Counterinsurgency by Air

Somehow this Government Executive article about the Air Force looking to get in on the counterinsurgency game doesn't leave me feeling any rosier about the Defense Department's new alleged focus on irregular warfare. The same old bureaucratic imperatives seem to be in play, except now instead of the military focusing on conventional conflicts because that's what justified expensive hardware, we're now going to have all the same equipment and inter-service politics, but everyone will just assert that it's all about the counterinsurgency.

The Air Force, for example, "has taken to touting show of force missions as a vital tool in counterinsurgency." What does that mean? Well, it involves "low-level fly-overs" that are "intended to intimidate opponents on the ground." For example, "Jet aircraft fly a few hundred feet above rooftops in downtown Baghdad and drop a string of flares." Greg Grant, the reporter on the story, nicely deadpans that "it's difficult to discern how show of force demonstrations compete with an enemy who cuts off its opponents' heads and leaves the bodies lying in the streets."

What about the fact that the use of air strikes in counterinsurgency situations creates civilian casualties on a level that makes them massively counterproductive? Well, General. Allen Peck, director of the Air Force Doctrine Center, "agrees that recent air strikes, particularly in Afghanistan, have caused civilian casualties and generated ill will." Nevertheless, he assures us that "the Air Force follows strict rules before dropping bombs, Peck says, constantly refining the process to minimize possible civilian deaths." I've made this point before, but while I'm sure there's some truth to this, the basic reality is that the Pentagon doesn't even count civilian casualties, so they can't possibly know whether or not they're minimizing them and, on some level, they're obviously not taking that mandate very seriously.

Comments

Wouldnt this only add to the choking feeling of occupation that the Iraqis already feel? Awesome shows of superior force just do not help win over subdued populations.

Seems counter productive to me. I mean, you catch more bees with honey than you do with humvees, jets, and missiles, right?

Posted by Ryan | June 16, 2007 2:51 PM

There is a place for air power in counterinsurgency. However, there is no place for it in populated areas (certainly not in an urban environment) and the sort of kit it requires tends toward large, slow, relatively heavily armoured planes with high loiter times. Precisely the opposite, in fact, of the sort of stuff the USAF tends to be hell-bent on procuring. Its utility also tends to have less to do with zapping bad guys and also more to do with aerial monitoring, tactical lift and - away from populated areas - logistics interdiction. It tends to be slow, boring detail work with extremely tight rules of engagement. If it's done right, that is.

Posted by Anthony C | June 16, 2007 3:06 PM

Nuremburg-level war crimes, discussed openly & without shame. No chance of prosecution or consequences. The corruption is complete.

Posted by bob mcmanus | June 16, 2007 3:34 PM

I mean, you catch more bees with honey than you do with humvees, jets, and missiles, right?

So that's what's killing off the bees!

Posted by Delicious Pundit | June 16, 2007 3:42 PM

Once again, William Lind shoots and scores:

"Nothing could testify more powerfully to the failure of U.S. efforts on the ground in Iraq than a ramp-up in airstrikes. Calling in air is the last, desperate, and usually futile action of an army that is losing. If anyone still wonders whether the "surge" is working, the increase in air strikes offers a definitive answer: it isn't.

Worse, the growing number of air strikes shows that, despite what the Marines have accomplished in Anbar province and General Petraeus's best efforts, our high command remains as incapable as ever of grasping Fourth Generation war. To put it bluntly, there is no surer or faster way to lose in 4GW than by calling in airstrikes. It is a disaster on every level. Physically, it inevitably kills far more civilians than enemies, enraging the population against us and driving them into the arms of our opponents. Mentally, it tells the insurgents we are cowards who only dare fight them from 20,000 feet in the air. Morally, it turns us into Goliath, a monster every real man has to fight. So negative are the results of air strikes in this kind of war that there is only one possible good number of them: zero (unless we are employing the "Hama model," which we are not)."
http://www.d-n-i.net/lind/lind_archive.htm

Posted by beowulf | June 16, 2007 3:49 PM

The British controlled Iraq with minimal ground forces backed up by lots of airpower.

It should work as well for us as it did for them.

Posted by David Tomlin | June 16, 2007 3:59 PM

The Brits also didn't really care how many wog babies they killed, and didn't have to deal with the rise of Islamonationalism.

Posted by Anderson | June 16, 2007 4:05 PM

"The British controlled Iraq with minimal ground forces backed up by lots of airpower.

It should work as well for us as it did for them."

I don't know whether this is sarcastic or not - hopefully so because the context is completely different.

On the Bill Lind point - he's right but it's nothing new or "4GW" about it. It's bog-standard old-school counterinsurgency that goes back at least as far as Harold Briggs and Gerald Templer - no artillery or air power in populated areas. He's right that it's a sign of failure though.

Posted by Anthony C | June 16, 2007 4:06 PM

"What about the fact that the use of air strikes in counterinsurgency situations creates civilian casualties on a level that makes them massively counterproductive?"

The Air Force has been working on a new bomb designed to dramatically reduce collateral damage. Even a laser- or satellite-guided traditional bomb that hits its target can send pieces of steel shrapnel flying into the building next door. The new-fangled bomb won't do that. See: Air Force seeks a bomb with less bang.

The real scandal here isn't that the Air Force is working on a weapon suited to counter-insurgency and other small wars, but that it has taken so long to get weapons like these developed.

Posted by Fred | June 16, 2007 4:09 PM

beowulf said "Mentally, it tells the insurgents we are cowards who only dare fight them from 20,000 feet in the air."

"We"? Are you a combat soldier? These insurgents you are trying to impress are the same ones who plant IEDs on the road and detonate them from behind a rock whilst filming it to whack off to later?

"Nuremburg-level war crimes, discussed openly & without shame. No chance of prosecution or consequences. The corruption is complete." Dropping flares is much worse than destroying Dresden. Go and shink your head in a bucket Bob.

Posted by MrSparkle | June 16, 2007 4:16 PM

Also, the Air Force's old school Spectre gunship (a converted cargo plane) was highly effective against the Taliban in Afghanistan and also against Sadr's militia during its last failed uprising in Najaf. By direct-firing (as opposed to artillery-style parabolic firing) small, rifled cannon shells (60lbs approx), and other smaller munitions, the Spectre can limit collateral damage more than planes dropping traditional 500lb bombs.

Posted by Fred | June 16, 2007 4:17 PM

"Dropping flares is much worse than destroying Dresden."

We weren't occupying Dresden at the time, which is not such a significant moral difference, but is the critical legal difference.

And we aren't dropping flares.

Posted by bob mcmanus | June 16, 2007 4:33 PM

I think it's probably worth staying away from the "war crimes" thing, unless the comments are going to turn into a technicolour flame war on both sides.

On the flares thing - the bottom line is that the USAF is not going to justify its budget and its shiny weapons systems by virtue of the fact that it can buzz the enemy and make noise and pretty patterns in the sky.

Fred's right that the Spectre is very much the sort of thing that's suited to the job. It's an open question whether the next generation of weaponry is discriminate enough for the strategic damage cause by the use of air power to now be outweighed by its tactical benefits - I personally think not and it's fair to say in my experience that this is still the majority opinion among counterinsurgency experts. That said, when even the British Army is relying on air strikes in Afghanistan, it's probably tilting at windmills.

Posted by Anthony C | June 16, 2007 4:43 PM

"Are you a combat soldier? These insurgents you are trying to impress are the same ones who plant IEDs on the road and detonate them from behind a rock whilst filming it to whack off to later?"

You have to admit the rhetorical and political propaganda effect this would have for an Iraqi is powerful. Remember, the majority of Iraqis support attacks on American soldiers. Without local support, counterinsurgency tactics fail.

Posted by Reality Man | June 16, 2007 5:41 PM

Going back to Bing and Owen West's pointed out in their NY Times op/ed yesterday, a good counterinsurgency technique is to detain those involved in bombings and other attacks rather than summarily releasing them. One of the unintended consequences of the Abu Ghraib scandal, as the Wests point out, was an over-reaction in applying peacetime rules of evidence to terror suspects in Iraq.

Posted by Fred | June 16, 2007 6:51 PM

That's great- I'm sure we're applying way too much "peacetime rules of evidence" in Iraq. We'll just have to hope that our soldiers can magically smell the smoke or see the little baggie under the seat as well as our local deputies.

Of course, one reason you might apply "peacetime rules of evidence" is to avoid situations where armed gangs pull all the passengers of one religion off a bus and kill them. It's called the "rule of law" and experience doth shew that "rules of evidence" are part of the rule of law.

We should just count ourselves lucky there are still people in Iraq sane enough not to keep hundreds of thousands of random bystanders in concentration camps while their relatives plot about how to bust them out.

Posted by serial catowner | June 16, 2007 7:26 PM

A few points:

Fred - I agree with you regarding the catch-and-release issue. I don't know anyone who isn't thoroughly hacked off with it. The reality is that in large part it isn't the expression of a smoothly flowing and accountable justice system but of wide-scale corruption and intimidation.

Bing West also deserves credit for banging the drum with regard to a workable population census - it's absolutely vital. Thing is, as things stand I think it's a case of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

On rule of law...

One of the key tenets of COIN is that the counterinsurgent should operate according to the rule of law.

BUT (and it's a big but)

What constitutes Rule of Law in an major insurgency situation rarely if ever amounts to the same thing as in peace time. In both theoretical and practical terms, it is vanishingly rare for an insurgency to be defeated according to peacetime rules. Even on so small-scale a case as the Rote Armee Fraktion in Germany, which was a tiny outfit with marginal public support, the day-to-day civil justice system was judged not to be up to the task and had to be prodded about (rightly or wrongly). Similarly in Northern Ireland - a far more difficult case than the RAF in Germany, but nonetheless a constituent part of the UK where the government was committed to running things Business As Usual as far as possible. The reality is that while various arbitrary measures proved horribly counterproductive, the peacetime system as constituted simply couldn't deal with a full blown insurgency situation. And in neither of these cases were things anything like as desperate or high-tempo as Iraq.

The point of rule of law from a COIN perspective is not that the forces of order must maintain a dogmatic insistence on the system running the same way it would on an ordinary shopping day on the Strand. It is that within whatever framework is settled upon, there should be as high a degree of certainty and accountability as possible. Oversight should be retained within the Emergency framework, the police should maintain a day-to-day civilian service as far as possible, the system should be run by civilians and not the army (which should be aid to the civil power), the population should know where they stand etc etc.

None of this is to argue that that sort of system is not flawed. It is. But the point is that there's virtually no support, either in the theory or - more importantly - in the historical record, to suggest that a full blown insurgency can be fought with the sort of legal setup that holds sway on a Saturday afternoon in Andover, New Hampshire. It simply doesn't happen. The price of absolute ideological purity on this matter is that the insurgents win and then nine times out of ten flawed justice gets replaced with kneecapping and head chopping. And to suggest that that's too high a price to pay is not by definition an endorsement of death squads and torture. Nor is there no middle ground between "peacetime rules" and armed gangs hauling people off buses and shooting them in the back of the head.

Posted by Anthony C | June 16, 2007 7:57 PM

Frankly, I'd be tickled to death if one of the Dem candidates questioned why we even need an independent Air Force any more. At best it's a relic of the Cold War, but really, it's whole institutional mindset goes back to the parlor games of Douhet and Billy Mitchell. If you want a techno-centric "strategy" that's oblivious to practically every real-world political consideration, ask an Air Force general. And all of its major "new" programs are meant to tackle military needs that disappeared with the USSR.

Posted by sglover | June 16, 2007 11:37 PM

People who want to apply the "peacetime rules" in Iraq are people who WANT to lose. They never had the will to win a war in the first place. All this "hearts and minds" crap from the 60s has gotten us nowhere.

Somebody made a good point the other day, successful counter-insurgency tactics go all the way back to 58BCE when Caesar went to dominate the decentralised enemy in Gaul. You need to employ Ceasar's total domination and suppression.

Of course there was never the level of support for a traditional war in the first place. It's like Neville Chamberlain attempting to keep the empire together by appeasing Germany, there needed to be a consensus on the danger of Germany before the dominions of Great Britain were prepared to engage in another European war.

However simply for the fact that Iraq is a vital strategic oil resource means that we cannot just retreat. Like the SAS when ambushed - we must charge the enemy with initiative and ferocity to catch them off guard.

Posted by MrSparkle | June 17, 2007 2:45 AM

It's funny you should mention Great Britain, MrSparkle, since they applied the same attitude in WWII to Germany that Matt describes in his post. They didn't have the ability to use air power effectively in precision strikes against German bases and manufacturing centers, so they reasoned that in order to make better use of their airpower, they should include civilian targets like housing, and to even more effectively use the resources they had, they should include lighter incendiary bombs in the attacks. The result was the massacre of women and children in huge fires sweeping through Hamburg.

Of course, Germany used similar logic earlier in the war, when air power was seen as first as a supplement, then a substitute, for a land invasion of Great Britain, with predictably brutal results.

Posted by Clark | June 17, 2007 5:03 AM

Um, Clark, did you even read Matt's post?

The post the rest of us read described an air force doing a lot of flyovers and dropping of flares in Iraq, and saying it was trying to follow very specific rules when dropping actual munitions to avoid civilian casualties. How exactly is that the "same attitude" as the RAF's attitude towards the citizens of Hamburg, again?

Posted by BruceR | June 17, 2007 4:41 PM

At least MrSparkle, doesn't pretend we are there on a humanitarian mission and we can't leave because a bunch of Iraqi's will die.

Posted by Ed Marshall | June 17, 2007 4:52 PM

Fred's right that the Spectre is very much the sort of thing that's suited to the job.

Not really. IIRC, the Spectre is only used during nightime because it is considered to be too slow and low-flying to safely operate during the day - when it is much easier to shoot down.

Posted by r4d20 | June 17, 2007 11:07 PM

The post the rest of us read described an air force doing a lot of flyovers and dropping of flares in Iraq, and saying it was trying to follow very specific rules when dropping actual munitions to avoid civilian casualties.

It actually sounds worthless as hell. I hope they are serious about all this, and if everyone is willing to pretend that it's completely worth flying a fighter over somewhere and dropping flares and that's a combat mission and it's crucial, that's great. It avoids the status quo where the Air Force wants to bomb everything out there because it has to do something to justify it's budget, and the entire chain of command (which depends on combat missions to dole out to justify promotions and pay raises) colludes to find some way to keep active. If they decide it's incredibly important to skywrite "America, Fuck Yeah!", and those missions get you an Air Force Cross (or equivalant for the other branches), that's even better.

Every study conducted in Iraq post-invasion (includind a supressed DOD one), concluded that the most likely way you were going to die there was a U.S. airstrike. Anything that keeps them busy doing something else is great for everyone involved.

Posted by Ed Marshall | June 17, 2007 11:42 PM

The post the rest of us read described an air force doing a lot of flyovers and dropping of flares in Iraq, and saying it was trying to follow very specific rules when dropping actual munitions to avoid civilian casualties.

It actually sounds worthless as hell. I hope they are serious about all this, and if everyone is willing to pretend that it's completely worth flying a fighter over somewhere and dropping flares and that's a combat mission and it's crucial, that's great. It avoids the status quo where the Air Force wants to bomb everything out there because it has to do something to justify it's budget, and the entire chain of command (which depends on combat missions to dole out to justify promotions and pay raises) colludes to find some way to keep active. If they decide it's incredibly important to skywrite "America, Fuck Yeah!", and those missions get you an Air Force Cross (or equivalant for the other branches), that's even better.

Every study conducted in Iraq post-invasion (includind a supressed DOD one), concluded that the most likely way you were going to die there was a U.S. airstrike. Anything that keeps them busy doing something else is great for everyone involved.

Posted by Ed Marshall | June 17, 2007 11:42 PM