Political Reliance on Airstrikes

[Onasander]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-32194722

 

Its been erking me for a while, that "airstrikes" have become a legitimate response to armwd provacation.

 

Bill Clinton thought this with Bin Laden.... a few missiles should teach them. It was half hearted, with no follow up. Little point, it was merely a rebuttle in a debate with Bin Laden, like one would have in a political debate club "You see that crater in your camp Bin Laden, I responded in kind!"

 

I would like to think this started with the semi-earnest air campaign in Kosovo. It had a weird logic to it since fully embraced by the democratic party for whatever odd reasons: Airstrikes is the more acceptable method of engaging in war, as it avoids a Vietnam "quagmire". Vietnam was a country we dropped Daisy Cutters and Agent Orange on, Airstrikes do not solve a Vietnam! Precision targeting does, and in order to have that, you either need something beyond a doubt obvious from the air that its a legit enemy target.... like a tank, or eyes on the ground confirming it is.

 

In the military, the most basic formula is a SALT report, where a ground unit will call up on radio Size, Activity, Location, Time. There are longer variations, but that's the most basic, whittled down formula you can say before the Air force goes to bomb a target by request.

 

In cases like Kenya.... their troops aren't already in position all over Somalia, a radioguy on every hill, obviously aware of what is and is not a target. They're all bunched up in the SouthEast in Somalia doing poorly equipped peacekeeping work. They gotta rely on other, non Kenyan info, or delayed intelligence reports before they make their strikes, if their relying on info at all. It might be as stupid as some colonel informing the pilots they gotta head out and find a good target to bomb, as the government needs to show a response.

 

This is a crappy system. First off, Missiles, bombs, and fuel cost money. Secondly, even your most precise aircraft made ordinance blows up everything around it.

 

In Kenya's case, a few guys in jeeps, trained to special forces level training, could make a far more precise, politically painful and efficient strike against their opponents, and they could release images of a night-vision raid, capturing some idiot. If they get the target wrong, catch and release, but there are no catch and releases when you just bomb them.

 

Aircraft diplomacy sucks. Light and rapid groups of special forces are better. A large military like the US can use both, but a small military should just focus on SF.

 

Secondly, if you use such strikes, they should be meaningful in the larger picture. There is no just war criteria for the proper means to seek revenge. Wars of revenge are stupid, however limited. Bill Clinton shouldn't of bothered at all with those stupid strikes on Bin Laden. Dialogue would of been at the very least, just as effective (as the effect was zero). But a well crafted argument can induce reflection and perhaps change. A worthless retaliatory strike on a peripheral aspect of a belligerent power most definately won't. It doesn't harm them.

 

So if your going to engadge in strikes, it better be either the final end game.... it will forever remove that threat to your country, or its the beginning, more to follow.... and by more I don't mean just more airstrikes. Infantry know how to spread out and move along multiple lines of advance. Air forces can't conventionally stop this, just nuisance them. You'll need ground forces.

 

If Kenya wants the strikes to stop, it has to craft its response in a manner that will get it to stop. If the Arabs want the war in Yemen to stop, the same applies to them. Same applies to President Obama in Iraq and Syria. There is nothing more moral or ethical about airstrikes over troops on the ground, and not all troops need be a occupational, base building force bent on reconstruction. We got plenty of special forces, in and out raids focusing on systematically reducing the enemy's ability to hold it together.

 

Even poor countries can have SF units, and most do. However, in Kenya's case more than any other, I recommend just sending a battalion or two to reinforce Mogadishu in Somalia, and train two more battalions for rotation, and send out a sixth of said force out at any given time with the Somalian government on joint strikes. Don't bother to take terrain, just find the terrorists and kill them. If the locals want to join up, let them tslj to the Somali units, if not, oh well, come back next week when the village idiot takes up the mantel of jihad. They'll run out eventually of such fools.

 

It will be for more effective that some stupid airstrikes. They do nothing. Airstrikes are by far the worst method of communication ever devised. Try sending a letter instead if all your doing is replying. Its better to not even bother if this is all your doing. Its disturbing, either be Pacifists or do it right. There is no middle, enlightened position of randomly maiming from afar without a endgame that ends it once and for all as part of the calculus.

[Pompieus]

Air strikes have long been seen as a  cheap, relatively low-risk way to use technology to punish people who annoy you while avoiding commitment of major resources, embarrassing "collateral damage" and the political price of "boots on the ground".  All these "advantages" are questionable, but they are, and have been, a tempting option for democracies.  It has been used since the British invented in it the 1920's (the new RAF finding a peacetime role bombing annoying Pathans - also a poke in the eye of the Navy when a gunboat and marines couldn't do the job).

The decision to implement air strikes without any follow-up is usually political don't you think?

[Onasander]

It makes a hollow showing of "the political".... I know to many politics is just heads butting between factions, and this extends to issues of defense and war, but as a commonwealth, of shared borders and commonly held threats, there needs to be a more scientific understanding of how we stratify risk and project ideas of "enemy". Its a bit like agriculture, you have very advanced modern farms, then you have historically very backwards farms in the farthest reachest of civilized antiquity. They needed food, and they planted. You can plant many ways, prepare for it differently, but despite the nebulous fashion of the initial selections, and the many different ways such endeavors could progressively unfold, any advanced system coming out of such an endeavor would have considerable knowledge and expertise behind it... it could and would be systematic to a logical set of principles, and the folly of foolishly following ones impulses and wishes that have been seen through history to lead to ruin would be seen as vices, bad psychology, warned and protected against.

 

We live in an era built upon former eras. We have very advanced militaries, and international alliances, and a shared destiny. Yet in terms of politics were blindly throwing out our seeds, pissing against a wind we don't understand for short term gains in a theater unresponsive to the needs of the latter.... political advancement against long term survival.

 

We don't train our children to think strategically. Best we can find is WASPs who send their kids to study economics, or guys who want their kids to be proud and honorable, marching around in youth military schools with a stick up their butt like proud little Prussians, so they know something of discipline. That stuff is silly.... I will give an iota of credit in the pursuit of economics or of defense, but neither are the whole of what a society needs. It leads to in the former an ugly and brutal Capitalism, or brainwashed socialism sure to fail in the long term, or a stupid fascism that at its most benign and tolerable exhibits itself as excessive flag waving rituals that EVERYONE must be a part of.... both claiming hidden principles to the masses they can't see or directly benefit from.

 

However, if students at a early age are taught to study the great masters of statecraft, the pioneers of Tactics and the historic priorities that brought such necessities foreword, of economic systems, with their divergences and failures respective of one another, in how such critical thinking developed, and how to identify within each students mind those very mechanistic elements, I think the nature of "politics" would be much healthier. We wouldn't have to blindly bash and thrash against "enemies", but could indulge in the paradox of their perceptions and motivations, and find much quicker and consistent paths to alliviate such situations, using the various tools of our commonwealth.

 

I had thought about the early British policing of Arab tribes in the middle east, but it was just that.... a very sick form of policing, of subjects. I'm certain they were viewed as enemies, but enemies under the same crown as the bombing force. The British also used a divide and control strategy to hold the middle eastern mandates together. Its not unrelated, but is a bit more advanced in its thinking (under a imperialistic mindset) that say, the US or Kenya bombing, as neither is approaching it using an classical imperialistic model (only Marxist or the extreme left would assume this, due to a lack of differenation in their logic to label violence. If you were a physicist, and only could label with the word "gravity" for any invisible force, all data pertaining to the weak or strong nuclear forces would be "gravity", your statistical analysis, however rightly empirically collected, essentially wasted).

 

Its a nebulous set of ideas, but one universally structured as all humans share similar minds, and due to the similarity of our minds neurologically, share a higher commonwealth. Any conflict therefore should be limited and seek straight after the point this recognition. We shouldn't blindly thrash out and alienate one another, just because we got used to it and get in our collective groups a positive pleasurable feeling that we've accomplished something. We really haven't.