Taking the 'war' out of US air
wars By Tom Engelhardt
When men first made war in the air, the
imagery that accompanied them was of knights
jousting in the sky. Just check out movies like
Wings, which won the first Oscar for Best
Picture in 1927(or any Peanuts cartoon in which
Snoopy takes on the Red Baron in a literal
"dogfight". As late as 1986, five years after two
American F-14s shot down two Soviet jets flown by
Libyan pilots over the Mediterranean's Gulf of
Sidra, it was still possible to make the movie
Top Gun. In it, Tom Cruise played
"Maverick," a US Naval aviator triumphantly
involved in a similar incident. (He shoots down
three MiGs.)
Admittedly, by then American
air-power films had long been in decline. In
Vietnam, the US had used its air superiority to
devastating effect, bombing the north and blasting
the south, but go to American Vietnam films and,
while that US patrol walks
endlessly into a South
Vietnamese village with mayhem to come, the air is
largely devoid of planes.
Consider Top
Gun an anomaly. Anyway, it's been 25 years
since that film topped the box-office - and don't
hold your breath for a repeat at your local
multiplex. After all, there's nothing left to base
such a film on.
To put it simply, it's
time for Americans to take the "war" out of "air
war". These days, we need a new set of terms to
explain what US air power actually does.
Start this way: American "air superiority"
in any war the US now fights is total. In fact,
the last time American jets met enemy planes of
any sort in any skies was in the First Gulf War in
1991, and since Saddam Hussein's once powerful air
force didn't offer much opposition - most of its
planes fled to Iran - that was brief. The last
time US pilots faced anything like a serious
challenge in the skies was in North Vietnam in the
early 1970s. Before that, you have to go back to
the Korean War in the early 1950s.
This,
in fact, is something American military types take
great pride in. Addressing the cadets of the Air
Force Academy in early March, for example,
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated: "There
hasn't been a US Air Force airplane lost in air
combat in nearly 40 years, or an American soldier
attacked by enemy aircraft since Korea."
And he's probably right, though it's also
possible that the last American plane shot down in
aerial combat was US Navy pilot Michael Scott
Speiker's jet in the First Gulf War. (The Navy
continues to claim that the plane was felled by a
surface-to-air missile.)As an F-117A Stealth
fighter was downed by a surface-to-air missile
over Serbia in 1999, it's been more than 11 years
since such a plane was lost due to anything but
mechanical malfunction. Yet in those years, the US
has remained almost continuously at war somewhere
and has used air power extensively, as in its
"shock and awe" launch to the invasion of Iraq,
which was meant to "decapitate" Saddam Hussein and
the rest of the Iraqi leadership. (No plane was
lost, nor was an Iraqi leader of any sort taken
out in those 50 decapitation attacks, but "dozens"
of Iraqi civilians died.) You might even say that
air power, now ramping up again in Afghanistan,
has continued to be the American way of war.
From a military point of view, this is
something worth bragging about. It's just that the
obvious conclusions are never drawn from it.
The valor of pilots Let's begin
with this: to be a "Top Gun" in the US military
today is to be in staggeringly less danger than
any American who gets into a car and heads just
about anywhere, given this country's annual toll
of about 34,000 fatal car crashes. In addition,
there is far less difference than you might
imagine between piloting a drone aircraft from a
base thousands of miles away and being inside the
cockpit of a fighter jet.
Articles are now
regularly written about drone aircraft "piloted"
by teams sitting at consoles in places like Creech
Air Force Base in Nevada. Meanwhile, their planes
are loosing Hellfire missiles thousands of miles
away in Afghanistan (or, in the case of Central
Intelligence Agency "pilots," in the Pakistani
tribal borderlands). Such news accounts often
focus on the eerie safety of those pilots in
"wartime" and their strange detachment from the
actual dangers of war - as, for instance, in the
sign those leaving Creech pass that warns them to
"drive carefully" as this is "the most dangerous
part of your day".
When it comes to pilots
in planes flying over Afghanistan, we imagine
something quite different - and yet we shouldn't.
Based on the record, those pilots might as well be
in Nevada, since there is no enemy that can touch
them. They are inviolate unless their own machines
betray them and, with the rarest of imaginable
exceptions, will remain so.
Nor does
anyone here consider it an irony that the worst
charge lodged by US military spokespeople against
their guerrilla enemies, whose recruits obviously
can't take to the skies, is that they use "human
shields" as a defense. This transgression against
"the law of war" is typical of any outgunned
guerrilla force which, in Mao Zedong's dictum,
sees immense benefit in "swimming" in a "sea" of
civilians. (If they didn't do so and fought like
members of a regular army, they would, of course,
be slaughtered.)
This is considered,
however implicitly, a sign of ultimate cowardice.
On the other hand, while a drone pilot cannot
(yet) get a combat award citation for "valor", a
jet fighter pilot can and no one - here at least -
sees anything strange or cowardly about a form of
warfare which guarantees the American side quite
literal, godlike invulnerability.
War by
its nature is often asymmetrical, as in Libya
today, and sometimes hideously one-sided. The
retreat that turns into a rout that turns into a
slaughter is a relative commonplace of battle. But
it cannot be war, as anyone has ever understood
the word, if one side is never in danger. And yet
that is American air war as it has developed since
World War II.
It's a long path from
knightly aerial jousting to air war as... well,
what? We have no language for it, because accurate
labels would prove deflating, pejorative, and
exceedingly uncomfortable. You would perhaps need
to speak of cadets at the Air Force Academy being
prepared for "air slaughter" or "air
assassination," depending on the circumstances.
From those cadets to Secretary of Defense
Gates to reporters covering our wars, no one here
is likely to accept the taking of "war" out of air
war. And because of that, it is - conveniently -
almost impossible for Americans to imagine how
American-style war must seem to those in the lands
where we fight.
Apologies all
around Consider for a moment one form of
war-related naming where our language changes all
the time. That's the naming of our new generations
of weaponry. In the case of those drones, the two
main ones in US battle zones at the moment are the
Predator (as in the sci-fi film) and the Reaper
(as in Grim). In both cases, the names imply an
urge for slaughter and a sense of superiority
verging on immortality.
And yet we don't
take such names seriously. Though we've seen the
movies (and most Afghans haven't), we don't
imagine our form of warfare as like that of the
Predator, that alien hunter of human prey, or a
Terminator, that machine version of the same. If
we did, we would have quite a different picture of
ourselves, which would mean quite a different way
of thinking about how we make war.
From
the point of view of Afghans, Pakistanis, or other
potential target peoples, those drones buzzing in
the sky must seem very much like real-life
versions of Predators or Terminators. They must,
that is, seem alien and implacable like so many
malign gods. After all, the weaponry from those
planes is loosed without recourse; no one on the
ground can do a thing to prevent it and little to
defend themselves; and often enough the missiles
and bombs kill the innocent along with those our
warriors consider the guilty.
Take a
recent event on a distant hillside in
Afghanistan's Kunar Province where 10 boys,
including two sets of brothers, were collecting
wood for their families on a winter's day when the
predators - this time American helicopters
evidently looking for insurgents who had rocketed
a nearby American base - arrived. Only one of the
boys survived (with wounds) and he evidently
described the experience as one of being "hunted"
- as the Predator hunts humans or human hunters
stalk animals. They "hovered over us," he said,
"scanned us, and we saw a green flash," then the
helicopters rose and began firing.
For
this particular nightmare, war commander General
David Petraeus apologized directly to Afghan
President Hamid Karzai, who has for years
fruitlessly denounced US and North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) air operations that have
killed Afghan civilians. When an angered Karzai
refused to accept his apology, Secretary of
Defense Gates, on a surprise visit to the country,
apologized as well, as did President Barack Obama.
And that was that - for the Americans.
Forget for a moment what this incident
tells us about a form of warfare in which
helicopter pilots, reasonably close to the ground
(and modestly more vulnerable than pilots in
planes), can't tell boys with sticks from
insurgents with guns. The crucial thing to keep in
mind is that, no matter how many apologies may be
offered afterwards, this can't stop. According to
the Wall Street Journal, death by helicopter is,
in fact, on the rise. It's in the nature of this
kind of warfare. In fact, Afghan civilians have
repeatedly, even repetitiously, been blown away
from the air, with or without apologies, since
2001. Over these years, Afghan participants at
wedding parties, funerals, and other rites have,
for example, been wiped out with relative
regularity, only sometimes with apologies to
follow.
In the weeks that preceded the
killing of those boys, for instance, a "NATO" -
these are usually American - air attack took out
four Afghan security guards protecting the work of
a road construction firm and wounded a fifth,
according to the police chief of Helmand Province;
a similar "deeply regrettable incident" took out
an Afghan army soldier, his wife, and his four
children in Nangarhar Province; and a third, also
in Kunar Province, wiped out 65 civilians,
including women and children, according to Afghan
government officials. Karzai recently visited a
hospital and wept as he held a child wounded in
the attack whose leg had been amputated.
The US military did not weep. Instead, it
rejected this claim of civilian deaths, insisting
as it often does that the dead were "insurgents."
It is now - and this is typical - "investigating"
the incident. General Petraeus managed to further
offend Afghan officials when he visited the
presidential palace in Kabul and reportedly
claimed that some of the wounded children might
have suffered burns not in an air attack but from
their parents as punishment for bad behavior and
were being counted in the casualty figures only to
make them look worse.
Over the years,
Afghan civilian casualties from the air have waxed
and waned, depending on how much air power
American commanders were willing to call in, but
they have never ceased. As history tells us, air
power and civilian deaths are inextricably bound
together. They can't be separated, no matter how
much anyone talks about "surgical" strikes and
precision bombing. It's simply the barbaric
essence, the very nature of this kind of war, to
kill noncombatants.
One question sometimes
raised about such casualties in Afghanistan is
this: according to United Nations statistics, the
Taliban (via roadside bombs and suicide bombers)
kills far more civilians, including women and
children, than do NATO forces, so why do the
US-caused deaths stick so in Afghan craws when we
periodically investigate, apologize, and even pay
survivors for their losses?
New York Times
reporter Alissa J Rubin puzzled over this in a
recent piece and offered the following answer:
"[T]hose that are caused by NATO troops appear to
reverberate more deeply because of underlying
animosity about foreigners in the country." This
seems reasonable as far as it goes, but don't
discount what air power adds to the foreignness of
the situation.
Consider what the
20-year-old brother of two of the dead boys from
the Kunar helicopter attack told the Wall Street
Journal in a phone interview: "The only option I
have is to pick up a Kalashnikov, RPG
[rocket-propelled grenade], or a suicide vest to
fight."
Whatever the Taliban may be, they
remain part of Afghan society. They are there on
the ground. They kill and they commit barbarities,
but they suffer, too. In our version of air "war,"
however, the killing and the dying are perfectly
and precisely, even surgically, separated. We
kill, they die. It's that simple. Sometimes the
ones we target to die do so; sometimes others
stand in their stead. But no matter. We then deny,
argue, investigate, apologize, and continue. We
are, in that sense, implacable.
And one
more thing: since we are incapable of thinking of
ourselves as either predators or Predators, no
less emotionless Terminators, it becomes
impossible for us to see that our air "war" on
terror is, in reality, a machine for creating what
we then call "terrorists". It is part of an
American Global War for Terror.
In other
words, although air power has long been held up as
part of the solution to terrorism, and though the
American military now regularly boasts about the
enemy body counts it produces, and the precision
with which it does so, all of that, even when
accurate, is also a kind of delusion - and worse
yet, one that transforms us into Predators and
Terminators. It's not a pretty sight.
So
count on this: there will be no more Top Guns. No
knights of the air. No dogfights and sky-jousts.
No valor. Just one-sided slaughter and targeted
assassinations. That is where air power has ended
up. Live with it.
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