Air Power

Max Bergman and Fred Kaplan both note that the Army's increased reliance on air power in Iraq is probably helping to produce the welcome decrease in American casualties. The only problem, as they both note, is that this seems to imply a shift away from a counterinsurgency strategy, which requires more risk-taking on the part of soldiers (i.e., dead Americans) in order to rely less on firepower (i.e., fewer dead Iraqis), back toward the failed force protection policies of 2005-2006.

Not, however, that I think we should go back to high casualty counterinsurgency tactics. Rather, the tendency of our commanders in Iraq to keep shifting back to low casualty strategies reflects politicians' perfectly accurate view that there's nothing left in Iraq such that it's both actually achievable and worth asking lots of people to die for. That, though, means we should adopt the ultimate casualty-reduction strategy of ending the war. Remaining in force while saving lives by adopting immorally destructive and ultimately counterproductive strategies is a very bad idea.

Comments

. Remaining in force while saving lives by adopting immorally destructive and ultimately counterproductive strategies is a very bad idea.

I'll half-grant you "immoral," but I don't think the rest is clear. You disengage from Iraq with the political and policy machinery you have,....

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | October 25, 2007 4:36 PM

Matt,

You are presenting a false dichotomy here, and drawing unfounded conclusions. First, there is a role for air power in counter-insurgency, and in some cases, it can be more accurate, and cause less collateral damage to civilians than forms of ground fires. For example, a hellfire rocket strike from a helicopter can more accurately target militants occupying a car, or one room in a building, than shell fired by ground-based artillery.

Second, if the primary goal driving military operations in Iraq were force protection, we wouldn't be using the numerous small outposts that are a centerpiece of the new counterinsurgency strategy.

Third, both Iraqi civilian casualties and U.S. casualties are both sharply down, which suggests that you are presenting a false choice between more dead Americans on the one hand versus more dead Iraqis on the other: General "Betrayus"'s current strategy has produced fewer Iraqi casualties and fewer American casualties. When will you give him and the troops under him an ounce of credit for what they are doing to stabilize Iraq?

Posted by Fred | October 25, 2007 4:38 PM

Fred's third point is the most important.

Fred Kaplan - who, really, has got to be the most idiotic "military" analyst out there - complete ignores that Iraqi civilian casualties are down sharply.

Counterinsurgency strategy requires that you decrease civilian casualties. Petraeus has done exactly that. The Reality-Based Community continues to ignore, well, reality, in that we are doing exactly what counterinsurgency strategy requires.

Posted by Al | October 25, 2007 4:41 PM

do you not get even the slightest pang of guilt when you write this trash?

I wouldve thought the fact that there has also been a large drop in civillian casualties at the same time would be relevant. Are iraqi civillians calling in air support as well?

Posted by pimp hand strikes! | October 25, 2007 4:49 PM

There have indeed been a significant drop in civilian casualties.

What Fred and others here don't seem to understand is that the vast majority of civilian casualties of the past were perpetrated by Iraqis, not Americans.

The relevant question, for which I have no data, is this. Has there been a drop in civilian casualties caused by US or coalition military actions?

My only other point is, is it just me or does that Hornet appear to have a rocket propelled drop tank/blivett?

Posted by Davebo | October 25, 2007 4:53 PM

If you actually look at the numbers (I know, that's a little too reality-based for some people), the number of American casualties seems, if anything, to correlate positively, not inversely, with the number of airstrikes. The number of airstrikes was high in June-July-August of this year, when American casualties generally were high, and both airstrikes and American casualties (and Iraqi civilian casualties, too) declined in September. American and Iraqi casualties have declined even further in October, but Slate doesn't give the airstrike numbers. So the analysis doesn't hold up, and of course Bergman/Kaplan/Yglesias don't even attempt to explain the trends in Iraqi civilian casualties.

Posted by y81 | October 25, 2007 5:06 PM

Mark,

Please stick to things you have some knowledge of or at least education about. Military topics are not your forte'. This was one of your worst posts and nakedly showed your liberal bias. At least try and get the concept/numbers straight.

Posted by danceswithgoats | October 25, 2007 5:11 PM

So Iraqi casualties are down? Is there evidence for this assertion?

Posted by DP | October 25, 2007 5:11 PM

Y81, I'm not sure what you're saying here. Slate certainly gives the airstrike numbers.

From January to September of this year, according to unclassified data, U.S. Air Force pilots in Iraq have flown 996 sorties that involved dropping munitions. By comparison, in all of 2006, they flew just 229 such sorties—one-quarter as many. In 2005, they flew 404; in 2004, they flew 285.

In other words, in the first nine months of 2007, Air Force planes dropped munitions on targets in Iraq more often than in the previous three years combined.

If the only point is to reduce American casualties I can offer a much cheaper solution. However, the expectation was higher American casualties but that we would be rewarded with political reconcilliation.

Neither has occurred and though I'm glad fewer of our children are dying I'm depressed that we are still taking casualties while making no progress on the goal of the surge.

Posted by Davebo | October 25, 2007 5:14 PM

According to iCasualties, these are the Iraqi civilian death totals for the last three months, including October month-to-date:

Civilians
Aug-07 1598
Sep-07 752
Oct-07 466

Posted by Fred | October 25, 2007 5:15 PM

"However, the expectation was higher American casualties but that we would be rewarded with political reconcilliation."

Apparently, the ground-up reconciliation efforts are common enough in Iraq that a veteran Iraq correspondent, Michael Yon, saw fit to mention one in passing, as if it were unremarkable, in his recent post about meeting Scott Beauchamp's battalion commander:

"I was at a reconciliation meeting between Sunni and Shia in the West Rashid district of Baghdad on 24 October, and it happened by complete coincidence that I was with Beauchamp’s battalion."

Posted by Fred | October 25, 2007 5:23 PM

For starters, Fred Kaplan is probably about the best military analyst out there. I have yet to read anyone else who knows as much about the armed forces and sees the big picture. But then again, he often deviates from the conservative line, so he can't know anything about the military, of course.

I was always taught in military history class that air power alone can't win a war. But I guess it can distract people from the political problems in Iraq for a while.

Posted by Lev | October 25, 2007 5:52 PM

Davebo:

Slate doesn't give the number of airstrikes in October. So the decline in American casualties can't be tied to airstrikes.

For the year, airstrikes are up, and American casualties are up. If you look month-by-month, there is no clear correlation between number of airstrikes and number of American casualties. So the armchair analysis of Bergman/Kaplan/Yglesias doesn't seem to be supported.

Posted by y81 | October 25, 2007 5:52 PM

It seems like everytime someone moves a deck chair on the Iraqi Titanic we all run around in a tizzy trying to analyze what it means.

I would opine that it's worth taking a step back and looking at this in terms of the "nation" of Iraq.

For all that there appear to have been local accomodations, the national level factions do not seem to have given up their aspirations. The Shia still want to win, the Sunni don't accept that they're not gonna get the big piece of the pie they once had and the Kurds still don't want to BE Iraqis to the extent they can.

Add to that the out-and-out criminal gangs, drug and arms smugglers, broken intrastructure, massive unemployment, foreign meddling (including our own) and immense level of societal and governmental dysfunction, ISTM the fact that the USAF is bombing Iraqi neighborhoods just points out that this ISN'T a classic counterinsurgency where the U.S. is doing FID for the national government. Right now it looks like a multisided civil war in a failed state, which I have no confidence in the Bush Administration's ability - a gang who couldn't figure out how to repair a major city in Louisiana (at least notionally part of the First World) - to figure out a way to turn this shit soup into a shit sandwich.

I have no particular idea whether this "more airstikes = more problems" analysis means anything at all. I do think that fighting over this while assuming that "but Iraqi civilian casualties are down = more better" is straining at gnats and swallowing camels. The murder rate for occupants of a cemetary is zero; it means nothing re: the mortality of the occupants. Iraqi civil deaths may be down for a number of reasons, including the increased troop presence in Baghdad has combatants lying low waiting for spring, or even that the ethnic cleansing of mixed neighborhoods has succeeded in reducing the availibility of killable neighbors and thus the liklihood of seeing more dead people.

Argue away, folks. But I'd argue myself to take this sort of analysis with a big mound of salt.

Posted by FDChief | October 25, 2007 6:31 PM

For starters, Fred Kaplan is probably about the best military analyst out there. I have yet to read anyone else who knows as much about the armed forces and sees the big picture. But then again, he often deviates from the conservative line, so he can't know anything about the military, of course.

I was always taught in military history class that air power alone can't win a war. But I guess it can distract people from the political problems in Iraq for a while.

Posted by Lev | October 25, 2007 5:52 PM
=================================================

1. I think you're confusing Fred Kaplan with Robert D. Kaplan

2. We aren't fighting in Iraq with air power alone - so what's your point?

Posted by Campesino | October 25, 2007 6:35 PM

My only other point is, is it just me or does that Hornet appear to have a rocket propelled drop tank/blivett?

Posted by Davebo | October 25, 2007 4:53 PM
================================================

Actually looking closely at that pic, it looks to me like the Hornet is dropping an anti-heatseeking missle flare. There's no rocket in front of the flame that would be its exhaust. Yglesias can't even pick out a picture of a plane dropping munitions.

Posted by Campesino | October 25, 2007 6:41 PM

I have to agree that Yglesias, Kaplan and Bergman are incomprehensible on this subject as they fail to come up with any attempt to align the increase in airstrikes with casualty rate drops and changed "clear and hold" tactics by ground troops.

MY has been on a more airstrikes = bad kick for months now with little indication that it's grounded in any sort of experience or reality. Your degree's in philosophy and you've spent how much time in the military?

Posted by Campesino | October 25, 2007 6:47 PM

Read the pigging article. Kaplan says the following about Iraqi civilian casualties from airstrikes:

"The research group Iraq Body Count estimates that 417 Iraqi civilians died from January to September of this year as a result of airstrikes. This is only a bit less than the estimated 452 deaths caused by airstrikes in the previous two years combined." He also notes that Iraq Body Count's methodology leads to the undercounting of casualties.

Posted by Tom S | October 25, 2007 7:06 PM

Read the pigging article. Kaplan says the following about Iraqi civilian casualties from airstrikes:

"The research group Iraq Body Count estimates that 417 Iraqi civilians died from January to September of this year as a result of airstrikes. This is only a bit less than the estimated 452 deaths caused by airstrikes in the previous two years combined." He also notes that Iraq Body Count's methodology leads to the undercounting of casualties.

Posted by Tom S | October 25, 2007 7:06 PM
=================================================

So lets see, Bergman and Yglesias don't talk about about the drop in overall Iraqi deaths at all. Actually Kaplan doesn't either - just that he *believes* more Iraqis are killed by airstrikes and doesn't even bother to put that in the context of overall Iraqi deaths by Coalition forces by all methods. What's that number?

Yglesias and Bergman say airstrikes = bad based (I guess) on their emotional reactions. Kaplan says airstrikes arebad because killing more Iraqis but can't be bothered to figure out if this means we're killing more Iraqis overall. If there might be a link between this strategy, the "clear and hold" strategy on the ground and the fact that overall Iraqi deaths are down - don't go there.

Kaplan comes out with this howler:

"Striking urban targets from the air inevitably means killing more innocent bystanders."

If you think a GPS guided bomb is going to cause more collateral damage than an artillery fire mission you have no business writing about the military.

And I'm supposed to be pigging impressed?

Posted by Campesino | October 25, 2007 7:39 PM

According to iCasualties, these are the Iraqi civilian death totals for the last three months, including October month-to-date:

Civilians
Aug-07 1598
Sep-07 752
Oct-07 466

Cautionary statement on the iCasualties site:

Actual totals for Iraqi deaths are much higher than the numbers recorded on this site.

Posted by rea | October 25, 2007 8:26 PM

In other words, reports of casualties in the news media are down That's all that sites like iCasualties do, is count the reports of casualties in the newspapers. Whether that correlates with an actual decrease in casualties, and if so, the causes of that decrease, remain to be seen.

Posted by rea | October 25, 2007 8:33 PM

"In other words, reports of casualties in the news media are down"

The Iraqi government and the U.S. military also report sharply lower civilian casualties.

"Whether that correlates with an actual decrease in casualties... remains to be seen"

The major media, the Iraqi government, and the U.S. military all report sharply lower Iraqi civilian casualties. There are even reports that the grave diggers are "feeling the pinch" as "violence falls in Iraq". And yet you have epistemic problems accepting that this represents an actual decrease. Did you have the same problems believing it when the media, the Iraqi government, and the U.S. military reported higher Iraqi civilian casualties? What would it take to convince you that they aren't in all in cahoots to deceive you now?

Posted by Fred | October 25, 2007 8:49 PM

This is a political war, and it calls for the utmost discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing is a knife, but I'm afraid we can't do it that way. The next best is a rifle. The worst is an airplane, and after that the worst is artillery. You have to know who you are killing.

-- John Paul Vann

Posted by croatoan | October 25, 2007 8:56 PM

I'm confused. First, I thought "we don't do body counts." Second, the point of the surge was to buy time for reconciliation, which Iraqi leaders have said is impossible. So it's nice that casualties are down, but that wasn't the goal of the surge.

Posted by croatoan | October 25, 2007 9:01 PM

OK, croatoan, but then Yglesias's entire analysis is beside the point. More airstrikes, fewer airstrikes, none of it matters by your logic. Even Yglesias hasn't concocted a claim that the number of airstrikes affects the Iraqi politicians' ability to cut a deal.

Was that the point of your comment, that Yglesias's critique of Petraeus's operational techniques has nothing to do with the real issues?

Posted by y81 | October 25, 2007 9:15 PM

Campesino:

Kaplan was comparing precision airstrikes to infantry clearing a building, not to artillery fire missions. Way to set up a false comparison.

Posted by Tom S | October 25, 2007 9:20 PM

All the nitwits came out for this one.

"For example, a hellfire rocket strike from a helicopter can more accurately target militants occupying a car, or one room in a building, than shell fired by ground-based artillery."

This is probably one of the stupidest remarks ever posted here.

The accuracy of direct-fire vs indirect fire is not the question. The question is the kill-radius of the weapon used.

If you fire a Hellfire anti-armor or anti-personnel missile at a building, everybody within 10 meters - 30 feet - os going to die and everybody within 50 meters - 150 feet give or take - of the blast - is going to get injured.

Not to mention that you don't use Hellfires in that situation, anyway, you use other ordinance, since the Hellfire is a top attack weapon.

Read this article in "The Nation":

The Secret Air War in Iraq
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070611/turse

Money quote:

According to Les Roberts, co-author of two surveys of mortality in Iraq published in the British medical journal The Lancet, "Rocket and cannon fire could account for most coalition-attributed civilian deaths." He added, "I find it disturbing that they will not release this [figure], but even more disturbing that they have not released such information to Congressmen who have requested it." Roberts himself witnessed the destruction caused by cannon fire in Baghdad's vast Shiite slum, Sadr City, in 2004. He recalls passing through 100- to 200-meter-wide areas of neighborhoods that had been raked by such fire. "It wasn't one house that was beat up," he recalled. "It would be five, six, seven buildings in a row." This portrait of devastation is echoed by independent Iraqi journalist Ali al-Fadhily, who told me he had witnessed helicopter gunships in action, noting: "The destruction they caused was always immense and casualties so many. They simply destroy the target with every living soul inside. The smell of death comes with those machines."

While the destructive capacity of helicopter gunships has been well documented, the actual scale of use is hard to pin down. Flight hours do give some indication. According to James Glanz of the New York Times, Army helicopters logged 240,000 flight hours in 2005, 334,000 in 2006 and projections for 2007 reach 400,000. These numbers don't include Marine squadrons that operate in Anbar Province, heliborne missions by private security contractors or those of the nascent Iraqi Air Force.

Carried out by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University and Iraqi physicians organized through Baghdad's Mustansiriya University, the Lancet study estimated 655,000 "excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war." The study also found that from March 2003 through June 2006, 13 percent of violent deaths were caused by coalition airstrikes. If the 655,000 figure, which includes more than 601,000 violent deaths, is accurate, this would mean that about 78,000 Iraqis had been killed by bomb, missile, rocket or cannon up to last June. There are indications that the air war has taken an especially grievous toll on Iraqi children. Figures provided by the Lancet study suggest that 50 percent of all violent deaths of Iraqi children under 15 in that same period were due to coalition airstrikes.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | October 25, 2007 9:23 PM

The iCasualties count is completely wrong.

If you follow the day-to-day casualty count at Antiwar.com, you'll see that nearly 200 or more people were killed in just four days last week.

So the iCasualty count of 466 for the whole of October to date is just obviously wrong.

The actual figure is likely to be over a thousand and probably between 1,200 and 1,500, which puts it about where it was in July and earlier when the casualty counts were well over 1,000.

Wednesday, 46 Iraqis were killed and 61 wounded - and that figure is undoubtedly an undercount.

As for why US military casualties are down, read this article:

Ill-Equipped Soldiers Opt for 'Search and Avoid'
http://www.antiwar.com/jamail/?articleid=11806

Money quote:

Aliff said he participated in roughly 300 patrols. "We were hit by so many roadside bombs we became incredibly demoralized, so we decided the only way we wouldn't be blown up was to avoid driving around all the time."

"So we would go find an open field and park, and call our base every hour to tell them we were searching for weapons caches in the fields and doing weapons patrols and everything was going fine," he said, adding, "All our enlisted people became very disenchanted with our chain of command."

Other active duty Iraq veterans tell similar stories of disobeying orders so as not to be attacked so frequently.

"We'd go to the end of our patrol route and set up on top of a bridge and use it as an over-watch position," Eli Wright, also an active duty soldier with the 10th Mountain Division, told IPS. "We would just sit with our binoculars and observe rather than sweep. We'd call in radio checks every hour and say we were doing sweeps."

Wright added, "It was a common tactic, a lot of people did that. We'd just hang out, listen to music, smoke cigarettes, and pretend."

"One of my buddies is in Baghdad right now and we email all the time," he explained, "He just told me that nearly each day they pull into a parking lot, drink soda, and shoot at the cans. They pay Iraqi kids to bring them things and spread the word that they are not doing anything and to please just leave them alone."

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | October 25, 2007 9:32 PM

In other words, this is exactly the same thing that happened in Vietnam, according to Vietnam vets I've talked to in the past.

When the war became ridiculous - they stopped fighting the war.

US troops in Iraq have unilaterally decided that their commanders are morons for ordering them to drive around with signs on them saying, "I'm an American moron! Blow me up!" - and they're refusing to do it.

Also, US commanders in Iraq in the past have ordered their commands to remain in base to avoid higher casualty rates. I'm sure this is also part of the process now going on. The lower commanders keep their men home, reduce their casualties, and tell Petraeus "Hey, General, the surge is working!"

The bottom line: the use of US air strikes in an URBAN counterinsurgency is a war crime. Period. Dropping a 500-pound bomb on a "rural farmhouse" - which is allegedly what was done to get Zarqawi - or on a jungle clearing in Vietnam is far different from dropping one in an urban neighborhood.

The latter is a war crime by definition, unless the "neighborhood" is known to be abandoned.

And you don't kill an estimated 78,000 civilians "by accident". By definition, that is a war crime.

And for those complaining that we didn't believe the counts when they were higher, that is truly stupid. We didn't believe them then BECAUSE THEY WERE TOO LOW THEN!

It's amazing how these right wing scumbags simply don't have the balls to admit that what they really want to do is bomb all the Iraqis to hell and then declare victory. I think there was just ONE such scumbag who was referenced a few months ago as advocating exactly that - nuke Iraq and leave.

Fred, campesino, and the rest of the clowns are simply kill-crazy idiots who don't give a rat's ass how many civilians get killed. They just don't have the balls to say so, so they make up lame arguments about military tactics they know nothing about and misrepresent undercounts - and acknowledged undercounts at that - as accurate.

Gutless punks, the lot.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | October 25, 2007 9:48 PM

The bottom line: the use of US air strikes in an URBAN counterinsurgency is a war crime. Period. Dropping a 500-pound bomb on a "rural farmhouse" - which is allegedly what was done to get Zarqawi - or on a jungle clearing in Vietnam is far different from dropping one in an urban neighborhood.

The latter is a war crime by definition, unless the "neighborhood" is known to be abandoned.

Hack talks, oh, so assertively about war crimes, but he is talking out his ass. Definition of war crime? War crime, period! Yeah, right. You think he would have learned something in the pen.

Nothing in Hague or Geneva says you cant drop air ordnance on a city. Or artillery. Or rockets. Or mortars.

And the Lancet study you also pulled out of your ass is discredited.

Posted by Chris Ford | October 25, 2007 10:48 PM

Campesino:

Kaplan was comparing precision airstrikes to infantry clearing a building, not to artillery fire missions. Way to set up a false comparison.

Posted by Tom S | October 25, 2007 9:20 PM
=================================================
Actually, Kaplan makes no direct comparison between airstrikes and infantry clearing a building. The quote stand on its own, and you made up the comparison.

Way to lie

Posted by Campesino | October 25, 2007 11:10 PM

I was reading a few weeks ago that not only did the US military call in an airstrike at 03:00 am on an apartment building (by the bomb demolished) in the upscale Mansur quarter, it surrounded the block to prevent fire and rescue teams from approaching the burning building. Women and children were left bleeding and burned to die. That's what your military does for you.

Posted by Nur al-Cubicle | October 25, 2007 11:20 PM

Fred, campesino, and the rest of the clowns are simply kill-crazy idiots who don't give a rat's ass how many civilians get killed. They just don't have the balls to say so, so they make up lame arguments about military tactics they know nothing about and misrepresent undercounts - and acknowledged undercounts at that - as accurate.g

Gutless punks, the lot.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | October 25, 2007 9:48 PM

=================================================

I've spent the last few months ignoring you, brainless toughguy. Just this once I'll point out that your whole schtick amounts to calling people names and ignoring facts that are inconvenient for you. You add nothing. Iraqi civilian casualties are up - the situation's going to hell. Iraqi civilian casualties are down - the numbers are no good. If anything else happens, scream, WAR CRIME. Just keep your head planted firmly up your ass and we'll just keep on ignoring you.

Posted by Campesino | October 25, 2007 11:26 PM

Free feel to ignore me, asshole. I'm not ignoring you clowns.

Every time you post your stupid bullshit based on nothing but assertions, I'll take it apart point by point with facts.

Tough noogies, fella.

Deal with it.

Ford:

"Nothing in Hague or Geneva says you cant drop air ordnance on a city. Or artillery. Or rockets. Or mortars."

I have repeatedly quoted here the opposite directly from the Geneva Conventions.

Want to see it again? Here it is, asshole:

area bombardments

Area bombardments occur when a number of clearly separated military objectives are treated as a single military objective, and where there is a similar concentration of civilians or civilian objects. ( Protocol I, Art. 51 , Sec. 5a)

Area bombardments and other indiscriminate attacks are forbidden. ( Protocol I, Art. 57, Sec. 2b)

An indiscriminate attack affecting the civilian population or civilian objects and resulting in excessive loss of life, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions. ( Protocol I, Art. 85, Sec. 3)

See also indiscriminate attacks.

indiscriminate attacks

Indiscriminate attacks are those which are not directed at a specific military objective or those which use a method of attack that cannot be directed at or limited to a specific military objective. (Protocol I, Art. 51, Sec. 4)

This includes area bombardment, where a number of clearly separated military objectives are treated as a single military objective, and where there is a similar concentration of civilians or civilian objects. (Protocol I, Art. 51, Sec. 5a)

This also includes attacks where the expected incidental loss of civilian life or damage to civilian objects is excessive to the military advantage anticipated. (Protocol I, Art. 51, Sec. 5b)

Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. (Protocol I, Art. 51, Sec. 4)

Combatants must distinguish between civilian and military objects and attack only military targets. (Protocol I, Art. 48)

If it becomes apparent that an objective in an attack is not a military one, or if that attack could cause incidental loss of civilian life or damage to civilian objects, then the attack must be called off. (Protocol I, Art. 57)

You conveniently leave out the parts where it talks about civilians when you say nothing says you can't drop certain ordinance on a city. Yes, you can - as long as you're not targeting civilians.

Your deliberately ignoring that distinction makes you a civilian killing war criminal asshole.

"And the Lancet study you also pulled out of your ass is discredited."

Prove it. I quote the following from the Christian Science Monitor:

"I loved when President Bush said 'their methodology has been pretty well discredited,' " says Richard Garfield, a public health professor at Columbia University who works closely with a number of the authors of the report. "That's exactly wrong. There is no discrediting of this methodology. I don't think there's anyone who's been involved in mortality research who thinks there's a better way to do it in unsecured areas. I have never heard of any argument in this field that says there's a better way to do it."

And from a Democracy Now interview with Roberts:

Roberts on cluster analysis:

You know, I don't want to sort of stoop to that level and start saying general slurs, but I just want to say that what we did, this cluster survey approach, is the standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries where the government isn’t very functional or in times of war. And when UNICEF goes out and measures mortality in any developing country, this is what they do. When the U.S. government went at the end of the war in Kosovo or went at the end of the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. government measured the death rate, this is how they did it. And most ironically, the U.S. government has been spending millions of dollars per year, through something called the Smart Initiative, to train NGOs and UN workers to do cluster surveys to measure mortality in times of wars and disasters.

So, I think we used a very standard method. I think our results are couched appropriately in the relative imprecision of [inaudible]. It could conceivably be as few as 400,000 deaths. So we’re upfront about that. We don’t know the exact number. We just know the range, and we’re very, very confident about both the method and the results.

Furthermore:

Greg Mitchell has written two columns on the topic for Editor & Publisher and he finds that:

* The Associated Press casts a very skeptical eye on the study, emphasizing the views of one "expert" Anthony Cordesman, (as the AP describes him) who charges that it is nothing but "politics," with the November election approaching.

* The Washington Post, meanwhile, interviewed Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years. He called the Johns Hopkins survey method "tried and true" and added that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have."

* Sarah Leah Whitson, an official of Human Rights Watch in New York, told the Post, "We have no reason to question the findings or the accuracy" of the survey.

* Frank Harrell Jr., chairman of the biostatistics department at Vanderbilt University, told the Associated Press the study incorporated "rigorous, well-justified analysis" of the data.

* Richard Garfield, a public health professor at Columbia University who works closely with a number of the authors of the report, told The Christian Science Monitor: "That's exactly wrong. There is no discrediting of this methodology. I don't think there's anyone who's been involved in mortality research who thinks there's a better way to do it in unsecured areas. I have never heard of any argument in this field that says there's a better way to do it."

* The sampling "is solid. The methodology is as good as it gets," said John Zogby, whose polling agency, Zogby International, has done several surveys in Iraq since the war began. "It is what people in the statistics business do." Zogby said similar survey methods have been used to estimate casualty figures in other conflicts, such as Darfur and the Congo.

Go look at Wikipedia's article on the study: while there were many criticisms, most of them appear to have been answered by the authors of the study.

Wikipedia also quotes these experts:

In a letter to The Age, published Oct. 21, 2006, 27 epidemiologists and health professionals defended the methods of the study, writing that the study's "methodology is sound and its conclusions should be taken seriously."[5]

A Reuters article reports on other researchers, epidemiologists, professors, and physicians who have defended the study. For example; this quote from the article;

"Over the last 25 years, this sort of methodology has been used more and more often, especially by relief agencies in times of emergency," said Dr. David Rush, a professor and epidemiologist at Tufts University in Boston.[67]

Sir Richard Peto, Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology in the University of Oxford, described the 2006 report as "statistically valid" in an interview on BBC television.[68]

Dr. Ben Coghlan, an epidemiologist in Melbourne Australia, writes: "The US Congress should agree: in June this year [2006] they unanimously passed a bill outlining financial and political measures to promote relief, security and democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The bill was based in part on the veracity of a survey conducted by the Burnet Institute (Melbourne) and the International Rescue Committee (New York) that found 3.9 million Congolese had perished because of the conflict. This survey used the same methodology as Burnham and his associates. It also passed the scrutiny of a UK parliamentary delegation and the European Union."[69] Burnham is one of the authors of both of the Lancet studies.

October 19, 2006 Washington Post article[34] reports:

"The numbers do add up," said Daniel Davies, a stockbroker and blogger for the Guardian. He argued that the sample of 1,849 households interviewed by Iraqi doctors working for the JHU research team was as large as that used by political pollsters.

An October 16, 2006 MediaLens article quotes many health experts, epidemiologists, biostatistics experts, polling experts, etc. who approve of the Lancet study and methodology.[70] For example:

John Zogby, whose New York-based polling agency, Zogby International, has done several surveys in Iraq since the war began, said: "The sampling is solid. The methodology is as good as it gets. It is what people in the statistics business do." ...

Professor Sheila Bird of the Biostatistics Unit at the Medical Research Council said: "They have enhanced the precision this time around and it is the only scientifically based estimate that we have got where proper sampling has been done and where we get a proper measure of certainty about these results."

In an October 31, 2006 MediaLens article, Lancet study co-author Les Roberts responded to several questions on the report, concluding that: "Of any high profile scientific report in recent history, ours might be the easiest to verify. If we are correct, in the morgues and graveyards of Iraq, most deaths during the occupation would have been due to violence. If Mr. Bush's '30,000 more or less' figure from last December is correct, less than 1 in 10 deaths has been from violence. Let us address the discomfort of Mr. Moore and millions of other Americans, not by uninformed speculation about epidemiological techniques, but by having the press travel the country and tell us how people are dying in Iraq."[71]

You're a liar, Ford. You're relying on some bullshit spoken by Bush when you say the study's methodology is discredited.

The study has not been discredited. It has been criticized in some respects, but not clearly discredited at all.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | October 26, 2007 12:11 AM

Fred:

"For example, a hellfire rocket strike from a helicopter can more accurately target militants occupying a car, or one room in a building, than shell fired by ground-based artillery."

Richard Steven Hack:

"This is probably one of the stupidest remarks ever posted here..."

Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Mundt, director of Army aviation:

“A rocket is a very good tool … to kill a soft-skin vehicle, or to take out one room in a building”

"Not to mention that you don't use Hellfires in that situation, anyway, you use other ordinance, since the Hellfire is a top attack weapon."

Actually, you do, since:

"The Army has lacked an in-between weapon that is less destructive than a 7-inch Hellfire missile but can be precisely guided to the target with a laser pointer, and keeps pilots at a relatively safe standoff range."

But, the Army is working on adding an APKWS (“advanced precision kill weapon system”) guidance kit to the smaller 2.5 inch Hydra rocket which will have less risk of collateral damage.

In the meantime though, direct-fired Hellfires from helicopters (and Predators) are more accurate, and less likely to cause collateral damage than ground-based artillery.

Posted by Fred | October 26, 2007 1:46 AM

This article really shows how much you know about your topic. We aren't fighting Iraqis. We are fighting insurgents and terrorists. We are helping the good guys not killing the bad guys. I say we because I am in Iraq right now, and it kills me when people make uneducated comments with the hopes to spark conflict.

Posted by Steven B Taylor Cpl USMC | October 26, 2007 10:17 AM

We aren't fighting Iraqis. We are fighting insurgents and terrorists. We are helping the good guys not killing the bad guys. I say we because I am in Iraq right now

What kind of FOB Goblin believes that the insurgency isn't made up almost entirely of Iraqis?

Posted by Davebo | October 26, 2007 11:06 AM

Free feel to ignore me, asshole. I'm not ignoring you clowns.

Every time you post your stupid bullshit based on nothing but assertions, I'll take it apart point by point with facts.
=================================================

I broke my rule to ignore you yesterday because I was in a crabby mood. Ever wonder why most other commenters here don't bother to say anything about your comments? All your comments are essentially the same one: I'm tough! I'm smart! Facts are bullsh*t! You're all stupid clowns! It's a WAR CRIME!

Wash. Rise. Repeat.

Go ahead and shout in the dark. No one's listening.

*moves switch back to "Ignore RSH"*

Posted by Campesino | October 26, 2007 11:22 AM

Ford once again totally ignores what I said, and provides completely irrelevant quotes which have nothing to do with what I said.

Once again, for the moron:

Nobody said anything about direct fire vs indirect fire.

The issue is the use of high kill-radius weapons in an urban environment in the presence of civilians.

That is a war crime based on the Geneva Conventions.

End of story.

As for Campesino...bye. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | October 26, 2007 6:29 PM