Hearts and Minds at 20,000 Feet

This is a really great post for the Guardian's blog by Matthew Yglesias, about the fuility of carrying out massive airstrikes in a counterinsurgency campaign. We failed to learn this lesson in Vietnam, and we're continuing that failure to this day.

Of course, any military operation carries some risk of civilian casualties and other forms of collateral damage that can doom a counterinsurgency operation. Air strikes are, however, especially risky in this regard. That's why the US army's highly touted new field manual on counterinsurgency warns that the "employment of airpower in the strike role should be done with exceptional care":

Bombing, even air strikes, should be weighed against the risks, the primary danger being collateral damage that turns the population against the government and provides the insurgents with a major propaganda victory. Even when justified under the law of war, bombing a target that results in civilian casualties will bring media coverage that works to the benefit of the insurgents. A standard insurgent and terrorist tactic for decades against Israel has been to fire rockets or artillery from the vicinity of a school or village in the hope that the Israelis would carry out a retaliatory air strike that kills or wounds civilians - who are then displayed to the world media as victims of aggression. Insurgents and terrorists elsewhere have shown few qualms in provoking attacks that ensure civilian casualties if such attacks fuel anti-government and anti-US propaganda. Indeed, insurgents today can be expected to use the civilian population as a cover for their activities.

But while military leaders clearly know this on some level - it's right there in the manual - they obviously aren't acting on their knowledge. Indeed, even in Iraq itself where David Petraeus, the author of the counterinsurgency manual quoted above, is in command, we're deploying more air strikes, not fewer. The first four and a half months of 2007 have already seen more air strikes than in all of 2006.

As William S. Lind observed on June 11, the rise in strikes is indicative of the ongoing failure of the "surge" on the ground. After all, "calling in air is the last, desperate and usually futile action of an army that is losing" its ground-based counterinsurgency efforts. "Worse," he writes, "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."

A military is a naturally conservative unit. In the business of saving their own soldiers' lives, they will provide whatever cover they can to help them carry out the mission. But airstrikes will simply enrage a population and, considering that they are by definition imprecise, they will fail to accomplish the kind of pinpointed goals you need to stop a counterinsurgency on the ground, and indeed may even work against the goal. (I'm also wondering if this also has to do with the lack of manpower. It's easier for one Air Force pilot to destroy a target than to send thousands of troops in there)

It hasn't been reported much, the increase in the level of airstrikes. But it's as sure a sign as any that we're losing wars on two fronts, and that our military is institutionally resistant to the kind of change needed to reverse course.