12
Jan
Tangled up in grue: a sociopath’s guide to guilt-free war
Moon of Alabama proprietor Bernhard has flagged a revealing op-ed piece in the New York Times from Air Force general Charles Dunlap singing the praises of air power. It’s the five-fold increase in air sorties, says Dunlap, that accounts for the success of The Surge. That’s just before he says that the success of The Surge is largely an illusion.
The real red meat comes only indirectly from the Times piece, though; it’s to be found in the following passage from another Dunlap article Bernhard unearthed in the Armed Forces Journal, “America’s Asymmetric Advantage”.
[T]he nature of the air weapon is such that an Abu Ghraib or Hadithah simply cannot occur. The relative sterility of air power — which the boots-on-the-ground types oddly find distressing as somehow unmartial — nevertheless provides greater opportunity for the discreet application of force largely under the control of well-educated, commissioned officer combatants. Not a total insurance policy against atrocity, but a far more risk-controlled situation.
As Bernhard notes, air power may not be an insurance policy against atrocity, but it’s a fairly good insurance policy against evidence of atrocity, what with the frequent lack of witnesses and reconstructable crime scenes.
Dunlap includes a nice classist touch there too, with his contrast between “well-educated, commissioned officer combatants” and the alternative. “Relative sterility” is nicely done as well, obscuring as it does the smears of flesh and blood and bone and rubble, and the occasional shreds of a wedding dress, that survive bomb and missile attacks.
Air power: turning atrocities into accidents since World War I.
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I heard that officer-class bullshit many years ago when I was a young NCO stationed in Biloxi, Miss. I worked down the hall from a USAF colonel who had spent six years in a North Vietnamese prison after being shot down during a bombing run. He told me that the American prisoners in Vietnam were a much more successful bunch than were the prisoners in our other wars because almost all of the Vietnam prisoners were officers: They were better disciplined, had more group cohesion, and were less self-absorbed than enlisted people would have been.
He offered no evidence to support his claim.
January 14th, 2008 at 11:19 pmI’ve heard it before too, but never that blatantly. You have to wonder how guys like that can bring themselves to climb into an aircraft maintained by the peasants.
January 15th, 2008 at 5:31 amThank Dog we’ve managed to work out that whole indiscriminate destruction of civilians attendant with multi kiloton explosive ordinance thing.
Prof.
January 15th, 2008 at 11:03 am[...] Tangled up in grue: a sociopath’s guide to guilt-free war [...]
January 15th, 2008 at 12:47 pm