Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real: World War III - Chris Hables ...

Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real [ 163 ]
mix of winning and losing (Kaplan, p. 331). In his book Arms and Influence,
Schelling applies his theory to limited war:
The power to hurt can be counted among the most impressive attributes
of military force.... War is always a bargaining process.... The bargaining
power. .. comes fromcapacity to hurt, [to cause] sheer pain and damage,
(quoted in Kaplan, p. 332)
Or, as Henry Kissinger put it,
In a limited war the problem is to apply graduated amounts of destruction
for limited objectives and also to permit the necessary breathing spaces
for political contacts, (quoted in Gibson, 1986, p. 22)
By 1970 it is thus:
While troops are being brought home, the air war increases. It is a new
form of war where machines do most of the killing and destruction. . . .
The mechanized war consists of aircraft, huge air bases, and aircraft
carriers. The goal of the mechanized war is to replace U.S. personnel with
machines. (Crystal, 1982, p. 24)
More than 3 million sorties (a sortie defined as one mission or attack by
one plane) were flown by U.S. aircraft during the Vietnam War. Over 1,700
planes were lost, including drones. Over 200 airmen were taken prisoner, and
they became some of North Vietnam's strongest bargaining chips. The U.S.
Air Force and U.S. Navy ran an ongoing contest to see who could fly the
most sorties because much of their budget was determined in that manner.
Often planes flew half full or on useless raids just to keep the numbers up.
Even though this massive application of air power proved a total failure, some
military officers still feel more bombing could have won the war. Their faith
in technology is all the stronger after its failure. 3 The various seductions of
strategic bombing are more potent in the discourse than any balanced
judgment of its efficacy.
Another example of the strange redirections the emotions of war took
in Vietnam was the official approval given killing by machines, while killing
by people directly was often considered an atrocity: "It was wrong for
infantrymen to destroy a village with white-phosphorus grenades, but right
for a fighter pilot to drop napalm on it." Civilians could be killed by airplanes
but not people: "Ethics seemed to be a matter of distance and technology.
You could never go wrong if you killed people at long range with sophisticated
weapons" (Caputo, 1977, p. 218).
In War Without End, Michael Klare (1972) gives a detailed account of
this mechanized war and many of the institutions behind it. He examines