National Experiences - British Commission for Military History

In t r o d u c t I o n • Av I At I o n A n d te c h n o l o g I c A l su p e r I o r I t y between new co n f l I c t s A n d dI p l o m A c y 29
world (but India and Pakistan certainly are not small). Obviously the prevalence of
conflicts within States brings to an increase of civilian casualties, but certainly the
advent of aviation also contributed to this.
The military operations in Libya, also officially motivated by “humanitarian”
reasons, reproposed the same issues of the previous intervention in Kosovo; operations
in Libya already lasted longer than the campaign of 1999 and brought poor and
controversial results (at this moment, July 2011). Bombs are even more “intelligent”,
but not enough to avoid civilian casualties and obtain a quick victory.
The most important last conflicts engaged by the United States and by their
Western allies, in the framework of NATO or as coalitions of the willing, and with
a partial and subsequent UNO mandate, against Serbia for the benefit of Kosovo,
in Afghanistan (2001), in Iraq (2003) and in Libya (2011), aimed, more or less explicitly,
to regime change and State building. For the intervention against Serbia the
purpose of regime change in Beograd was not stated openly, but it was implicit; in
any case NATO wished to impose a different kind of administration for the Kosovo
province. Regime change, actually a real State building, was instead the declared
purpose of the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, in this latter case with a difference
in respect to 1991, when the first war had the more traditional scope of evicting
Iraqi invaders from Kuwait and President George Bush Sr. didn’t want to conquer
Baghdad and overturn Saddam Hussein’s regime. In Libya the UN mandate authorizes
various measures to obtain a truce and to protect civilians. Yet various members
of the coalition strained the mandate declaring openly their willingness to defeat
Kaddafi and to force him out of power, a goal now accepted almost by everybody.
At the time of Kosovo, the goal of Milosevic’s removal was never proclaimed, but
emerged in the long distance.
We may certainly agree with the conclusion of Prof. Corum’s above mentioned
essay: «Yet, in the ongoing counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan since 2001
and in Iraq since 2003, the technological advantage does not play the same central
role as it might in conventional war. Current conflicts against non state forces offer
no strategic target set or industrial nodes whose destruction will cripple the enemy
forces. If unconventional wars are the norm for the coming decades, American airmen
will have a frustrating future».
However «frustration», if we want to use this word, affects the entire issue of using
military force. If it’s true that «airpower may devastate, punish and destroy, but
cannot, dominate, keep and control land or territories» 14 , it’s as truer that «there are
no military solutions to an ethnic conflict or to a civil war. Force may only create
the pre-conditions for an eventual political solution. [Force] may do some things,
but not other ones. For example may separate two ethnic groups … but cannot com-
14 H. W. Baldwin, Strategy for Tomorrow, quoted in Sanfelice di Monteforte, op. cit., p. 50.