Air strikes are not an effective tactic of war, but we keep using them anyway
Bombs over Baghdad? Largely ineffectual.
American military involvement in Afghanistan has been ongoing since 2001, making it the longest foreign war in American history. Maybe it’s because there doesn’t actually seem to be an end to hostilities in sight that Americans are prone to forgetting that, on any given day, we’re a country at war. We’re alienated from our wars by design. It takes the occasional extraordinary event, like the recent detonation of the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (colloquially referred to as the Mother Of All Bombs) to, however fleetingly, hold our attention.
The MOAB is a 21-thousand pound, 30-foot long bomb carrying 11 thousand pounds of explosive ordnance. It’s the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in our arsenal. After being dropped from a plane like a C-130 Hercules, the MOAB is released from its drogue parachutes and is guided to target by GPS. The MOAB is an airburst weapon, which means that it detonates about six feet above ground, increasing the range of its lethality. According to the New York Review of Books, the MOAB’s blast radius “stretche[d] for more than a mile, and the blast waves knocked people to the ground and punctured ear drums five miles away.” It’s assumed that something that catastrophic killed enemy combatants, but the exact number is almost impossible to pin down. And while the response to the attack can generally be categorized as a disgusted awe at the size of the weapon and the scope of its lethality, a much more insidious issue seemed to be overlooked: Bombings don’t win wars. And they make poor substitutes for actually having a strategy.
Ever since the first aerial attack in history, when Italian pilot Giulio Gavotti dropped four hand grenades out of his plane while flying near Tripoli on November 1st, 1911, the dream of bombing from the air has been something of an El Dorado for militaries. And, on paper at least, it offers a compelling alternative to slogging it out on the ground. Bombing is supposed to be (relatively) cheap and safe (for our side, at least). It’s almost like by waving the magic wand of technology we can simultaneously win wars and save lives. But the reality has always been very different.
Although it was explored and augmented during WWI, aerial bombardment as we think of it today didn’t really come into its own until WWII. This was total war, with little regard for civilian casualties, and with cities such as Hamburg and Dresden almost entirely obliterated. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed by American bombing in both Germany and Japan, with a total of something like one-and-a-half million tons of bombs dropped on Germany alone. And did it win the war? Historian Robert Pape argues in Bombing to Win: Airpower and Coercion in War that it wasn’t civilian losses or destruction of infrastructure that led to German surrender, but territorial loss from advancing ground armies. In fact, Pape argues quite radically, aerial bombings didn’t have an effect on when the war ended at all. A RAND study funded by the Air Force and conducted mainly in order to refute Pape was forced to admit that, although the United States Air Force “ha[s] scored some notable successes, the record is mixed” on aerial bombing.
It’s a tepid endorsement of an expensive and counterproductive way of waging war. As writer and historian Ian Buruma writes, “The problem with strategic bombing is that it never seems to have worked, with the possible exception of Rotterdam (but by then Holland had already been defeated). Rather than breaking popular morale in London, Berlin, Tokyo or Hanoi, it usually strengthened it. Confronted by a common deadly threat, civilians rally around the only leaders who can do anything to protect them, even if those leaders are widely disliked.”
Buruma mentions Hanoi, which presents an even more compelling argument against the efficacy of bombing than the already mind boggling WWII experience. America dropped twice the tonnage of bombs on Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam as it dropped during the entire Second World War. There was so much ordnance dropped that it altered the landscape. In his book Kill Anything That Moves, the author Nick Turse quotes the ecologist Arthur Westing as writing during a wartime visit to Vietnam, “Never were we out of sight of the endless panorama of craters.” So many defoliants were dropped from American planes that between 1945 and 1980 forest cover in Vietnam declined by half. There are 78 million unexploded bombs currently still littering the landscape of Laos. And despite the overkill, America lost the war. Bombing, even with “creative” weapons like Agent Orange and Napalm, simply didn’t work. As Nick Turse writes, “Overkill was suppose to solve all American problems, and the answer to any setback was just more overkill.”
The precision bombing technologies developed during the 70s and more recent drone technologies were supposed to be the end of overkill. From now on, America would only kill bad guys, quickly and efficiently. But technology isn’t perfect, as our recent bombing of Syria has shown. Innocent people are always killed in wars, no matter the steps taken to mitigate it. So bombing remains as counterproductive as ever. As Institute for Policy Studies Middle East expert Phyllis Bennis said in an interview, “You can’t bomb terrorism out of existence.” You can destroy buildings and kill people, and perhaps you’ll kill a terrorist in the process, but that’s not a strategy to win wars or end terrorism. Rather, it only causes “more terrorism, antagonism, and violence.” And history tends to support that idea.
So why do we keep doing bombing — especially using a weapon as extreme as the MOAB — even though we know it doesn’t “work”? Ian Buruma thinks it has to do partly with a desperate desire to wreak vengeance, but that that “cannot be the only, or perhaps even the main, reason.” A better explanation might be morale — not hurting the morale of the enemy, but lifting the flagging morale of a home front that is stuck somewhere between complete resignation and cynical frustration.
