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

Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real [ 167 ]
brutal: "Whether as field tactic or foreign policy, our way of war now relies
on the use of indiscriminate American artillery and airpower that generates
innumerable My Lai's as a norm, not as a shocking exceptional case" (1972,
p. 236).
They are both right and wrong. Van Creveld is certainly right as far as
low-intensity conflicts (LICs) go; but the same high-tech strategy can work
remarkably against the right enemy, as Saddam Hussein went out of his way
to prove. And Ellsberg is imprecise when he calls the firepower approach
"indiscriminate." It was discriminate in the Vietnam War, through numerous
restrictions and zones and moratoriums, and it was certainly discriminate in
the Gulf War in a very similar way.
Both wars had free-fire zones, especially for the B-52s; they had precision
bombing of numerous targets, some of which were horrible misses; they had
various targets completely off-limits; they aimed at command, control,
communications, and industries in the rear areas and military units in the
forward areas; and they were not really challenged in the air. Often targets
were prioritized, even chosen, as much for political as for military reasons.
Good examples of such targets were the Scud missile launchers and the Iraqi
planes bombing Shiite rebels and Kurdish refugee camps.
Since Vietnam, the U.S. infatuation with high-tech war has only
increased. Even in the form of war that is the most political in every way, the
seductive appeal of war technologies has made technoscience at the center
of LIC doctrine. It has developed into a set of interconnected systems, the
subject of the next chapter.