WhatFinger


Applying air power has some utility but the real work of fighting them is not going to be so distant… or clean. The illusion of action is not a substitute for effective action

Huffing and Puffing and Blowing Houses Down



Huffing and Puffing and Blowing Houses Down
The Royal Canadian Air Force, (RCAF) is back in action again, dropping bombs on the slave-taking, throat-cutting rapists of ISIS. The morality of the situation is unequivocal, the effect of our contribution to the war on the new Caliphate is – alas – doubtful.
We are fighting an ideology, an idea that keeps attracting new adherents and captures their hearts and seduces their minds. This means dropping bombs on their partisans in a far off place might be a salutary idea but we are far from engaging them in a decisive arena. In the minds of Western politicians, using airpower is an inexpensive alternative to the hard work of really getting involved in warfare. It lets us get involved – often in affairs we should stay clear from -- and provides a relatively risk-free intervention because we are not getting our soldiers killed in combat or making uncomfortable decisions This lets political leaders believe they are accomplishing something without getting their own hands dirty. Airpower can work and can be awesomely destructive… if the enemy has something to destroy. As an alternative to getting troops on the ground shooting and bayonetting somebody who deserves it (as the members of ISIS certainly do), sending airpower to do a man’s work is a spectacular failure. The world’s first air raid occurred in Libya when the Italians wrestled it away from the Turks in 1911. A stuttering Taube biplane tossed out some improvised bombs over the Turks and a new age of airpower was born. Since then, policy makers have consistently misused it.

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World War I and II

After its troubled childhood over the mud, blood and trenches of the Western Front in World War One, the military airplane was embraced as a means of imposing destruction on enemies without actually committing more men to the hardships of war on the ground. The British tried to police Iraq in the early 1920s by sending biplanes instead of soldiers… it proved more expensive and yielded less results. The military airplane matured in the Second World War, especially as Allied bomber fleets were able to shatter entire cities while only losing men in the thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands. This was a quantum improvement over traditional ways of taking fire and sword to the enemy’s home populations. However, the precise and controlled violence promised by early pioneers of military aviation remained unrealized – we could burn all of Tokyo or Dresden to the ground more easily than we could knock out a single ball-bearing plant. The Schweinfurt Factory raids cost far more men and aircraft than the incineration of 100,000 Tokyo residents in March 1945.

Vietnam

It was not until the last years of the Vietnam War that a new generation of precision weapons came into general use – the so-called smart bombs. They opened up new possibilities and really showed the world what they could do in the 1991 Gulf War. In quantitative terms, the Iraqi Army and the Coalition Forces were roughly equal and grim forecasts about casualties were flying thick and fast. Quality was another matter and the 100 hour ground war was almost an afterthought following weeks of devastatingly accurate aerial attacks. The imbalance of casualties hadn’t been so uneven since the British used Gatling guns on Zulu spearmen at Ulundi. However, the success of airpower comes when it is applied against a well-developed economy with power plants and road networks; or against a conventional army in the field with artillery batteries, HQs, and supply dumps. In a war against terrorists and their ideologies this is not so much of a useful practice. To Western policy makers, it seemed that an era of risk-free applied violence was upon us. If somebody needed a rap on the knuckles, smart bombs and cruise missiles would allow carefully-planned attacks to destroy selected targets and, if needed, armies could be defeated from the air without deploying soldiers on the ground.

Kosovo

Enter the Serbs – who were coerced by what was possible before signing the Dayton Accords in 1995. When accused of being politically incorrect by the Kosovar Muslims in 1999 (who couldn’t possibly have had a sinister agenda of their own), the US and NATO saw white versus black in a land of gray and sent fighter-bombers to pound sense into Belgrade. Never before had so much material damage been delivered so rapidly and so cheaply (in terms of lives) to so little use. Bombing bridges and power plants was one thing, bombing Serbian forces on the ground was something else. When the dust settled, the Serbian military was largely intact since most of their arms had been hidden by decoys and camouflage. However, Serbia backed out of Kosovo and the Kosovar Muslims soon proved to be as cruel and petty as the Serbs said they were. We didn’t learn, partly because we thought we were successful in whatever it was we were trying to achieve.

Afghanistan

One lesson that didn’t seem to have been learned is that if you want to destroy an army through airpower, you still need troops on the ground to flush out the foe. At least, in 2001 in Afghanistan, a handful of special forces with radios and fighter-bombers on call used the foes of the Taliban as game-beaters; so that every time the Taliban mustered the smart-bombs came crashing down. They haven’t deployed a large open field force since.

Libya

Libya in 2011 was a repeat of Kosovo in 1999. Gaddafi was ‘bad’, while we hoped the rebels might be ‘good’. With these inarticulate policy goals, we sent in the airpower and really screwed things up. Libya still isn’t stable but Qaddafi’s old stocks of weaponry are appearing in the wrong hands from Cameroon to Afghanistan. Our airpower is more dangerous than we thought. It lets us think interventions will be easy, and then we find we don’t know why we are there. Just because we can drop a bomb exactly where we want, doesn’t mean we should… In the meantime, everybody we don’t like is starting to get really good at hiding. The champions of the Caliphate in Syria and Iraq are no fools in one respect. Their leaders have survived Coalition airpower in Afghanistan and Iraq, Russian airpower in Chechnya, and Assad’s airpower in Syria. The one thing they have learned to do is to stay dispersed and hidden. They have tanks and artillery pieces – looted from the arsenals of Iraq and Syria – and do not concentrate them in numbers. Most of their troops move rapidly from point to point in civilian vehicles and enforce their dictates with an absolute ruthlessness that mitigates against us developing timely intelligence on their whereabouts.

ISIS

ISIS understands what Western Air Forces are really good at attacking, so they deny such targets to us. Canada’s aircraft will join those of other countries in bombing targets of questionable or little value with a great deal of accuracy. The reality of the matter is that ISIS represents an ideological threat – being the latest and most successful child of al-Qaeda, itself a child of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Sect. Those catchy hip-hop numbers as finger-waving young men slit throats, shoot bound captives in ditches, and kidnap women for sale as sex-slaves are drawing attention in our towns and cities. ISIS recruits and indoctrinates on our own home turf. Dropping bombs in Syria and Iraq will not stop this threat. In the long run, the hearts and minds of those who cling to this ideology might have to be reached another way… and doing so will be far messier than dropping 250-kilo JDAMs from 40 kilometers away. Suppressing ISIS on a foreign field is not a substitute for fighting them here. Applying air power has some utility but the real work of fighting them is not going to be so distant… or clean. The illusion of action is not a substitute for effective action.


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