The Myth of Precision Bombing (Revisited)

Our leaders claim that modern aerial bombardment can be done with few if any civilian casualties.  Recent events in Syria are just the latest in these assertions.  I guess we are to believe that somehow war will be more moral thereby.  

Historically bombing required an enormous expenditure of resources to destroy a single objective. It proved to be no easy task to fly an airplane into hundreds of miles of defended air space, strike a target, and return to base.  Eventually most difficulties were overcome, and from 1943 to 1945, the Allied powers devastated Germany, but at the cost of the lives of over 100,000 British and American flyers.

Modern aerial bombardment changes that equation in two ways.  First each bomb is far more accurate, so the same result can be achieved with far less expenditure of munitions.  Second, the use of aerial drones carries no risk to the bombing power of the loss of air personnel.  This is particularly important when it is desirable to reduce the risk of capture and a consequent hostage situation,  

So long as we make war on countries that cannot retaliate, these changes effectively make our air war invisible as far as we are concerned, and therefore acceptable.  Congress is content to sleep while our government bombs nation after nation:  Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Niger (?) and Serbia, which not coincidentally are for the most part Islamic countries.

Bombs alone are not enough to win wars; territory must be occupied by land forces, “boots on the ground” to use that horrible phrase.  Our nation is not willing to engage our own men and women in doing so, not after the Iraq fiasco.  So we prop up various stooge armies, such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in its war to conquer Yemen.  

In this process, we create far more enemies than our allies, the Saudi armed forces, can kill.  Consider this  January 22, 2018 report from the New Yorker, describing an attack in October 2016 on a funeral for a prominent man, in which 3,000 mourners attended.

More than a hundred and forty mourners were killed and five hundred were wounded in the strike. Afterward, Yemeni investigators unearthed a tail fin of one of the bombs. The serial number indicates that the bomb, a Mark-82—a sleek steel case eighty-seven inches long, twelve inches in diameter, and filled with five hundred pounds of explosive—was produced by Raytheon, the third-largest defense company in the United States. The bomb had been modified with a laser guidance system, made in factories in Arizona and Texas, called a Paveway-II.

Here is a video of that bombing, which apparently was based on information the Saudis received that one of their Yemeni political opponents, would be at the funeral.  

Our bombmakers, Raytheon and the others, are readily identified.  The people we bomb with good cause make no distinction between us and their Saudi enemies. 

When combined with the mass disease, deprivation and refugee problem affecting Yemen as a result of this war, the urge to launch counterstrikes, which we will call terrorism, against us and the Saudis becomes inevitable. 

Instead of defeating terrorism, we create the conditions for it to prosper.  See here for a video in which a Saudi spokesman does indeed call a Yemeni missile strike “terrorism.”  

And here lies again the danger of so-called “precision bombing” particularly when it is entrusted the Saudi government and their ilk (from the New Yorker report):

“They had been sold to the Saudis on the understanding that they would make their targeting more accurate,” Mark Hiznay, the associate arms director at Human Rights Watch, told me. “It turned out that the Saudis were failing to take all the feasible precautions in attacks that were killing civilians accurately.”

In October 2011, I wrote post on this website, The Myth of “Precision Bombing”, in which I stated:

The temptation to use this method of warfare, which necessarily focuses on civilian areas, almost ensures that large numbers of civilians will be killed.  

Sadly my prediction has come true.    And Trump seems ready to go through the same process in Syria.  I criticize Trump for Syria, but the Obama administration deserves equal blame for Yemen.