fired rockets at suspicious-looking characters instead of wasting time having NATO ground troops there, that everything would be fine now.

He goes on to argue further about the general obsolescene and irrelevance of ground forces and the incredible fecklessness of the "bowtogs". Besides, his argument suggests we need to forget about all this counterinsurgency nonsense and keep preparing for war with Russia, or China, or Islamofascomism, or whatever else keeps the bucks flowing to the Air Force. And if we do have to fight one of these silly counterinsurgency wars, we'll just handle it with air power:

The point is how much of our air power — our most effective national security component — do we want to sacrifice to maintain large active-duty formations of ground forces useful only in selected contexts?Given his general argument, it's hard to imagine he thinks their useful in any context.

Does anyone truly believe America will do a nation-building "Iraq" again anytime soon? Are we likely, with the benefit of our experience in Vietnam and now Iraq, to attempt yet another hearts-and-minds campaign the BOTGZ seem to desire?

This was the grand post-Vietnam solution embraced by the officer corps of all services: just don't do counterinsurgency any more.

Or is the more likely scenario one in which the need is to destroy an adversary's capacity to project power that damages U.S. interests? If so, air strikes to demolish enemy capabilities, complemented by short-term, air-assisted raids and high-tech Air Force surveillance platforms, are the answer, not colossal boots-on-the-ground efforts.

Yep, air power does it all.

This desire to market their talents and accomplishments is presumably why the Air Force provides regular summaries at its public puff-piece Web site on the air attacks it's making in Iraq and Afghanistan. For instance, in the June 7 airpower summary (published 06/08/07), we read that there were 42 combat ("close air-support") mission flown in Afghanistan and 62 in Iraq. If what Dunlap writes is correct, you would think that after over four years in Iraq and well over five years in Afghanistan, that the terrified Tabliban and Iraqi terrorists and all the other bad actors would have long since laid down their weapons and stopped causing trouble. Maybe another four or five years of hundreds of air missions a month our invincible Air Force will persuade everyone to cower in terror and not fight the Americans.

Or not.

Tags: air power, air war

Counterinsurgency

Edward Luttwak's article on counterinsurgency in the February 2007 Harper's is now available online, Dead End. A large part of his argument is that nationalism, or in a less pleasant form, hatred of foreigners, is a powerful motivator for insurgent operations against foreign armies. In other words, a counterinsurgency by a native government can be successful where one directed by a foreign power can't.

This problem is painfully obvious in Iraq, though the same problem at a lower level of death and destruction faces NATO forces in Afghanistan. How anyone imagined such missions could be accomplished without large numbers of Arabic speakers (for Iraq) and Pashto and Dari and speakers for Afghanistan is mind-boggling to consider. Luttwak writes:

It is a sad story indeed when the astonishing linguistic incapacity of U.S. military forces and intelligence organizations is contrasted with the abundance of American civilians who speak all known foreign languages, and the brilliant record of foreign-language education in the U.S. Army and Navy, which used to produce as many good Chinese and Japanese speakers as they wanted by selecting for natural aptitude in the recruit pool, giving them a year of intensive courses (eight hours a day, six days a week), and quickly sending away those who failed to keep up with their classes. Nothing prevents the military from doing the same for Arabic, Persian and, say, Azeri now, except for an unwillingness to invest in the future, and probably a lack of disciplined volunteers willing to learn a language eight hours a day, six days a week, for a whole year or more.

Note that this is not primarily a problem of civilian interference or Presidential incompetence or lack of Will among the American public or any of the other alibis that the generals are already using to duck blame for their own failures in the Iraq War and Afghanistan. Prioritizing language instruction, at least for Arabic, is something that should have been obvious even as early as the Gulf War of 1991. It was obvious to military decision-makers by the end of 2003 latest that the occupation of Iraq was going to be a long haul. If they had started such year-long crash courses in Arabic even in 2004, they would have many more Arabic speakers available by now. The generals screwed that one up.

Luttwak also explains the limitations of the high-tech weapons and gadgets in fighting insurgents. This, by the way, is a feature of all wars. There's always some new techie device or super-duper new weapon that is going to change everything. The airplane, for example, was going to make war obsolete by creating such devastating destruction on the enemy that no one could consider having a war. Oddly enough, multiple experiments over decades and many wars don't seem to be able to wipe that particular fantasy aware from even otherwise reasonable minds. Luttwak writes:

Naturally, every form of technical intelligence and every possible sensor is being employed to supplant the lack of very elementary but indispensable human intelligence, including synthetic-aperture radars aboard big four-engine aircraft and the infrared and video sensors of the latest targeting pods on two-seat heavyweight jet fighters. The expense of these flights alone is huge, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars a month, but the results are very meager. The aim, of course, is to gather immediately actionable imagery, especially at night, showing such things as insurgents placing side bombs alongside U.S. patrol routes or approaching oil pipelines bearing explosives. Failing that, it is at least hoped that possible insurgent activities could be detected for further investigation; for example, people furtively bringing things to isolated buildings at night. But in practice, unless insurgents carry recognizable weapons, it is simply impossible to differentiate between them and innocent people going about their peaceful business. In the meantime, very elaborate equipment that is very costly to operate, and very effective in identifying armored vehicles, bunkers, missile launchers, and any other readily recognizable target of classic form, is still being employed every day in futile attempts to detect deliveries of a few dollars of food, or the emplacement of readily improvised explosive devices. This too is an aspect of the structural unsuitability of modern armed forces to fight elusive enemies that present no stable targets.

It's worth noting here that air power is being used for more than high-tech reconaissance. As Tom Engelhardt writes in Words to Die For TomDispatch.com 04/17/07:

Air power has long been the American way of war. In fact, the use of air power with all its indiscriminate terror has, in the last year, ratcheted up strikingly in Afghanistan and may now be in the process of doing the same in Iraq. (It's hard to tell without the necessary reporting.) Journalists in Baghdad evidently do not look up - and military press briefers don't point to the skies. We have, in fact, been bombing and missiling in heavily populated urban areas of Iraq throughout the occupation years. But no descriptive language has been developed that would capture in any significant way the loosing of the U.S. Air Force on either country; and so, in a sense, the regular (if, in Iraq, still limited) use of air power has next to no reality for Americans, even though Iraq's skies are filled with attack helicopters, jets, and drones. (my emphasis)

There are some problems in Luttwak's arguments. He seems to suggest toward the end that a longer-term commitment by the US to govern a conquered country like Iraq - conquered in conventional military terms, at least - would make a successful counterinsurgency effort more feasible.

And what would any article on counterinsurgency be without the inevitable Second World War reference? Luttwak has an uncomforable discussion about how Roman ruthlessness back in the old days and German reprisals in occupied territories during the Second World War were effective in maintaining control. He also says that this wouldn't work for the US because we wouldn't be willing to do such a thing.

Actually, the pacification of Fallujah just after the 2004 Presidential election was largely the Roman method. The city was evacuated and something like a third of the buildings in the city distroyed. The resistance remains active in Fallujah. And the air war referenced in the Tom Engelhardt quote above is also a kind of Terror in its old-fashioned sense from the French Revolution.

And a couple of thoughts about the German occupation example. In the east, i.e., central Europe and Russia, the Hitler government wasn't interested in having friendly cooperating governments. That territory was "Lebensraum" (living space) for the German people in Hitler's eyes. The supposed lesser peoples like the Slavs were to be enslaved and possibly eliminated. "Wining hearts and minds" over the long term was just not part of the plan.

I don't know enough specifics about the Third Reich's intentions for France to be able to judge that example that well. But in that case, as also on the eastern front, the partisan guerrilla forces were acting in very much a subordinate role to the conventional forces on the other side of the German lines behind which they found themselves. As long as there was any reasonable hope of a counteroffensive by their side's main forces, which was the case on both fronts even at the darkest moments for the Allies, the partisans could afford to limit their attacks in order to be of maximum use as an harassment force later on when the German position weakened. Luttwak is surely partly right in the argument that he makes here. But those German-occupation examples are really of limited value in determining what was effective in opposing insurgencies like the one in Iraq.

Finally, Luttwak opens his article by accepting what I think is a deeply flawed assumption about the American people's attitude toward casualties in war:

Modern armed forces continue to be structured for large-scale war, but advanced societies whose small families lack expendable children have a very low tolerance for casualties. Even supposedly warlike Americans [??? who besides Republican warmongers assumes that?] gravely count casualties in Iraq that in three years have yet to reach 3,000 — fewer than were lost in many a single day of battle in past wars. Fortunately, this refusal to spill the blood needed to fuel battles diminishes the likelihood that advanced societies will deliberately set out to fight one another (pas des enfants, pas des Suisses, pas de guerre) unless they are somehow able to convince themselves that a war could be entirely or very largely aerial and naval. Such wars, however, are difficult to imagine, except when islands are involved, as in a China-Taiwan war, which is very improbable for its own reasons. Air and naval forces can certainly be employed advantageously against any less advanced enemy incautious enough to rely on a conventional defense, conducted by regular forces, but in that context as well here must be severe doubts about the continued usefulness of the ground orces of advanced countries that are intolerant of casualties. It is easy enough to blockade the enemy, to successfully bomb all the right nodal points and shut down electrical, transportation, and communications networks. Air strikes can disable runways and destroy both sheltered and unsheltered aircraft, ballistic missiles, and nuclear installations. Air power can also sink warships, or rout any mechanized forces eployed in the open, as the United States did with Iraq in 1991 and partly in 2003, and as it could do with Iran. No real role would remain for ground forces except to dislodge the enemy from any territory he had occupied, or to occupy his own territory. That, however, is bound to cost casualties that might not be tolerated; it is also bound to provoke an insurgency. (my emphasis)

In my earlier comments on John Mueller's arguments about war and public opinion, I talked about my reservations on this widely-held assumptions. It seems to me that the example of the Second World War (there it is again!) shows that the public will support a long war with heavy casualties if they have good reason to believe that it's in the national interest. The Iraq War shows that the public can also reject a war that most people don't believe is vital to the US, even with relatively small death toll. (Although we should note that total casualty figures including both injuries and deaths are larger in relation to the Vietnam War than the death toll. More severely wounded soldiers are surviving longer thanks to better battlefield medical care and also the ability to airlift the wounded to top-quality military hospitals in Germany.)

Tags: air power, air war, counterinsurgency, iraq war, edward luttwak, tom engelhardt

Air power, the magic key to victory?

The Spring 2007 Army War College journal Parameters features an article on the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006: The 2006 Lebanon War: Lessons Learned by Sharah Kreps. Kreps looks at the hopes the Israeli military placed in air power during that war and how the results came up short. She argues that Israeli war planners say the Kosovo war as a model, reading its results to say that air power alone could defeat Hizbullah.

One of the tricky parts of this article is the concept that not so often discussed this way in civilian reporting, the idea that an emphasis on air power is driven by the "casualty aversion" of the home public, in this case Israel's. Air power can in theory minimize own-side casualties. But they also magnify casualties on the other side, including "collateral damage", aka, killing and injured civilian noncombatants, which can be seriously counterproductive to the goals of a war.

Also, as with any military article, it's helpful to keep in mind how particular analyses could be used in inter-service rivalries for funds and prestige.

William Arkin looks at what appears to him to be more than a little menance-mongering by the Air Force in Is Iraq Making China the Next Soviet Union? Washington Post 04/12/07. To the Air Force, it seems, the Chinese are coming after us on all fronts. Arkin's conclusion:

I for one can only see disaster ahead in trying to turn today's China into yesterday's Soviet Union. Not that we "lose," but just in terms of wasted energy and resources and the wrong course. We need not only to get out of Iraq but also a complete change in priorities.

Tags: air power, israel, lebanon, william arkin

Supporting the troops - and the "support the troops" slogan

The San Francisco Chronicle had a good editorial this past Sunday on the "support the troops" = "cheer for the administration's war policy" line that the Republicans are pushing, more and more frantically as time goes on, it seems, To honor the troops 03/18/07:

So what does it really mean to "support the troops?" In the administration's view, an echo of the reasoning that sent us deeper into the quagmire of Vietnam, withdrawing from a war somehow discredits the sacrifices of the soldiers who risked, and in some cases lost, their lives in the war. That rationale for continuing a war was nonsensical then - and it is nonsensical now.

A nation's support for its troops is not measured by its willingness to send soldiers into battle, but what it does for them when they get there - and what it does for them when they return home with the psychic and physical wounds of their duty. "Support the troops" involves much more than putting a bumper sticker on the car or sending packages of cookies to the soldiers. It means giving them the armament and strategy to succeed in their mission. It means giving the wounded the highest quality care. It means acknowledging, with dignity and decorum, the sacrifice of those who died.

In too many ways, the Bush administration has not given our troops the support they deserve in this war. Even setting aside the question of the necessity of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the troops have not been well served by their commanders in Washington. (my emphasis)

I've been reading a couple of the essays in a 1976 book edited by Anthony Lake, The Vietnam Legacy: The War, American Society and the Future of American Foreign Policy. After more than three decades of conservative re-imagining the history of the Vietnam War, it can be suprising to see what people were actually saying about in in real time, or in the immediate aftermath.

In an essay on "The War and the American Military", Adam Yarmolinsky talked about the officer corps' view of the war, civilian-military relations and the challenges they saw facing them at that time. One of the things he said is a real reminder about the way this idea developed that anyone who isn't cheering for our infallible generals and pretending to believe them even when they're obviously lying in our faces is somehow failing to "support the troops" or "honor the troops", etc. He wrote that, in addition to the general mood of skepticism and critical thinking toward the military that was widespread at the time:

A secondary effect on the military's relations with society is the extraordinary defensiveness of their spokesmen toward civilian audiences. Their rhetoric about the U.S. military may be the same as the rhetoric of the 1960s, but the tone is different. Criticism is anticipated even when it is not forthcoming. Even with an Administration [the Nixon-Ford administration] that is significantly less critical of the military than were the Kennedy or Johnson Administrations iwhich sharply attacked organizational practices and procedures even while increasing military budgets), the defensiveness has been intensified. It is as if military leaders see themselves being held responsible for all the shortcomings of American society.

In other words, there was quite a bit of just plain whining going on along these lines. This mood among so much of the officer corps was an important part of why the loss in the Vietnam War did not receive the amount of honest critical reflection that it deserved.

Yarmolinsky's description of the questioning of military claims and military authorities in that time is a reminder that a critical attitude in those matters is a very healthy thing:

The principal effect of Vietnam on the military's relations with society was to lower its prestige, at the same time that its size and potential influence were significantly increased. Nobody talked about a military-industrial complex in World War II or in the Korean War, and the phrase coined by General Eisenhower at the very end of his Administration only acquired general currency as the Vietnam crisis deepened.

The general identification of the military-industrial complex as a major factor in American society coincided with the development of an increasingly critical attitude toward the military, even within the congressional committees that had been the military's principal defenders. The criticism became skepticism and doubt, extending from the Vietnam involvement to the wisdom of particular military research and development efforts.

We shouldn't confuse "supporting the troops" with falling for budget boondoggle being promoted by amibitious generals or greedy Halliburton lobbyists.

Congress certainly needs to take a look at the failures, misdeeds and crimes on the part of civilian officials in the course of the Iraq War. But the military itself merits some real criticism, too, in connection with this disaster. William Arkin gave his own summary of some of those problems that need to be addressed in It's Time to See the Army like FEMA Early Warning blog 03/12/07:

Here's the Army, within its own share of responsibilities:

• Doing essentially nothing between the 1991 Gulf War and Sept. 11 to boost the number of Arabic speakers and increase cultural understanding of the Middle East, and doing nothing to understand Iraq and its internal culture up to the 2003 war.

• Not taking charge of post-war planning in the pre-war period, what had become the traditional Army mission with its 1990's Peacekeeping Institutes and its "experience" in Bosnia and elsewhere, and the shortchanging the effort with inadequate resources.

• Not understanding the Iraqi Army - their own military opponent - well enough to believe, as the politicos did, that they would remain in their barracks and resume their work for whatever Iraqi national government emerged. Chalabi and company might have served Kool Aid to Rumsfeld regarding how American would be greeted with flowers, but the Army didn't even understand the Iraqi Army and what it was.

• Garrisoning itself and slowly removing itself from the Iraqi street except to "patrol" and move goods and services around to the garrisons, the sure development of a moving target for IEDs and a practice now being reversed with forward operating bases and combat outposts

• Not equipping soldiers at the basic and personal level, necessitating - as the mountain of letters I've received attest to - that soldier's families' ship to them often expensive goods, gear that has become essential for the war the Army couldn't anticipate.

• Underestimating and then taking too long to recognize the post-war security challenges and the growing insurgency, even years into the occupation, and then not adjusting strategies, tactics, and deployments until it was too late.

• Developing the wrong military command structure for Iraq, taking too long to transform V Corps into a Joint Task Force, taking too long to develop training and detainee commands of substance and authority. As current Iraq commander Gen. David H. Petraeus said in his own confirmation hearings, "We took too long to develop the concepts and structures needed to build effective Iraqi Security Forces..."

The "we" here is the Army. These are Army decisions. ... Again and again, they [senior Army officers] demonstrated that they were more interested in tomorrow's budget and Washington lunches than soldier resources and hot meals. (my emphasis)

He also has some very useful thoughts about the political seductions of the air power enthusiasts' boosterism in Shock and Awe Worked, God Help Us Early Warning blog 03/19/07. The role of air power in the Iraq War and in planning for the future is something that Congress needs to take a serious and critical look at. Arkin writes:

If there is one thing that defines American military technology, one thing that floats seductively suggesting engagement without true commitment, it is airpower.

Airpower was the boost of confidence we needed in 2003 to travel on our own highway of death [into the Iraq War]. Given the current ground quagmire in Iraq, airpower will be even more our downfall in the future.

Air power didn't live up to its hype in the Iraq War - just as it has failed to do in every war from the Second World War on. At some point, Congress and the public need to start catching on to that. And making decisions accordingly.

Tags: adam yarmolinsky, air power, iraq, iraq war, support the troops, vietnam war, william arkin