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Carpet Bombing: A Brief History
Ted Cruz locked onto the phrase “carpet bombing” on the campaign trail and repeated it in the most recent Republican debate. He presumably means heavy, concentrated, tactical airstrikes such as those used in the First Gulf War. In popular imagination, these were also decisive in the Second Gulf War, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the 1995 NATO bombing campaign in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the 1999 campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In other words, he probably means a massive concentration of tactical airstrikes against all C3 targets (command, control, communication) and against enemy logistics and operational forces.
It’s true that the air rate of sorties (one craft, one mission) against ISIS has been very low compared to those campaigns. It seems that Cruz envisions using air power alone to destroy ISIS by accelerating the tempo of strikes. For some reason, he’s confused the phrase “carpet bombing” with this idea. Perhaps he saw it on a documentary somewhere.
In the last debate, Wolf Blitzer immediately assumed he was talking about area bombing — the use of heavy bombers during the Second World War to smash enemy cities. The technique was first used by the Germans, based on the theories of 1920s air warfare advocates such as the Italian general Guilio Douhet and the American general William “Billy” Mitchell. Anyone who wants a grim laugh should read Douhet’s book, The Command of the Air. (He vastly overestimated the amount of damage a ton of bombs could do, among many other mistakes.) But at the time, air force generals really thought he was onto something, and the idea that wars may be won through airpower alone has long gripped military planners and still grips popular imagination.
Area bombing like that conducted during the Second World War would be truly impossible to conduct in this day and age. Short of using nuclear weapons, it’s hard to imagine how bombing assets could be sufficiently concentrated enough to permit such a heavy strike. And it would be a clear war crime under the 1977 amendment protocol to the Geneva Conventions.
I’m certainly among those who believe the area bombing campaigns were not a complete waste of lives, in that they significantly shortened the course of the Second World War. But that’s another discussion, and that wasn’t really “carpet bombing,” either.
Wikepedia’s definition of carpet bombing appeals to the Medimex dictionary:
Carpet bombing, also known as saturation bombing, is a large aerial bombing done in a progressive manner to inflict damage in every part of a selected area of land. The phrase evokes the image of explosions completely covering an area, in the same way that a carpet covers a floor.
I don’t think that’s quite the correct definition, either, so I’ll clarify. Carpet bombing is the use of heavy bombers and a strategic or operational-level weapon — the type needed for area bombing — to support tactical operations. For example, the Strategic Air Command’s B-52s, originally designed to deliver nuclear weapons, were modified to carry conventional high explosive bombs for use against Viet Cong sanctuaries.
Let’s define some terms: tactical, operational, and strategic. “Tactical” refers to achieving limited, short-term goals. We need to take that town tomorrow. We need to bomb this artillery unit. We need to achieve a breakthrough. Tactical airpower.
“Strategic” planning is the way wars are won, from the planning of a campaign to deployment, and even in the design of weapons over the course of a war.
“Operational” describes all the plans that derive from these — plans that bridge the gap between the tactical and the strategic.
The first successful use of carpet bombing — that’s to say, massive bombing, concentrated in a narrow and shallow area of the front, and closely coordinated with advance of friendly troops — came at the end of the Tunisia campaign in 1943. The best examples of its successful use come during Operation Totalize at Caen during the Normandy battles. This was spearheaded by the Canadian Army, using the newly-built Armored Personnel Carriers that were later to dominate the battlefield. The Germans had been stubbornly preventing a northern breakout. Hundreds of British tanks had been destroyed trying to punch out of Caen. German 88 mm anti-tank guns had clear lines of fire over great wide fields, holding off all daylight attacks. Under the cover of night, using a carpet-bombing force, the Canadians were able to break out and cover the ground.
The RAF had spent years developing effective techniques for night combat, but were not very proficient in attacking during the light of day. Using the same carpet-bombing techniques during the day proved ineffective. After a short drop that killed Allied troops, the use of carpet bombing was suspended for the duration of the war. The bomber barons were happy to return to what they thought was the real mission: area bombing cities.
The Korean war was the heyday of carpet bombing. The United States quickly gained control of the skies and began bombing anything that moved. Curtis Lemay, commander of the Strategic Air Command, later claimed that the US killed at least 20 percent of the North’s population during the conflict. The truth is they bombed everything they could: rails, roads, and supply centers. Despite all of this, the North Koreans adapted and managed to keep their armies supplied along the 38th parallel.
The last true use of carpet bombing was in Vietnam. A group of 28 B-52 bombers were retrofitted to support tactical strikes. Their heavy bombs would fall on the jungle, clearing out large areas upon which helicopter forces could land.
They were also used in a tactical role, but were much less effective. It took them several hours to fly from Guam to get on station. Often they would bomb targets only to find the enemy had already left the area. This happened so often it caused the National Security Agency to investigate.
The Soviet Union didn’t often have as many bases as the United States from which to monitor communications, so they had set up a fleet of “fishing trawlers.” Outside, they looked like commercial craft. Inside, these were packed to the rivets with intelligence gear. The NSA worried that the Air Force’s sophisticated communications gear had been cracked by the Soviets, meaning the SAC’s bombers were in danger of being intercepted, or worse, sent conflicting orders.
The NSA team arrived on Guam and quickly determined that they needn’t fear the worst: The problem was much simpler. Since the airmen in Guam knew they were in a rear area, they didn’t bother to use operational security, and they broadcast all information in the clear. The Soviet trawlers took that information fed it back to Moscow; from there, the Viet Cong were tipped off about when the bombers would arrive, their fuel loads, and other insights that helped them to pinpoint where the B-52s would strike.
Suffice to say, no, Ted Cruz doesn’t want to nuke Raqqa. He seems to want to use heavier air strikes to win. But that won’t defeat ISIS. It’s a classic air power delusion. Militarily speaking, the only way to defeat them is with ground forces supported by airstrikes.
If the North Koreans could supply their armies even as Curtis Lemay bombed everything that moved for two years, it should be obvious that bumping up the pace of sorties won’t remove ISIS.
Until this president or the next grasps this — and speaks the truth to the American people and their allies — you may assume he or she has no serious plan to dislodge them.
Published in General, History, Military, Politics
Maybe one of you can help me find these articles?
A quick search of the website yielded nothing useful.
no results:
I’m not quite ready to lay down money on this, but even if I were, I would not be able to find which articles or back issues to purchase.
Try this link: http://shop.strategyandtacticspress.com/
It is a really tremendous magazine. Literally read each issue cover to cover.
I’ve learned more about history from reading s&t than I ever did in school. There are a lot worse things you could spend money on.
There is a digital library available. 20 dollars US I believe and may have some of the articles.
Issue 265 Operation Linebacker. The first of those 1972 raids.
Not exactly related but 272 has my article on the Mau Mau Insurgency.
There are others but I would have to open all the article heads and search them one by one.
I also found this which looks promising. Havent read it.
http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/the-christmas-bombing-1813815/?page=4
But looking up linebacker in google seems to give good results.
However linebacker is strategic bombing against strategic targets. Its not carpet bombing for the destruction of ground units, which was what my original post was about. Heavy bombers against tactical targets.
No matter what tactic of air power is chosen, ISIS and other Islamic fighters deliberately hide themselves and their materiel among civilian populations, itself a violation of the so-called laws of warfare. US air power will therefore be faced with a rather stark choice between current rules of engagement which reportedly result in many sorties returning without delivering their payload, or more effective attacks and lots of “collateral damage,” with round the clock coverage of civilian casualties.
I think Cruz is trying to signal to the electorate that he intends to change the ROE, and let slip the dogs of war.
ISIS isn’t a guerilla movement everywhere and is not always on the defensive, so there is a middle ground here. We can blast their columns when they mass for an attack across the desert, even in bad weather (the decision not to do so led to the fall of Ramadi). We can attack their victory parades, and their prominent, signposted buildings. We can hit oil transport. Ideally, we can catch up with Turkish efforts and hit the occasional Flanker. There doesn’t have to be enormous civilian harm, although the standard cannot be the current putative “none”.
Or both.
I disagree, and here’s why.
James is right that air power could have kept ISIS out of Ramadi. I’ll never understand how we allowed that to happen: The whole world watched as we did nothing. But even under changed ROE, air power alone will never achieve our strategic objectives.
What we’re facing is a global insurgency — one with many local theaters, each very different. The key word is “insurgency.” Air power — no matter what the ROE — can be part of a counter-insurgency strategy, but it simply won’t work on its own, and if misapplied, will be deeply counter-productive.
We’ve now got al Qaeda and ISIS insurgencies raging around the globe, along with quite a few more jihadi-salafist insurgencies that will probably link up with the ostensible winner. (Yesterday about 200 al-Shabab jihadists pledged bay’a to ISIS.) Beyond Syria and Iraq, we’re looking at insurgencies in Libya, Kenya, Somalia, Northern Mali, Sinai, Yemen, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, and more. We can’t bomb these insurgencies out of existence.
If we keep going as we have been since September 11 — from one strategic blunder to another — I’d guess that within two years we’ll be looking at jihadi control of twice as much territory and population (in Iraq, Yemen, North Africa, Sinai, and Syria). Al Qaeda could reclaim Mali, Yemen, and Somalia. In other words, we could be looking at an army of regular and irregular fighters at least twice the size as the one we’re looking at now.
Afghanistan looks as if it’s going to become a safe haven again very soon. Russia’s doing everything to help ensure this — They’re now reportedly sharing intelligence with the Taliban, although that could be a rumor planted to demoralize us, given that CNN is now the official purveyor of Russian propaganda. But obviously, Helmand is barely being propped up.
If we imagine these insurgencies spreading at the rate they have been — and it would be an astonishing failure of imagination not to — we’re looking at a serious threat to Mauritania, Niger, Northern Nigeria, the Horn of Africa, Tunisia, Egypt, and ultimately Pakistan. At which point we’ve got ourselves a nuclear al Qaeda.
Insurgencies — not conventional armies.
It’s a truism, but successful counterinsurgency is very, very difficult. It requires doing many things that no one seems to want to hear about: in some places it will involve a long-term ground commitment; in every place, a coordinated strategy of political pressure, intelligence, and nation-building (Yes, nation-building. If we know anything now, it’s that insurgencies thrive in ungoverned, chaotic spaces). It requires economic aid, military training, and deep local knowledge of the players in each region, so that we don’t get played, which we do far too often. We actually do have that knowledge — if you read the Wikileaks cables, you’ll see that we do indeed have it, even if this stuff never gets reported — but someone needs to listen to what our people on the ground are telling them. It will also require working effectively with the UN and other international organizations and alliances.
And it requires grasping how fast tactical victories can turn into operational defeats when insurgents and — especially — when civilians are killed. If that was a basic principle of counter-insurgency before, it’s a thousand times more true now that the world is covered in iPhones.
Civilian casualties may not make the news in the US, or seem like a big deal to us. Insurgent casualties (inflicted by us or our proxies) may sound terrific to us. But to people in the regions affected, they don’t. Nor are people stupid: They remember who killed their families; they remember who destroyed their cities; they remember who raped their wives and daughters; they remember being tortured or seeing their kids tortured to death, and they don’t forgive — even if most Americans never knew it was happening. That’s why it’s insane to assume Sunnis will fight for us in Syria if we don’t share their priority — getting rid of Assad, who’s not just “a bad guy” but a monstrous tyrant. That’s why it’s insane to believe the Kurds would be crazy enough to go into Raqqa; that’s why it’s insane to think that even if we could persuade them to (and we will not), it would do anything other than unleash hell. Syrian Arabs haven’t been through this only to be invaded now by Kurds.
It may be satisfying to think of dropping a MOAB on Raqaa, but this is a global war that involves a revanchist, remilitarized and nuclear-armed Russia — one that is not, whatever anyone might think, on our side, and may well be more hostile to us than it was at any point in the Cold War.
Russia’s capable of immediately destroying a Western city right now. They may at this point believe they could do it without retaliation; they’ve certainly been talking about it. Islamist insurgents want to destroy the West; at this rate, they could well acquire the means.
The war also involves Iran, which now a threshold nuclear state, and what’s apt to be a rapid rush to nuclear proliferation among countries that suspect either that our commitment to them has faltered or that we’re no longer able to uphold our commitments, given that we so clearly can’t get our political and fiscal house in order. That’s many countries, at this point; and they aren’t wrong.
We’ve also taught the world that Osama bin Laden was right. We’re apt to make huge mistakes in response to terrorist attacks, but unprepared to stay for the long haul. Unfortunately, that lesson won’t be unlearnt if we “bomb the hell” out of any one city; in fact, it will be reinforced.
The reality is that we now have fewer allies, fewer forward bases, fewer resources, and fewer forces to deal with this than we did in 2001, and Russia’s determined to contain us: Their strategy is to peel off the allies we have left, one by one, and they are superbly good at this. Iran is likewise determined to contain us. And I assume that for now, China will play offshore balancer by supporting Russia.
So this is a very dangerous, long, complex, costly, and dangerous war. Wars can be lost to stupidity and bad strategic decisions. History isn’t on our side: History just is.
Insurgents — Islamic or otherwise — get a huge bang for the buck, so to speak, out of terrorism. To an extent, we’re in this situation now because democracies over-react to terrorist attacks in self-defeating ways, and because by their nature they can’t sustain long-term war efforts.
Obama was elected — twice — by promising to end the wars through declaring victory and quitting. Now we have candidates who are telling us they can end the war by bombing more civilians and through some variant on border control.
But they’ll also have to change the laws of physics, which is harder. This is the nuclear age and the age of ICBMs. It’s the age of cyber-warfare. It’s the age of chemical and biological weapons. Having the Pacific and the Atlantic on either side of us makes it easy to think we could put up a wall and be done with it. Maybe we could. But I sure doubt it.
No one has much experience of fighting a war like this, because the introduction of the Internet has made military censorship an impossibility. In a way, Americans have imposed censorship on themselves: They don’t want to know.
Terrorism is a devastatingly effective asymmetrical weapon. A single act of terrorism instantly puts huge pressure on politicians to overreact in disastrously counter-productive ways. That’s a weakness of democratic politics.
The next Commander in Chief, if he doesn’t know all of this already, will be briefed about it as soon as he’s nominated. None of this is at all a secret. I truly hope he won’t be shocked. He’ll then either have to level with an appalled American public, refuse to take in what he’s told, or lie. He might — like Obama — go into denial and tell us we’re winning. He might tell us we’re bombing the hell out of someone and that it’s going terrifically. But that won’t be true.
Counter-insurgency’s a bitch. No major power’s successfully dealt with a global insurgency and a multipolar nuclear threat before while at the same time enjoying a smaller and smaller share of the global economy. Nor has anyone much experience in countering Internet-age propaganda. So we don’t have much precedent to rely upon.
And we could lose. So what the candidates are saying about this really does matter to me.
I agree that these are all serious problems, but I don’t think it’s fair to criticize strategies for fighting ISIS in Syria* for not dealing with those problems.
*and Iraq? His debate position was unclear and he doesn’t seem to have anything more detailed on his website than “restore American leadership globally” as point six on his fifteen point priority list.
I don’t think that this is true. It was still potentially true in 2007, before the surge, or even in 2008, before Obama decided to stay in Iraq until it was properly pacified. But the surge took place, Obama stayed in Iraq until it was pacified, and America showed that it was comfortable staying there for the best part of a decade under fire.
Not only was Iraq not a confirmation that America would not act as it did in Korea, it was the first time since Korea that it has successfully repudiated that charge. It did not act as Reagan did in Beirut or Clinton did in Somalia, the key pieces of evidence for Osama. Not only was Saddam removed from power, but no ally of Saddam’s is ever going to dominate Iraq ever again; it’s true that protoges of Saddam’s are getting their kicks out in the Anbar desert, but that’s temporary, and it is very much not the same thing as being part of the Baghdad ruling class.
Afghanistan hasn’t gotten there yet, and it appears that we need to expend a little more effort, but a surge there from either Clinton or a Republican in 2016 would probably work; it’d be a clear statement that America was there to stay. That there was a viable alternative to moral compromise. If Obama completely leaves in 2016, that would be harder, but I suspect that he will not.
Those are quibbles with a comment I thought was insightful and that I agree with.
Incidentally, do you talk with Dave Barry? I thought his year in review this time had a lot in common with your interests and peeves.
This is the clearest statement of his strategy I’ve seen reported:
That was December 10. In the same speech, bewilderingly, he says:
So it verges, in my view, between incoherence and outright untruth. No mention of Iraq.
Man, even he sounds fed up, doesn’t he.
Proponents of air power have always said that you can win wars through air power alone, and they’ve always been wrong.
The only hopeful thing in the whole comment.
Arming the Jordanians rather than folks in Iraq or Syria (other than the Kurds) is the key to defeating ISIS, eh?
One way of looking at that is the way that Huckabee controversially did with Obama, saying that Obama hated Republicans more than he hated ISIS. Obama hasn’t been selling Jordan drones, so Cruz says we should stop doing all the things we are doing and do the thing we’re not doing: the right policy is always the policy that renders one critical of Obama. A stopped clock is never right, etc.
Another way is to note that Duncan Hunter has been pounding that beat. Right now, Hunter’s endorsing Huckabee, but Huckabee isn’t going to be around forever (heaven only knows why Hunter endorsed him at the end of November; maybe out of loyalty to his father and Congressional predecessor, who endorsed Huckabee in 2008?). It seems pretty plausible to me that a high priority in Cruz’s formulation of strategy for ISIS would be finding and supporting the pet projects of plausible potential endorsers, and Hunter fits the profile of a guy who would be likely to endorse Cruz.
I can’t think of a non-cynical argument. It’s true that the US involvement hasn’t been enormous (although, yes, it is funny to see him straddle his “we shouldn’t be involved” and “we should be much more involved” positions in one speech) but American attacks have been massively bigger than Jordanian attacks. It’s like complaining about the quality of American prison food and then praising the Kim family.
You can leave nothing left alive with air power. It is the choice to do so that is the problem.
It comes down to how many of our troops need to die in order to preserve casualties on the other side. It depends on your acceptable ratio of dead Americans to dead Others.
You can’t divide by zero.
Your comments on air power seems to say that zero is not your number of choice.
Air power can win any war, provided you are willing to leave no one on the other side alive.
Ah. I meant zero American casualties, infinite others.
OK, so then Air Power *can* win a war in your mind.
I can’t see where you’re going with this. Sure, we could turn Iran into a radioactive glass parking lot. Is that winning? Short of nukes, air power does not translate into control of the ground.
If you destroy their ability to feed themselves, you win. Air power can win a war. You have to use it right. You don’t need nukes. Firebombing in WWII was more effective than the nukes.
When the ground troops are not Americans, it seems to me that the calculation does not involve all that many dead Americans. It’s a choice between the numbers of dead enemies, dead allies, and dead bystanders. Defeat, or a slow victory, might lead to American deaths, but it’s an indirect connection and hence even more speculative than usual.
It’s never worked in the past. I’ll grant you that there might be some theoretical future in which it might work.
Firebombing also killed many more people than did the nukes.
But it was usually accidental – it worked in Dresden because the winds were just right, but when they tried to do it again (and again) it failed.