Ratcheting up the air war?

While doing my regular hunt for MRAP news, I happened across a rather strange (in my view) story over at the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Tom Engelhardt's essay appears to advocate the notion that the United States is putting emphasis on the air war in Iraq.

His assertion appears to hinge on a couple of stories appearing in mainstream media sources.

"The U.S. military also said in a statement that it had dropped 19,000 pounds of explosives on the farmland of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad. The strikes targeted buried bombs and weapons caches.

"In the last 10 days, the military has dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of explosives on the area, which has been a gateway for Sunni militants into Baghdad."

And here's paragraph 22 of a 34-paragraph Jan. 22 story by Stephen Farrell of the New York Times:

"The threat from buried bombs was well known before the [Arab Jabour] operation. To help clear the ground, the military had dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs to destroy weapons caches and IEDs."

(Centre for Research on Globalization)

Up through this point, Engelhardt has a solid case. Dropping tons of bombs does add up to increased emphasis on air war. It doesn't take Engelhardt long to perplex, however. Just two paragraphs later, Engelhardt asserts the bombing is "unexplained" in the LA Times story. The context suggests that the 100,000 pounds were dropped for the same reason as the 19,000 Engelhardt quoted in the previous paragraph, and if that weren't enough the NYT story reinforces the idea by saying that the bombings targeted weapons caches and IEDs.

Engelhardt elaborates by charging that the bombings haven't been covered adequately in the news. If we start with the presumption that the bombings resulted in some substantial number of deaths (the reader can supply whatever number he finds substantial) about which the press was aware, then Engelhardt's argument is plausible. "If it bleeds, it leads," after all.

If, on the other hand, the bombings merely detonated IEDs and destroyed some weapons caches the bombings are a bit of a footnote to the war operations in Iraq.

Engelhardt's story appears to confirm that he thinks the bombings killed significant numbers of people, albeit his is an argument from silence (or worse) with respect to the newspaper stories he cites. He veers off into a story of the German bombing at Guernica (Spain) featuring 100,000 pounds of ordinance where a great deal of carnage did take place.

Engelhardt then proceeds to emphasize how Guernica became international news, apparently in contrast to the present indifference to the supposedly corresponding carnage in Iraq.

I'll quote one more (long!) sentence in which Engelhardt attempts to underscore his point.

Those last two tag-on paragraphs in the Parker and Rasheed Los Angeles Times piece tell us much about the intervening 71 years, which included the German bombing of Rotterdam and the blitz of London as well as other English cities; the Japanese bombings of Shanghai and other Chinese cities; the Allied fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities; the U.S. atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Cold War era of mutually assured destruction (MAD) in which two superpowers threatened to use the ultimate in airborne explosives to incinerate the planet; the massive, years-long U.S. bombing campaigns against North Korea and later North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; the American air power "victories" of Gulf War I and Afghanistan (2001); and the Bush administration's shock-and-awe, air-and-cruise-missile assault on Baghdad in March 2003, which, though meant to "decapitate" the regime of Saddam Hussein, killed not a single Iraqi governmental or Ba'ath Party figure, only Iraqi civilians.

I'll take Engelhardt's word that the "shock and awe" bombing campaign didn't kill a single Iraqi governmental or Ba'ath Party figure, though I don't have any idea how he came by that information (he's not telling, at least in this story). I'll just say that my understanding of the "decapitation" strategy was that it attempted primarily to disrupt communications between commanders and troops.

Pape's question asks the following: should I adopt a punishment strategy, which tries to push a society beyond its economic and psychological breaking point, a denial strategy, which tries to neutralize an opponent's military ability to wage war, or a decapitation strategy, which destroys or isolates an opponent's leadership, national communications, or other politico-economic centers?
(Military Theory)

That isn't to say that "decapitation strike" cannot refer to the killing of a key individual, obviously.

Here's a reference that may provide the germ of Engelhardt's claim about the failure of the decapitation strikes along with an explanation supporting my point of view:

But not one of the top 200 figures in the regime was killed by an air strike. [Air] attacks are only as good as the intelligence they are based on. . . . That intelligence was often not reliable” (p. 177). Despite the factual nature of this statement, it overlooks any psychological effects of the air portion of the overall campaign on Iraqi leadership, and since many key Iraqi leaders fled for survival at first opportunity, one cannot say that the air campaign did not successfully separate them from the battlespace.
(Air & Space Power Journal, book review)

By the middle of his essay, Engelhardt does refer to anecdotal evidence of casualties from the bombing in question. Oddly, however, his lone example consisted of a report of Coalition troops advancing through "smoldering citrus groves."

I can see the Reuters headline now: "American troops advance through smoldering citrus groves."

Or if that's not shocking enough: "U.S. bombs helpless citrus trees."

Engelhardt spends the latter half of the essay talking about the use of air power to combat the insurgency in Iraq, calling particular attention to increased deployment of hardware. Minus my suspicion that one is intended to associate the increased use of air power with a corresponding death toll on innocents, there's not much to object to in the latter section unless it is to question Engelhardt's assertion that the buildup represents an escalation of the air war.

Most likely, the buildup represents an aspect of the overall surge strategy, which calls for putting extreme military pressure on the insurgency while holding territory already cleared of insurgents. The areas currently being bombed may represent the last stand of al Qaeda in Iraq, which will end up reducing the need for U.S. air support for missions, particularly bombing.

It is true, however, that Iraq has no real air force of its own at present. U.S. air support for Iraqi operations will probably be needed for years while Iraq develops its own air force.

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