American Way of War (10 page)

This is not to say the press does not write about the air war at all. Anodyne press reports on our ongoing air wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond appear almost daily. Normally, only a few lines are devoted to the air war against urban or rural areas, which is, by the nature of the situation, a war of terror. We almost never see any cumulative figures on air strikes in Iraq or Afghanistan per day, week, or month, maps of the reach of the air war, or more than a few photos of its results—let alone what it’s been like for people in major cities and rural villages to experience such periodic attacks, or what kinds of casualties result (or who the casualties actually are), or what, if any, may be the limitations on the use of airpower.

To the extent that we know anything about the loosing of airpower on heavily populated urban areas, we only know what an uninquisitive press has been told by the military and stenographically recorded, which means we know remarkably little. During the war in Iraq, American reporters could be found embedded with tank or Bradley Fighting Vehicle units: “Captain Paul Fowler sat on the curb next to a deserted gas station,” wrote Anne Barnard of the
Boston Globe
.

American reporters could climb aboard SURCs (Small Unit Riverine Craft), high-tech Swift Boat equivalents, as John Burns of the
New York Times
once did, to “[roar] up the Euphrates on a dawn raid.” They could follow U.S. patrols as they busted down Iraqi doors looking for insurgents. The only thing they evidently couldn’t do in Iraq was look up, even though the air space was populated with all kinds of jets, fearsome AC- 130 Spectre gunships, Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drones, and ubiquitous Apache, Cobra, Lynx, and Puma helicopters.

Given the history of twentieth-century war, which is, in many ways, simply the history of bombing cities, should our “war reporters” not have been prepared? Shouldn’t anyone have been thinking about the destruction of cities when it’s been such a commonplace? Shouldn’t major papers have insisted on embedding reporters in Air Force units (if not on the planes themselves)? Shouldn’t reporters have visited our air bases and talked to pilots? Does no one remember the magnitude of the air war in Vietnam (or Laos or Cambodia), no less any other major war experience of our lifetimes?

A glance at the history of American war tells us airpower is as American as apple pie and that Americans were dreaming of cities destroyed from the air long before anyone had the ability to do so. As H. Bruce Franklin tells us in his book
War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination
, as early as 1881, former naval officer Park Benjamin wrote a short story called “The End of New York” that caused a sensation. In it the city was left in ruins by a Spanish naval bombardment. By 1921,
air-power visionary Billy Mitchell was already flying mock sorties over New York and other East Coast cities, “pulverizing” them in “raids” sensationalized in the press, to publicize the need for an independent air force. (“The sun rose today on a city whose tallest tower lay scattered in crumbled bits,” began a
New York Herald
article after Mitchell’s “raid” on New York City, a line that should still send small shudders through us all and remind us how much the sensational of the previous century has become the accepted of our world.)

It would seem hard to forget that the “invasion” of Iraq began from the air—as much a demonstration of power meant for viewers around the world as for Saddam Hussein and his followers. Who could forget those cameras strategically placed on the balconies of Baghdad hotels for the shock-and-awe
son-et-lumière
show—dramatic explosions in the night (only lacking a score to go with it). Does no one remember air force claims that airpower alone could win wars?

Is there some secret I’m missing here? Doesn’t anyone find it strange that, back in 1995, our papers—from their front pages to their editorial and op-ed pages—were convulsed by a single contested air-war exhibit being mounted at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum on the bombing of Hiroshima? A historical argument about the use of air power half a century ago merited such treatment, but the actual—and potentially hardly less controversial—use of airpower today doesn’t merit a peep?

Near the end of 2004, I could find but a single press example of an American reporter in the air in Iraq. On November 17, 2003, the
New York Times
’ Dexter Filkins wrote an article focusing on the dangers to American pilots in the Iraqi skies (“It is not a good time to be a helicopter pilot in the skies over Iraq”). That, as far as I can tell, is it. Now, it’s true that any air war is harder to report on than a ground war, especially if reporters aren’t allowed in planes or on helicopters (as they are on the river boats and in the Bradleys, for instance). But hardly impossible. Most reporters in Baghdad, after all, have at least been witnesses to air attacks in the capital itself. In one case, an American helicopter even fired a missile into a crowd in a Baghdad street only a few hundred yards from the heavily fortified American heartland, the capital’s Green Zone, killing a
reporter for al Arabiya satellite network in footage seen only briefly on American TV but repeatedly around the world.

Life under the helicopters is a story that might be written. At the very least, the subject could be investigated. Pilots could be interviewed on the ground. Victims could be found. The literature could be read because, as it happens, air force people are thinking carefully about the uses of airpower in a counterinsurgency war, even if reporters aren’t. Journalists could, for instance, read Thomas F. Searle’s article “Making Air Power Effective Against Guerrillas.” (If I can find it, they can.) Searle, a military defense analyst with the Airpower Research Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, concludes:

Journalists could report on the new airborne weaponry being deployed and tested by U.S. forces. After all, like other recent American battlefields, Iraq has doubled as a laboratory for the corporate development and testing of ever more advanced weaponry. A piece, for instance, could be done on the armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), the Hunter, being deployed alongside the Predator in Iraq. (The people who name these things have certainly seen too many sci-fi movies.) In a piece in
Defense Daily
, a “trade” publication, we read, for example:

Of course, it would be a reportorial coup if any reporter were to go up in a plane or helicopter and survey the urban damage in Iraq, for example, as Jonathan Schell did from the back seat of a small forward air controller’s plane during the Vietnam War. (From this he wrote a report for the
New Yorker
magazine, “The Military Half,” which remains unparalleled in its graphic descriptions of the destruction of the Vietnamese countryside and which can be found collected in his book
The Real War
.) But that’s a lot to hope for these days. The complete absence of coverage, however, is a little harder to explain. Along with the vast permanent military base facilities the United States has been building in Iraq, the expansion of U.S. airpower is the great missing story of the post- 9/11 era. Is there no reporter out there willing to cover it? Is the repeated bombing, strafing, and missiling of heavily populated civilian urban centers and the partial or total destruction of cities such a humdrum event, after the last century of destruction and threatened destruction, that no one thinks it worth the bother?

Barbarism seems an obvious enough category. Ordinarily in our world, the barbarians are them.
They
act in ways that seem unimaginably primitive and brutal to us. For instance, they kidnap or capture someone, American or Iraqi, and cut off his head. Now, isn’t that the definition of barbaric? Who does that anymore? The word
medieval
comes to mind immediately, and to the mass mind of our media even faster.

To jump a little closer to modernity,
they
strap on grenades, plastic explosives, bombs of various ingenious sorts fashioned in home labs, with nails or other bits of sharp metal added in to create instant shrapnel meant to rend human flesh, to maim, and kill. Then they approach a target—an
Israeli bus filled with civilians and perhaps some soldiers, a pizza parlor in Jerusalem, a gathering of Shiite or Sunni worshippers at or near a mosque in Iraq or Pakistan, or of unemployed potential police or army recruits in Ramadi or Baghdad, or of shoppers in an Iraqi market, or perhaps a foreigner on the streets of Kabul—and they blow themselves up. Or they arm backpacks or bags and step onto trains in London, Madrid, Mumbai, and set them off.

Or, to up the technology and modernity a bit, they wire a car to explode, put a jihadist in the driver’s seat, and drive it into—well, this is now common enough that you can pick your target. Or perhaps they audaciously hijack four just-fueled jets filled with passengers and run two of them into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and another into a field in Pennsylvania. This is, of course, the very definition of barbaric.

Now, let’s jump a step further into our age of technological destruction, becoming less face to face, more impersonal, without, in the end, changing things that much.
They
send rockets from southern Lebanon (or even cruder ones from the Gaza Strip) against Israeli towns and cities. These rockets can only vaguely be aimed. Some can be brought into the general vicinity of an inhabited area; others, more advanced, into specific urban neighborhoods many tens of miles away—and then they detonate, killing whoever is in the vicinity, which normally means civilians just living their lives, even, in one Hezbollah volley aimed at Nazareth, two Israeli Arab children. In this process, thousands of Israelis have been temporarily driven from their homes.

In the case of rockets by the hundreds lofted into Israel by an armed, organized militia, meant to terrorize and harm civilian populations, these are undoubtedly war crimes. Above all, they represent a kind of barbarism that—with the possible exception of some of those advanced Hezbollah rockets—feels primitive to us. Despite the explosives, cars, planes, all so basic to our modern way of life, such acts still seem redolent of less civilized times when people did especially cruel things to each other face to face.

That’s
them
. But what about us? On our we/they planet, most groups don’t consider themselves barbarians. Nonetheless, we have largely
achieved non-barbaric status in an interesting way—by removing the most essential aspect of the American (and Israeli) way of war from the category of the barbaric. I’m talking, of course, about airpower, about raining destruction down on the earth from the skies, and about the belief—so common, so long-lasting, so deep-seated—that bombing others, including civilian populations, is a “strategic” thing to do, that airpower can, in relatively swift measure, break the “will” not just of the enemy, but of that enemy’s society, and that such a way of war is the royal path to victory.

This set of beliefs was common to airpower advocates even before modern air war had been tested, and repeated unsuccessful attempts to put these convictions into practice have never really shaken what is essentially a war-making religion. The result has been the development of the most barbaric style of warfare imaginable, one that has seldom succeeded in breaking
any
will, though it has destroyed innumerable bodies, lives, stretches of countryside, villages, towns, and cities.

Even during the 2006 Lebanon War, Israeli military strategists were saying things that could have been put in the mouths of their airpower-loving predecessors decades ago. The
New York Times
’ Steven Erlanger, for instance, quoted an unnamed senior Israeli commander this way: “He predicted that Israel would stick largely to air power for now…. ‘The problem is the will to launch. We have to break the will of Hezbollah.’” Don’t hold your breath is the first lesson history teaches on this particular assessment of the powers of air war. The second is that, a decade from now, some other senior commander in some other country will be saying the same thing, word for word.