Registan.net

Let’s leave aside the many questions born of observer bias in this Small Wars Journal post by an advisor to the Secretary of the Air Force defending the utility of 1000% increases in air strikes in counterinsurgencies and address the meat of the argument:

Why did General Petraeus defy doctrine and increasingly call on airpower in a kinetic role? The answer is that air and space technology have come a long way since Vietnam. New communication technology allows air and ground forces to work together much more effectively than in the past. The synergy that joint forces derive from this interaction vastly magnifies the power of the force. Soldiers and Marines’ situational awareness increases dramatically when married to airborne ISR and their firepower increases by orders of magnitude when combined with precision guided munitions…

[Precision Guided Munitions] have had a similar effect. Unlike the imprecise bombs of the 1960s, modern bombs cause little unintentional damage. When linked with good human intelligence and eyes on the ground that can identify targets as hostile, they are a radically effective way of applying firepower without killing noncombatants or putting U.S. troops in harms way. Evidence of the unobtrusiveness of this form of military power is that the press has remained almost entirely ignorant of the tenfold increase in the amount of air launched ordinance used in the surge.

This second paragraph is, frankly, an outright lie if Nick Turse’s months of documenting what seems to be a deliberate decision not to cover the air war in Iraq can be believed. In the case of Afghanistan, the futility of air strikes has been at the heart of the debate for increasing ground troops—every one from Hamid Karzai to Barrack Obama to Antonio Giustozzi have noted the significant role collateral damage borne of air strikes have played in recruiting locals to the Taliban and other militant groups. While Richard Andres is couching his argument in terms of the Surge in Iraq, he is making a theoretical argument about the use of air strikes to make up for defficiencies in ground forces… which means it should be generalizable and not only applicable to Iraq.

Even ignoring the long argument I’ve made about the outright lie of claiming to have precision weapons, Andres is willfully misleading readers about the effects of PGMs. For one, if “little unintentional damage” occurs from precision air strikes… well, I’m curious how it is that we keep on bombing wedding parties and murdering dozens of people in the process. Even when coupled with good intelligence, we cannot eliminate collateral damage—say, when lobbing artillery shells into Pakistan to kill a militant leaders and killing several innocent people in the process. Such a world, in which an enemy conveniently hides away from all possible negative consequences of U.S. action, does not exist. And it would behoove the Air Force to start paying attention to that.

Worse than the practicalities of Andres’ argument is just how strongly it goes against established, means-tested analysis of other insurgencies. The Winograd Commission, which was convened in Israel to analyze why their 2006 war with Hezbollah last year didn’t go well, came to three main conclusions about the failure of Israeli strategy. Most pertinent here is the first: Western militaries are in active denial concerning the limitations of precision weapons. This is a lesson NATO is figuring out, as evidenced by their decision to use smaller bombs to reduce the number of civilian casualties.

But the U.S. has, in the past, proven unreliable in its quest to minimize civilian casualties in operations—year after year, the number of civilians killed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan climbs near to Taliban levels, and last year in Helmand were so severe a British commander reportedly requested the U.S. Special Forces withdraw to avoid further antagonizing the locals.

But it is even worse. Andres claims the first principle in counterinsurgency is to shore up the legitimacy of the government. Air strikes in Afghanistan, at least in the frequency with which they occur, have done the opposite: apart from all of our other policies, which also undermine the Afghan government, the appalling number of civilians killed in air strikes the last two years is probably the best insurgent recruiting tool out there. Hamid Karzai’s repeated public entreaties to reduce them has fallen on deaf ears; every time, then, that we mistakenly bomb a wedding party and murder 50 women, we further undercut the perception of Kabul as the political center of the country. In other words: the West has given normal citizens in Afghanistan no reason to have faith in their government.

This is because air power is not very precise, and it is not really limited—especially when you have small numbers of militants hiding in a village of mud huts. A 3-meter CEP (Circular Error Probable, which is a radius in which a weapon will land 50% of the time) is useless when even mild blast effects can rip apart mud huts and kill innocents. That is why, despite downgrading its standard munition to 500 lbs, NATO will still kill far too many civilians with such a light footprint. Over-investing in air power, and pretending that can make up for a troop shortfall, is sheer folly.

Indeed, the most precise weapon is the individual soldier, not an aircraft. How unsurprising an Air Force booster would neglect that.

Stumble it!