Airpower is for airheads

The U.S. military conducted more than five times as many airstrikes in Iraq last year as it did in 2006, targeting al-Qaeda safe houses, insurgent bombmaking facilities and weapons stockpiles in an aggressive strategy aimed at supporting the U.S. troop increase by overwhelming enemies with air power.

So says The Washington Post a few days ago, in a credulous article about US counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq. By now, all Americans should be aware that close air support has, at best, a minor role in counterinsurgency. Insurgents don't normally make themselves easy-to-find targets. Even when you locate them, they're unlikely to be found in large numbers, huddled together in easy-to-bomb clumps. And, of course, there's the continued problem of political backlash from bombing suspected guerrilla locations, since bystanders often lose the property, their limbs, or their lives during the attack.

A five-fold increase in air-to-ground attacks is not, therefore, a sign of progress. It's a sign of desperation, the only measure that the US military has--particularly given the pressure for results in the recent escalation.

Since the insurgent groups are not complete morons, they have taken countermeasures, after years of fighting, to blunt US airpower. Not every group is as smart as every other group, but in general, you won't find them marching around the Iraqi countryside in large groups, waiting to be annihilated.

Any weapons caches or bomb factories are also dispersed enough so that no single attack, or even a series of attacks, will completely eliminate them. Even if the attacks are the result of better intelligence, is bombing a safehouse used by the Army of the Mahdi or Al Qaeda in Iraq (these groups have names, by the way) the best way to get rid of them? Or even start a clear-and-secure operation against them?

Colin Kahl, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University who studies the Iraq war, said airstrikes rose in 2007 because of a combination of increased U.S. operations and a realization that air power can have a strong psychological effect on the enemy.

"Part of this is announcing our presence to the adversary," said Kahl, who recently returned from a trip to the air operations center. "Across this calendar year you will see a reduction in U.S. forces, so there will be fewer troops to support Iraqi forces. One would expect a continued level of airstrikes because of offensive operations, and as U.S. forces begin to draw down you may see even more airstrikes."

Apparently, we are fighting a war against insurgents who don't read the newspapers, or are too stupid to draw conclusions about the staying power of the United States. Therefore, no amount of "announcing our presence to the adversary" matters if the guerrillas conclude they can out-wait the United States and the Iraqi government.

If, instead of "announcing our presence," the air strikes are intended to knock some Sunni and Shi'ite insurgent groups temporarily off-balance, while Iraqi forces assume larger operational responsibility, why not just say it? More corporate PR-ish announcements merely corrode trust between the US government and the electorate that much further.