Death at a Distance: The US Air War
According to the residents of Datta Khel, a town in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, three missiles streaked out of Afghanistan’s Pakitka Province and slammed into a Madrassa, or Islamic school, this past June. When the smoke cleared, the Asia Times reported, 30 people were dead.
The killers were robots, General Atomics MQ-1 Predators. The AGM-114 Hellfire missiles they used in the attack were directed from a base deep in the southern Nevada desert.
It was not the first time Predators had struck. The previous year a CIA Predator took a shot at al-Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, but missed. The missile, however, killed 18 people. According to the Asia Times piece, at least one other suspected al-Qaeda member was assassinated by a Predator in Pakistan’s northern frontier area, and in 2002 a Predator killed six “suspected al-Qaeda” members in Yemen.
These assaults are part of what may be the best kept secret of the Iraq-Afghanistan conflicts: an enormous intensification of US bombardments in these and other countries in the region, the increasing number of civilian casualties such a strategy entails, and the growing role of pilot less killers in the conflict.
According to Associated Press, there has been a five-fold increase in the number of bombs dropped on Iraq during the first six months of 2007 over the same period in 2006. More than 30 tons of those have been cluster weapons, which take an especially heavy toll on civilians.
The U.S. Navy has added an aircraft carrier to its Persian Gulf force, and the Air Force has moved F-16s into Balad air base north of Baghdad.
Balad, which currently conducts 10,000 air operations a week, is strengthening runways to handle the increase in air activity. Col. David Reynolds told the AP, “We would like to get to be a field like Langley, if you will.” The Langley field in Virginia is one of the Air Force’s biggest and most sophisticated airfields.
The Air Force certainly appears to be settling in for a long war. “Until we can determine that the Iraqis have got their air force to significant capability,” says Lt Gen. Gary North, the regional air commander, “I think the coalition will be here to support that effort.”
The Iraqi air force is virtually non-existent. It has no combat aircraft and only a handful of transports.
Improving the runways has allowed the Air Force to move B1-B bombers from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to Balad, where the big aircraft have been carrying out daily strikes. A B1-B can carry up to 24 tons of bombs.
The step-up in air attacks is partly a reflection of how beaten up and overextended U.S. ground troops are. While Army units put in 15-month tours, Air Force deployments are only four months, with some only half that. And Iraqi and Afghani insurgents have virtually no ability to inflict casualties on aircraft flying at 20,000 feet and using laser and satellite-guided weapons, in contrast to the serious damage they are doing to US ground troops.
Besides increasing the number of F-16s, B1-Bs, and A-10 attack planes, Predator flight hours over both countries have doubled from 2005. “The Predator is coming into its own as a no-kidding weapon verses a reconnaissance-only platform,” brags Maj. Jon Dagley, commander of the 46th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron.
The Air Force is also deploying a bigger, faster and more muscular version of the Predator, the MQ-9 “Reaper” - as in grim - a robot capable of carrying four Hellfire missiles, plus two 500 lb. bombs.
The Predators and the Reapers have several advantages, the most obvious being they don’t need pilots. “With more Reapers I could send manned airplanes home,” says North.
At $8.5 million an aircraft - the smaller Predator comes in at $4.5 million apiece - they are also considerably cheaper than the F-16 ($19 million) the B1-B ($200+ million) and even the A-10 ($9.8 million).
The Air Force plans to deploy 170 Predators and 70 Reapers over the next three years. “It is possible that in our lifetime we will be able to run a war without ever leaving the US,” Lt Col David Branham told the New York Times.
The result of the stepped up air war, according to the London-based organization Iraq Body Count, is an increase in civilian casualties. A Lancet study of “excess deaths” caused by the Iraq war found that air attacks were responsible for 13% of the deaths - 76,000 as of June 2006 - and that 50% of the deaths of children under 15 were caused by air strikes.
The number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan from air strikes has created a rift between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States.
“A senior British commander,” according to the New York Times, has pressed U.S. Special Forces (SF) to leave southern Afghanistan because their use of air power was alienating the local people. SFs work in small teams and are dependent on air power for support.
SFs called in an air strike last November near Kandahar that killed 31 nomads. This past April, a similar air strike in Western Afghanistan killed 57 villagers, half of them women and children. Coalition forces are now killing more Afghan civilians than the Taliban are. The escalating death toll has thrown the government of Hamid Karzai into a crisis and the NATO governments into turmoil. “We need to understand that preventing civilian casualties is crucially important in sustaining the support of the population,” British Defense Minister Des Browne told the Financial Times.
It has also opened up the allies to the charge of war crimes. In a recent air attack in southern Afghanistan that killed 25 civilians, NATO spokesman Lt. Col Mike Smith said the Taliban were responsible because they were hiding among the civilian population.
But Article 48 of the Geneva Conventions clearly states: “The Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants.” Article 50 dictates that “The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilian does not deprive the population of its civilian character.”
The stepped up air war in both countries has less to do with a strategic military decision than the reality that the occupations are coming apart at the seams.
For all intents and purposes, the U.S. Army in Iraq is broken, the victim of multiple tours, inadequate forces, and the kind of war Iraq has become: a conflict of shadows, low-tech but highly effective roadside bombs, and a population which is either hostile to the occupation or at least sympathetic to the resistance.
It is much the same in Afghanistan. Lord Inge, the former British chief of staff, recently said, “The situation in Afghanistan is much worse than many people recognize…it is much more serious that people want to recognize.” A well-placed military source told the Observer, “If you talk privately to the generals, they are very worried.” Faced with defeat or bloody stalemate on the ground, the allies have turned to air power, much as the U.S. did in Vietnam. But, as in Vietnam, the terrible toll bombing inflicts on civilians all but guarantees long-term failure.
“Far from bringing about the intended softening up of the opposition,” Phillip Gordon, a Brookings Institute Fellow, told the Asia Times, “bombing tends to rally people behind their leaders and cause them to dig in against outsiders who, whatever the justification, are destroying their homeland.”
Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist.
© 2007 Foreign Policy In Focus
Who do we hang for war crimes? The robot or it’s manufacturer?
How much more cowardly can the Americans get? Not man enough to fight a war robots are now needed, are the civilians too fearsome for you? Stones Vs Helicopter gunships now that’s what Americans call a fair fight. Not content with being the richest country in the world, you have to bomb the s*** out of people who have nothing? WTF.
I’d suggest Idavin must be young. War is not engaged in so that it is a fair fight. Remember the whole point of warfare is killing and trying not to get killed.
Conn has written about the process of an air campaign. It is this air war but much more intense, which will be fought in Iran if Bush has his way. Our cowboy prince wants a big finale to his epic movie. With landforces exhausted through his ineptness and a corrupt administration, Bush turns to mass destruction by air as his only option for a war with Iran.
First provocation then an air war response …then a call for the draft and then … it starts getting real serious. If we attack Iran, chances are that Pakistan will fall to extremists.
The nuclear exception for India and the new arms deals to mideast allies seem in preparation for wartime alliances. Arms and alliances! How did people feel in 1913? In the thirties as they watched alliances and the beginnibgs of the world war?
To kill and not be killed that is war. No one is looking for a fair fight in a war.
Once again, reality has caught up with Science Fiction.
““It is possible that in our lifetime we will be able to run a war without ever leaving the US,” Lt Col David Branham told the New York Times.”
We now “fly” combat missions by sitting in an ergonomically designed easy chair in an air conditioned room in the Nevada Desert. You watch the screen, deploy your weapons at targets of opportunity, or upon request. At the end of your two or four hour watch, you turn it over to a “fresh” pilot, pick your latte up from the cup holder and stroll to the officer’s club for a drink.
Does the screen tally up “Kill” points, just like a video game? I have no idea, but Co. Branham’s statement says it all. We will soon be able to kill anyone, anywhere in the world, without leaving the comfort of our easy chair.
Ah yes, the ideal. No American casualties, just lots of dead “enemy combatants” and huge numbers of collateral damage, which will have nobody on the ground to count them but their own families.
Just remember history. German terror bombing of London was supposed to make the British sue for peace. It strengthened their resolve. Carpet bombing in Germany stiffened German resistance. Bombing Vietnam strengthened their resolve. Brutal Nazi reprisals against the citizenry for resistance movements in France and in the Balkans only strengthened the resolve to get the foreigners out of their country. Slaughter of civilian populations in Iraq and Afghanistan are increasing the resistance against United States forces in those countries and the blowback may reach us yet.
Yes, we now have the technology to incinerate whole populations without leaving our chair, but unless we are going to kill the entire world, we will not win, and we will never regain any trust and respect from the rest of the world, friend or enemy. We are beyond the pale.
Why did Seung Hui Cho shoot the students? He was a baffled angry psychopath.
Bush & Cheney and their friends want to do the same thing to the world — except they have all sorts of hi-tech murder machines to play with, a compliant Congress, and robotic beefed up arseholes who get a thrill out of it and think that they’re heroes for doing it. The more they kill, the more moral, the more justified they feel in killing.
And a reminder what our brave boys get up to without remote control missiles –
War crimes? Article 48 and 50 of the Geneva Conventions states what?
No kiddin, how about that. Our Constitution, Bill of Rights, Geneva Conventions, ___ who cares what they state? Bush don’t and he’s the boss, remember. I’m not trying to be funny, it ain’t funny at all. It is how it is.
Don’t kid yourselves - all that beefed up air power is to take out Iran. cluster bombs, nukes, whatever we have that will take down the functiong state of Iran.
Everybody is the stationiing of 3 Marine Expeditionary Forces - each self sufficient to operate for 30 days, each with 10000 troops and all their own carriers, assault helos, tanks, etc.
If you liked Iraq, you’ll love Iran.
Tonight CNN aired probably the most outrageous and filthy piece of militaristic propaganda I’ve seen, a shit piece called “The Anvil of God” in which the Marines who demolished Fallujah are eulogized as heroes — I only caught a few sgements, the whole thing was a recruitment tool that would’ve made Joe Goebbels blush with envy & shame. At the end, the narrator said “They stand tall because they were better soldiers and because they were fighting for each other” — the whole thing exists in a pure void, “Invasion? What invasion?”
Murderous miserable puking lot of sick subhuman savages . . .
BugsBBunny III -
You are absolutely correct in that war is rarely a fair fight. So is Idavin: the US military fights this war in as cowardly a way as possible. It is only truthful and just to call them cowards. I do note they will fight courageously in battle when forced to, it is just they are not.
Bush’s famous Mission Accomplished speech was not a lie. The Iraqi military was defeated, and the war part is over. However, the US military refused to carry out the Occupation in a responsible manner, because they were neither ordered nor trained to do so. Since they do know how to wage war, they use war tactics at a time when Petraeus’ counter-insurgence plan calls for police tactics.
In that their actions incite blowback (as previous actions incited 9/11), the US military is doubly cowardly: they kill innocents on the possibility they might be a threat, but also place US innocents at risk for their individual sake.
In earlier phases of the Iraq war, the US used a strategy whose primary effect was to kill 1/2 million babies and young children to try to get the Iraqi populace to overthrow Hussein after the US failed militarily 1991. (If that wasn’t the prime objective, how can the crash development, production, and use of a bunker-buster bomb to kill Hussein be explained?) For that act, I nominate the US military as one of the most cowardly of all time. (I also note that the food for oil program cut that mortality rate by more than half, but that the ground invasion plus Occupation has succeeded in bringing it back up to its old high level.)
Idavin may be young; I am not.
Cognitive dissonance. The Pentagon is the “victim” of its own cognitive dissonance.
These weapons and weapon systems were designed during the Cold War, and intended to defeat a fully-armed and -operational “conventional” enemy. They are as useless in an insurgency or resistance struggle as tits on a bull.
In the end it won’t actually be the Iraqis who defeat the US occupation - it will be the US. The Iraqis will merely help the process along.
After all, how many times must the US occupation field a multi-million dollar response to an attack costing a few hundred? And how deeply will that cut into the resources for the occupation force itself?
What’s worse of course is the fact that the Pentagon is likely to find itself targetted via electronic media, and I fully expect that there will be hidden flaws in the drones that will be exploited, by people sympathetic to the Iraqi victims, or at least less-than-sympathetic to the Pentagon and US hegemony.
We live in interesting times. I just hope we survive them