Terror from the Sky

Edward N. Luttwak has a piece in the March/April Foreign Policy called "In Praise of Aerial Bombing: Why Terror from the Sky Still Works." In it he argues that the case against bombing has been over-learned, that there are several recent examples of bombing in which civilians were killed, the bombing was "effective" and this kind of bombing we should be doing in Afghanistan.

Luttwak is a wonderful prose stylist, and his scholarship is marvelous: intellectual, thoughtful, original. His book on Roman grand strategy (The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third) is impressively researched, unusual for the breadth of its vision, persuasive in it's argument and remarkable because he says something really new in a field with 1600 years of scholarship.

His argument about bombing from the current Foreign Policy, however, is confused and - if I understand what he's saying - simply wrong.

He starts by pointing to an early - and in his estimation, ideal - use of aerial bombing: the bombing by the Italians of enemy soldiers in the Italo-Turkish war of 1911. Luttwak explains the failure of later bombing by noting that "Aerial bombing works very well, but only if the enemy must move in open, arid terrain and has no air force or effective anti-aircraft weapons. These conditions emphatically did not apply to World War II until the very end. And Vietnam was full of trees, as well as brave men: hence the failure of tactical bombing in the south, while the strategic bombing of the north was strongly resisted and there were too few good targets anyway."

He then cites the 2006 aerial attacks by Israel against Hezbollah as key evidence that bombing works. He talks about the bridges and viaducts that were destroyed, cites a Hezbollah leader's statement after the war that "he would never have ordered the original deadly attack on an Israeli border patrol had he known that Israel would retaliate with such devastating effect," and points out that since the conflict Hezbollah has launched far fewer rockets into Israel. "Evidently, Israel's supposedly futile bombing did achieve its aim," he concludes.

He goes on to talk about Israel's similar use of aerial bombing during the 2006 attacks in Gaza against Hamas, asserting that "the same doubters repeated their assertions -- only to be proven wrong again." He notes the high number of civilians killed (1,300) and admits the political cost that Israel paid in both conflicts.

He concludes with a prescription for Afghanistan: "The better and much cheaper alternative would be to resurrect strategic bombing in a thoroughly new way by arming the Taliban's many enemies to the teeth and replacing U.S. troops in Afghanistan with sporadic airstrikes. Whenever the Taliban concentrate in numbers to attack, they would be bombed."

What is confusing about this article is Luttwak's unwillingness or inability to sort out attacking civilians from attacking military targets. The subtitle of the article ("Why Terror from the Sky Still Works"), and the references to high Palestinian civilian casualties leads the reader to believe that Luttwak is advocating killing civilians. -Either directly or accidentally-done-on-purpose. This is certainly what the bombing of German, Japan, and Hanoi was about. Those campaigns were designed to win by punishing civilian populations and it is this sort of bombing that so definitively failed. 

The Israeli cases are less clear. Is the Hezbollah leader talking about the cost in human lives? Or the money that had to be paid to rebuild those bridges and other infrastructure? Or is he talking about military losses - fighters who were killed in the conflict? Did Hezbollah and Hamas scale back their rocket attacks because of civilian losses, because of military losses or because of some other (for example, political) factor? Ascribing the change to air attacks alone short changes all the other aspects that went into Israel's response. 

Bombing civilians and bombing military targets are two very different activities. The bombing that was done in World War II is generally called "strategic" bombing and generally means bombing that is aimed at a "legitimate" target but that is also designed to inflict high civilian casualties. Luttwak's use of the same term to describe the sort of bombing that should be done in Afghanistan and the the use of the word "terror" in the article's headline seems to mean that he is calling for the bombing of civilians.

This would be a foolish policy, however.  The record of civilian bombing is quite clear. Bombing civilians stiffened morale in both Great Britain and Germany. As Bernard Brodie concluded, attacks against civilian morale turned out to be largely a waste of bombs.

Luttwak is right: bombing soldiers in the open desert is an ideal use of air power. His apparent conflating of attacks against soldiers with attacks against civilians makes no sense. Bombing civilians in Afghanistan can only be counterproductive.