counterinsurgency war, even if reporters aren’t. Journalists could, for instance, read Thomas F. Searle’s article “Making Air Power Effective Against Guerrillas.” (If I can find it, they can.) Searle, a military defense analyst with the Airpower Research Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, concludes:
Airpower remains the single greatest asymmetrical advantage the United States has over its foes. However, by focusing on the demands of major combat and ignoring counterguerrilla warfare, we Airmen have marginalized ourselves in the global war on terrorism. To make airpower truly effective against guerrillas in that war, we cannot wait for the joint force commander or the ground component commander to tell us what to do. Rather, we must aggressively develop and employ airpower’s counterguerrilla capabilities.
Journalists could report on the new airborne weaponry being deployed and tested by U.S. forces. After all, like other recent American battlefields, Iraq has doubled as a laboratory for the corporate development and testing of ever more advanced weaponry. A piece, for instance, could be done on the armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), the Hunter, being deployed alongside the Predator in Iraq. (The people who name these things have certainly seen too many sci-fi movies.) In a piece in Defense Daily , a “trade” publication, we read, for example:
The Army in Iraq is poised to start operations using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) armed with a precision weapon, Northrop Grumman’s [NOC] Viper Strike munition, a service official said…. The Army is arming the Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI)-Northrop Grumman [NOC] Hunter UAV, under an approximately $4 million Quick Reaction Capability contract with Northrop Grumman that will be completed in December, John Miller, Northrop Grumman director of Viper Strike, told Defense Daily …. The Hunter can carry two Viper Strike missiles.
The Hunter UAV has been used in Iraq “since day one,” [Lt. Col. Jeff] Gabbert [program manager of Medium Altitude Endurance] said. The precise Viper Strike munition is important because, “it has very low collateral damage, so it’s going to be able to be employed in places where you might not use 500-pound bombs or might not use a Hellfire munition, [but] you’ll be able to use the Viper Strike munition.”
Of course, it would be a reportorial coup if any reporter were to go up in a plane or helicopter and survey the urban damage in Iraq, for example, as Jonathan Schell did from the back seat of a small forward air controller’s plane during the Vietnam War. (From this he wrote a report for the New Yorker magazine, “The Military Half,” which remains unparalleled in its graphic descriptions of the destruction of the Vietnamese countryside and which can be found collected in his book The Real War .) But that’s a lot to hope for these days. The complete absence of coverage, however, is a little harder to explain. Along with the vast permanent military base facilities the United States has been building in Iraq, the expansion of U.S. airpower is the great missing story of the post- 9/11 era. Is there no reporter out there willing to cover it? Is the repeated bombing, strafing, and missiling of heavily populated civilian urban centers and the partial or total destruction of cities such a humdrum event, after the last century of destruction and threatened destruction, that no one thinks it worth the bother?
The Barbarism of War from the Air
Barbarism seems an obvious enough category. Ordinarily in our world, the barbarians are them. They act in ways that seem unimaginably primitive and brutal to us. For instance, they kidnap or capture someone, American or Iraqi, and cut off his head. Now, isn’t that the definition of barbaric? Who does that anymore? The word medieval comes to mind immediately, and to the mass mind of our media even faster.
To jump a little closer to modernity, they strap on grenades, plastic
Airpower remains the single greatest asymmetrical advantage the United States has over its foes. However, by focusing on the demands of major combat and ignoring counterguerrilla warfare, we Airmen have marginalized ourselves in the global war on terrorism. To make airpower truly effective against guerrillas in that war, we cannot wait for the joint force commander or the ground component commander to tell us what to do. Rather, we must aggressively develop and employ airpower’s counterguerrilla capabilities.
Journalists could report on the new airborne weaponry being deployed and tested by U.S. forces. After all, like other recent American battlefields, Iraq has doubled as a laboratory for the corporate development and testing of ever more advanced weaponry. A piece, for instance, could be done on the armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), the Hunter, being deployed alongside the Predator in Iraq. (The people who name these things have certainly seen too many sci-fi movies.) In a piece in Defense Daily , a “trade” publication, we read, for example:
The Army in Iraq is poised to start operations using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) armed with a precision weapon, Northrop Grumman’s [NOC] Viper Strike munition, a service official said…. The Army is arming the Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI)-Northrop Grumman [NOC] Hunter UAV, under an approximately $4 million Quick Reaction Capability contract with Northrop Grumman that will be completed in December, John Miller, Northrop Grumman director of Viper Strike, told Defense Daily …. The Hunter can carry two Viper Strike missiles.
The Hunter UAV has been used in Iraq “since day one,” [Lt. Col. Jeff] Gabbert [program manager of Medium Altitude Endurance] said. The precise Viper Strike munition is important because, “it has very low collateral damage, so it’s going to be able to be employed in places where you might not use 500-pound bombs or might not use a Hellfire munition, [but] you’ll be able to use the Viper Strike munition.”
Of course, it would be a reportorial coup if any reporter were to go up in a plane or helicopter and survey the urban damage in Iraq, for example, as Jonathan Schell did from the back seat of a small forward air controller’s plane during the Vietnam War. (From this he wrote a report for the New Yorker magazine, “The Military Half,” which remains unparalleled in its graphic descriptions of the destruction of the Vietnamese countryside and which can be found collected in his book The Real War .) But that’s a lot to hope for these days. The complete absence of coverage, however, is a little harder to explain. Along with the vast permanent military base facilities the United States has been building in Iraq, the expansion of U.S. airpower is the great missing story of the post- 9/11 era. Is there no reporter out there willing to cover it? Is the repeated bombing, strafing, and missiling of heavily populated civilian urban centers and the partial or total destruction of cities such a humdrum event, after the last century of destruction and threatened destruction, that no one thinks it worth the bother?
The Barbarism of War from the Air
Barbarism seems an obvious enough category. Ordinarily in our world, the barbarians are them. They act in ways that seem unimaginably primitive and brutal to us. For instance, they kidnap or capture someone, American or Iraqi, and cut off his head. Now, isn’t that the definition of barbaric? Who does that anymore? The word medieval comes to mind immediately, and to the mass mind of our media even faster.
To jump a little closer to modernity, they strap on grenades, plastic
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