American Way of War

by Tom Engelhardt

  On Not Looking Up

  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:Airpower remains the single greatest asymmetrical advantage the United States has over its foes. However, by focusing on the demands of major combat and ignoring counterguerrilla warfare, we Airmen have marginalized ourselves in the global war on terrorism. To make airpower truly effective against guerrillas in that war, we cannot wait for the joint force commander or the ground component commander to tell us what to do. Rather, we must aggressively develop and employ airpower’s counterguerrilla capabilities.

  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:The Army in Iraq is poised to start operations using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) armed with a precision weapon, Northrop Grumman’s [NOC] Viper Strike munition, a service official said…. The Army is arming the Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI)-Northrop Grumman [NOC] Hunter UAV, under an approximately $4 million Quick Reaction Capability contract with Northrop Grumman that will be completed in December, John Miller, Northrop Grumman director of Viper Strike, told Defense Daily…. The Hunter can carry two Viper Strike missiles.

  The Hunter UAV has been used in Iraq “since day one,” [Lt. Col. Jeff] Gabbert [program manager of Medium Altitude Endurance] said. The precise Viper Strike munition is important because, “it has very low collateral damage, so it’s going to be able to be employed in places where you might not use 500-pound bombs or might not use a Hellfire munition, [but] you’ll be able to use the Viper Strike munition.”

  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?

  The Barbarism of War from the Air

  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 i
n 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.

  The Religion of Airpower

  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.

  When it comes to brutality, the fact is that ancient times have gotten a bad rap. Nothing in history was more brutal than the last century’s style of war making—than those two world wars with their air armadas, backed by the most advanced industrial systems on the planet. Powerful countries then bent every elbow, every brain, to support the destruction of other human beings en masse, not to speak of the Holocaust (which was assembly-line warfare in another form), and the various colonial and cold war campaigns that substituted the devastation of airpower in the third world for a war between the two superpowers that might have employed the mightiest air weaponry of all to scour the earth.

  It may be that the human capacity for brutality, for barbarism, hasn’t changed much since the eighth century, but the industrial revolution—and in particular the rise of the airplane—opened up new landscapes to brutality. The view from behind the gun sight, then the bomb sight, and finally the missile sight slowly widened until all of humanity was taken in. From the lofty, godlike vantage point of the strategic, as well as the literal heavens, the military and the civilian began to blur on the ground. Soldiers and citizens, conscripts and refugees alike, became nothing but tiny, indistinguishable hordes of ants, or nothing at all but the structures that housed them, or even just concepts, indistinguishable one from the other.

  One Plane, One Bomb

  We have come far from that first bomb dropped by hand over the Italian colony of Libya. In the case of Tokyo—then constructed almost totally out of highly flammable materials—a single raid carrying incendiary bombs and napalm that began just after midnight on March 10, 1945, proved capable of incinerating or killing at least 90,000 people, possibly many more, from such a height that the dead could not be seen (though the stench of burning flesh carried up to the planes). The first American planes to arrive over the city, writes historian Michael Sherry, “carved out an X of flames across one of the world’s most densely packed residential districts; followers fed and broadened it for some three hours thereafter.”

  What descended from the skies, as James Carroll recounts it in his book House of War, was “1,665 tons of pure fire…the most efficient and deliberate act of arson in history. The consequent firestorm obliterated fifteen square miles, which included both residential and industrial areas. Fires raged for four days.” It was the bonfire of bonfires, and not a single American plane was shot down.

  On August 6, 1945, all the power of that vast air armada was again reduced to a single bomb, “Little Boy,” dropped near a single bridge in a single city, Hiroshima, which in a single moment of a sort never before experienced on the planet did what it had taken three hundred B-29s and many hours to do to Tokyo. In those two cities—as well as Dresden and other German and Japanese cities subjected to “strategic bombing”—the dead (perhaps 900,000 in Japan and 600,000 in Germany) were invariably preponderantly civilian, and far too distant to be seen by plane crews often dropping their bomb loads in the dark of night, giving the scene below the look of hell on earth.

  So 1911: one plane, one bomb. 1945: one plane, one bomb—but this time at least 120,000 dead, possibly many more. Two bookmarks less than four decades apart on the first chapter of a history of the invention of a new kind of warfare, a new kind of barbarism that, by now, is the way we expect war to be made, a way that no longer strikes us as barbaric at all. This wasn’t always the case.

  The Shock of the New

  When military airpower was in its infancy, and silent films still ruled the movie theaters, the first air-war films presented pilots as knights of the heavens, engaging in courageous, chivalric, one-on-one combat in the skies. As that image reflects, in the wake of the meat grinder of trench warfare in World War I, the medieval actually seemed far less brutal, a time much preferable to those years in which young men died by their hundreds of thousands, anonymously, from machine guns, artillery, poison gas, all the lovely inventions of industrial civilization, ground into the mud of no-man’s-land, often without managing to move their lines or the enemy’s more than a few hundred yards.

  The image of chivalric knights in planes jousting in the skies slowly disappeared from American screens, as after the 1950s would, by and large, airpower itself, even as the war film went on (and on). It can last be found perhaps in the film Top Gun; in old Peanuts comics in which Snoopy imagines himself as the Red Baron; and, of course, post–Star Wars, in the fantasy realm of outer space, where Jedi Knights took up lethal sky-jousting in the late 1970s, X-wing fighter to X-wing fighter, and in zillions of video games to follow. In the meantime, the one-way air slaughter in South Vietnam would be largely left out of the burst of Vietnam films that started hitting the screen from the late 1970s on.

  In the real
, off-screen world, that courtly medieval image of airpower disappeared fast indeed. As World War II came ever closer, and it became more apparent what airpower was best at—what would now be called “collateral damage”—the shock set in. When civilians were first purposely targeted and bombed in the industrializing world rather than in colonies like Iraq, the act was widely condemned as inhuman by a startled world.

  People were horrified when, during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Hitler’s Condor Legion and planes from fascist Italy repeatedly bombed the Basque town of Guernica, engulfing most of its buildings in a firestorm that killed hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians. If you want to get a sense of the power of that act to shock then, view Picasso’s famous painting of protest done almost immediately in response. (When Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the United Nations in February 2003 to deliver his now infamous speech explaining what we supposedly knew about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, UN officials covered over a tapestry of the painting that happened to be positioned where Powell would have to pass on his way to deliver his speech and where press comments would be offered afterwards.)

  Later in 1937, as the Japanese began their campaign to conquer China, they bombed a number of Chinese cities. A single shot of a Chinese baby wailing amid the ruins, published in Life magazine, was enough to horrify Americans (even though the actual photo may have been doctored). Airpower was then seen as nothing but a new kind of barbarism. According to Sherry, “In 1937 and 1938, [President Roosevelt] had the State Department condemn Japanese bombing of civilians in China as ‘barbarous’ violations of the ‘elementary principles’ of modern morality.” Meanwhile, observers checking out what effect the bombing of civilians had on the “will” of society offered nothing but bad news to the strategists of airpower. As Sherry writes,In the Saturday Evening Post, an American army officer observed that bombing had proven “disappointing to the theorists of peacetime.” When Franco’s rebels bombed Madrid, “Did the Madrileños sue for peace? No, they shook futile fists at the murderers in the sky and muttered, ‘Swine.’” His conclusion: “Terrorism from the air has been tried and found wanting. Bombing, far from softening the civil will, hardens it.”