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Pundits Gone Wild
by Dale Brown, 2007

ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED AT TheBigFiveOh.com Blog @ Yahoo.Com, Friday February 9, 2007

I subscribe to a variety of military, political, aviation, Hollywood, and business newsletters and blogs. My most recent subscription is www.TomDispatch.com. The editor, Tom Engelhardt, is fervently anti-Bush and anti-Cheney. He doesn't stop at disagreeing with White House policy, but goes on to call Bush and Cheney "delusional" and "wacky" and comparing them to Thelma and Louise surrounded by police with no way out but to drive over a cliff, taking all Americans down with them.

I enjoy reading posts by writers like this, and I think it's important to read opposing viewpoints. If nothing else, reading these rants inspires me to write my own responses on my Web site www.AirBattleForce.com and in this blog, which then inspires me to write more fiction. Nothing gets the creative juices flowing like reading other writers whining, sniveling, and deriding persons and things you know and respect.

In his latest post, Engelhardt writes about the impending--he thinks inevitable--war with Iran. He predicts global disaster and passionately believes President Bush and Vice President Cheney are mindless ideologues at best and quite possibly deranged. He doesn't offer any suggestions, not even a call for impeachment--he just goes on and on about Vice President Cheney's policies (not the President's--he firmly believes Cheney and the neocons are really in charge at the White House) spelling certain doom and disaster.

All that's fine. Conservatives were saying the same about President Clinton before the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo; it's all part of the game. But he did make the following comments about possible action in Iran that got my attention:

"In the case of a possible future assault on Iran, the larger fundamentalism of the Church of Force will surely combine with the only significant force the Pentagon has on hand -- air power. The belief in air power's ability to fell regimes and change the political essentials, to bring whole peoples to their knees, is long-lasting and deep-seated. Since well before World War II, we've been living with a belief system in which bombing others, including civilian populations, is a "strategic" thing to do; in which air power can, in relatively swift measure, break the "will" not just of the enemy, but of that enemy's society; and in which air power is the royal path to victory.

"That this has not proven so; that, most recently, it did not prove so in Afghanistan, in shock-and-awe Iraq, or in Israel's air assault last summer on Lebanon matters little. Faith in the efficacy of air power (as opposed to its barbarism) is fundamentalist in nature and so not disprovable by the facts on the rubble-strewn, cratered ground."

I study and write extensively about the use of air power, and have for over thirty years now, and I have never heard anyone say that airpower can "bring whole peoples to their knees" or "break an enemy's society." Air power is a tool to fighting and winning wars. The effects of the application of air power can certainly affect a society, even on a massive scale, but I don't recall it ever destroying a "society" or an entire "people." You can certainly argue that the lives of millions were changed by the German air attacks over London, the Allied firebombings in Germany, or by the atomic bombings in Japan, but English, German, or Japanese society didn't disappear, and their people are still with us.

American air power has led to the cessation of hostilities in every war in which it was applied with relentless concentration: it brought about an end to the Vietnam conflict; brought about a quick victory in the first Iraq war; was successful over Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo; and was unquestionably successful in routing the Taliban in Afghanistan. There is no question that air power will be the key and deciding factor if war does flare up in Iran. But that is because the potential targets in Iran--its anti-ship missile sites, command-and-control facilities, air bases, air defense sites, and lastly its nuclear development sites--are spread out, and Iran is a very big country.

What about Operation Iraqi Freedom? The Pentagon reports that in the first three years of OIF, less than 200 aerial "smart" bombs and missiles have been expended by coalition forces over Iraq. I think we use more than that in one day during a RED FLAG wargame exercise! This does not include machine gun, mortar, tank, or artillery rounds or guided missiles fired by ground forces, or cannon rounds and unguided rockets fired by aircraft--all of which are harder to track--but I stil believe this is an incredibly surprising statistic.

Obviously the mission objectives, target priorities, and the characteristics of the battlefield determine this amazingly low number. In Operation Desert Storm, the targets were Iraqi tanks, bunkers, headquarters buildings, command-and-control centers, and airfields, mostly in the open--all perfect targets for big bombs and guided missiles. Not so with insurgents in urban areas, mixing with the locals, unless you want to see gruesome images of dead civilians on the news 24/7.

As I've said many times before, the American military is a massive armor- and artillery-heavy fighting force designed to take on a numerically superior adversary--the Soviet Union and its satellite states--in relatively open terrain--Europe--for an extended period of time. The American military is a wrecking ball mounted on a huge crane that needs a lot of time, room, supplies, and support to operate effectively. Give it what it needs to do its thing and it's unstoppable. But try to use a wrecking ball to knock down a child's dollhouse inside her home without killing the child, her parents, her neighbors, or destroying the entire apartment building, and that tool becomes almost useless.

Engelhardt is trying to say that Bush and Cheney are megalomanic imperialists and will try to use air power, including nuclear weapons, to destroy not just Iran's ability to make war or develop nuclear weapons, but Iranian society, and ultimately Islam itself. I think he will say anything to try to convince you that Bush and Cheney are madmen out to destroy the world. The facts say otherwise.

I admit that in my novels I often portray air power as the one and only solution to any conflict. My readers understand where I'm coming from. To the rest, I'm telling you that air power is not THE solution, only PART of the solution, but it can and SHOULD be a MAJOR part of the solution, especially as technology emerges and anti-terrorist and asymmetrical warfare becomes the norm.

Read Engelhardt's blog, then make up your own mind. I hope you'll agree that he's nothing but a liberal bomb-throwing (pun intended) ideologue who's only discourse is to try to scare you into believing the world is coming to an end unless something can be done to stop the Cheney-Bush "fatwa" on the rest of the peace-loving world.

Then do as I do...get some perspective, have a good laugh, and get back to work.

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