Friday, Sep 5, 2008
One of the problems, according to Col. Dan Smith, a former West Point professor who is now chief of research for the Center for Defense Information, a Washington think tank, lies with the inflated expectations produced by the military's focus on technological precision. They've oversold American military capability, says Smith. "The dilemma of bombing is one of the Pentagon's own making," he says. "For years they have touted the accuracy of precision guided munitions, but they obviously are not quite as precise as the military boasted they were." Smith says that the military brass should long ago have stopped stressing accuracy in the abstract and instead used concrete examples from past conflicts.
The fact stressed by Kohn and others is that the United States, more than any other country in history, has attempted to avoid civilian casualties. American bombing strategy has become progressively more focused not just on destroying the enemy but also on avoiding so-called "collateral damage."
World War II pilots worked with very different strategic goals. Unlike the current war against terrorism, in which military action -- itself severely hemmed in by diplomatic and political concerns -- is only one part of a multiprong strategy, World War II was a total war. American bombers aimed for military targets first, but it was considered acceptable to bomb entire cities such as Berlin in order to weaken the Third Reich. Pilots were also ordered to drop their bombs even if they couldn't find their targets, a situation dramatized in Joseph Heller's bitterly ironic anti-war novel "Catch-22." In the waning days of World War II, deliberate American firebombing of wooden Japanese cities, which had little military strategic value, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.
In Vietnam the Pentagon outlined "free fire zones" in which "anything that moved was enemy," says Smith, a Vietnam veteran. Vietnam also saw horrendous civilian massacres as in Mai Lai and indiscriminate bombing like the 1968 raids that leveled the entire city of Hue (which prompted General Westmoreland's infamous line "we had to destroy the city in order to save it.")
While those and many other high-profile incidents (such as the recent revelation that former Sen. Bob Kerrey and his troops knowingly killed civilians) highlight the American military's indiscriminate targeting of civilians in Vietnam, U.S. forces also made strenuous, if ineffective, efforts to separate civilians from military actions. Resettlement programs specifically aimed to move civilians out of strategic areas before bombings occurred or away from known military forces. These initiatives ultimately failed because Vietnamese society was so agrarian that being removed from their land left them without any economic tools for survival, but the plans still broke from previous military tradition.
The American military's desire to fight clean wars was given a huge boost by technological advances in the 1980s, when the F-117 was first used, says Smith. The Lockheed Martin fighter, made of radar-absorbing materials, allowed bombs to be dropped from about 10,000 feet, far closer than other bombers like the B-52. "[This] gave pilots the opportunity to come in lower to drop their weaponry," Smith explains.
In fact, however, there was still a built-in conflict between maximizing pilot safety and minimizing civilian casualties -- a tension that will never be overcome. "The Gulf War was the first widespread use (and trumpeting) of what is called precision munitions," Smith says. "And it is here that the problem of civilian casualties clashed with claims of precision. Just as expectations were raised that U.S. casualties would be low because pilots would not have to swoop in low to make sure they hit targets, so too were expectations raised that civilian casualties would be low."
Studies conducted after the war proved the expectations to be far-fetched. Human Rights Watch, the most trusted source for civilian casualty data, found that the number of civilian deaths in the Gulf War was "historically low" -- but more that 3,000 civilians were still killed.
"Considering the extent of the campaigns, these numbers are very low," Kohn says. But because the Pentagon led people to believe that there would be virtually no civilian casualties -- showing only pictures of successful targets hit at briefings -- the numbers seemed disturbingly high, he adds.
While the Pentagon pursued a tight-lipped P.R. strategy that largely ignored civilian casualties and highlighted precision-targeted cruise missiles, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was playing his propaganda cards for all they were worth. Highlighting alleged civilian deaths, he claimed that the U.S. was targeting Muslims rather than the Iraqi military machine. No doubt much of the Arab world was disposed against the U.S.-led war to begin with, but Saddam's cunning added fuel to the fire: Arabs rioted in the streets and denounced the U.S. The idea that the U.S. is targeting Muslims rather than its declared enemies (first Saddam, now bin Laden) still holds sway in much of the Arab world today.
Euphoric after a victory that took only 43 days, the Pentagon failed to realize that touting precision weapons could backfire. The bombing campaign in Kosovo continued the pattern. During 78 days of NATO bombing, about 500 civilians died. This was a historic low for a war in which 26,000 bombs were dropped and a staggering 37,465 sorties flown, but the videos of a civilian train being hit by a missile and graphic accounts collected by the Yugoslavian government, Human Rights Watch and other organizations posed stark challenges to American and allied support for the war. As in the Gulf War, the resident dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, made hay out of claiming that the NATO air war was indiscriminately killing civilians.
Midway through the war President Clinton issued an executive order banning the use of cluster bombs because their use in the northern Serbian town of Nis had killed 14 civilians and provoked a disastrous public relations backlash. Joost Hiltermann, executive director of the arms division of Human Rights Watch, notes that "Clinton needed to keep the coalition together and couldn't afford to rock the boat. And one thing that will rock the boat is killing a lot of civilians, because the home publics of many governments will stand up and scream and say 'What are we doing in this coalition?'."
Joost also notes that the U.S. military works to integrate the laws concerning the treatment of noncombatants into all its troops. "There's a fairly strong integration of these concerns: Military manuals reflect U.S. obligations; officers and soldiers are instructed in rules of war." Joost also noted that "lawyers are involved who go over target lists and look at new weapon systems that are being developed in order to ensure that there are no violations in principle of the U.S. obligations under international humanitarian law. To that extent, the U.S., like other Western governments, has done quite a bit to integrate these concerns into its military."
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