Face The Facts: Bombing Works by Fareed Zakaria

December 3, 2001, U.S. Edition

Face the Facts: Bombing Works
With our information edge, U.S. air power is an awesome tool. Let's make better use of it.
By Fareed Zakaria

Over the last decade, every time the United States has engaged in a strategic bombing campaign it has achieved its goals--think of the Persian Gulf War, the Bosnian air campaign (which persuaded Milosevic to sign the Dayton accords), Kosovo and Afghanistan. And after each war, influential experts and journalists have emphasized that the central lesson of the operation is... air power alone doesn't work. With the Taliban in ruins and American allies in control of three quarters of Afghanistan, expect to start hearing arguments about how our victory had little to do with bombing.

In this view American military campaigns over the last decade are all optical illusions. What looks to the naked eye like victories produced by air power were really--with some creative interpretation--victories from the ground.

You might think this is a difficult case to make. Yet consider the lead essay in the current issue of International Security, the premier journal of national-security studies. The author, Prof. Daryl Press, explains that in the gulf war, 38 days of heavy bombing--which destroyed command bunkers, bridges, telephone exchanges, power plants, supply lines and tens of thousands of troops--had little effect on Iraq's military. But four days of scattered ground combat crushed the Iraqi Army and persuaded them to surrender.

This is not so different from the argument made about the Kosovo campaign. NATO flew 37,465 sorties, relentlessly destroying every major military, industrial and communications site in Serbia. But if you thought this was what made Milosevic fold, you're wrong. Soon after the war, commentators decided that it was a couple of phrases that Bill Clinton muttered about the possibility of ground troops that did the trick. Who knew that words could be so powerful?

A few weeks into the current campaign the skeptics began their drumbeat. Air power never works, Afghanistan is ill-suited for it, it has strengthened the Taliban politically, etc. Then came the awkward fact of the Taliban's near-total collapse. But it turns out that this one also was a result not of the weeks of lethal bombing but of the few Special Operations, conducted by a couple of hundred soldiers (most of whom were actually helping guide the bombing, but never mind). And, of course, pride of place now goes to the fearless Northern Alliance, the indispensable force on the ground. (The alliance was often walking into abandoned towns that the Taliban had fled from, but never mind that,too.)

It's time to face facts. American air power today is an amazing weapon of war. The combination of the information revolution and precision munitions has produced a quantum leap in lethality. William Owens, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explains the fundamental transformation. "The key instruments that make us so powerful from the air are global positioning systems, laser guidance, detailed maps, radar, J-Stars, moving target indicators. All of these give you information--really knowledge. What sets the United States apart from its adversaries is that we use information much better than they do. Properly used, that can be an unbridgeable gap."

And in many ways this is only the beginning. "Strategic bombing could be much more effective," Owens explains. "Imagine an integrated network of sensors that made us see the entire battlefield all the time and a military that was totally interconnected at all times. If we had such a system now, finding Osama bin Laden would be easy."

Many in the defense establishment are still trapped by the lessons of Vietnam and World War II--in which dumb bombs were largely ineffective. Bureaucratic and political support for old-fashioned systems of power projection remains strong. And nostalgia for land power is still widespread. That's why Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's attempts to transform the military along the lines Owens advocates were killed by the permanent defense establishment.

One of the main reasons air power is constantly scoffed at--even as it succeeds in test after test--is that many people believe that the limited, precise targeting we are moving toward isn't really war. The chief criticism of the Afghan campaign was that it was not lethal enough. "Why aren't we carpet-bombing troops?" we were asked. But carpet-bombing has never been very effective; otherwise Vietnam would have been a thundering success. The better the information you have, the fewer bombs you need to drop to hit a target. During Desert Storm it would take, on average, 10 bombs to hit one target. In the Afghan campaign it took about two bombs to hit a target. The point is to achieve your military objective, not have a fireworks display.

The unease about antiseptic warfare goes beyond bombing itself. Throughout this war, commentators have worried that by not using ground troops we were making war too easy, losing the sense of struggle and sacrifice that are essential to its pursuit. But while there is something to this impulse, surely if America can achieve its objectives without placing too many of its soldiers in harm's way, it would be crazy to do anything else. Certainly if my son were in the military I would like him to be as lethal and effective as possible. This part is actually not new, revolutionary thinking at all. Remember the words of actor George C. Scott, paraphrasing Gen. George S. Patton: "You don't win the war by dying for your country. You win the war by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country."