entire book - Chris Hables Gray

[ 136 ] The Past
By the language they used, the methods they employed, and the concerns
they focused upon, the experts helped change the content of what decision
makers in the air force thought about, permitting them to see air war less
as a strategic process aiming at victory and more as a technical process in
which the assembly and refinement of means became paramount.
They did so in part because the refinement of means and the
achievement of destruction were what operations research could most
effectively achieve, (p. 234)
Not only was military utility replaced by operational utility, but the
military morality of "just war" and "manly combat" was supplanted by an
industrial, amoral approach: mass production killing:
The rhetoric and methodology of civilian expertise also defined goals by
the distance they interposed between the designers and victims of destruction.
The more sophisticated the methods of destruction became, the less
language and methods of measurement allowed men to acknowledge the
nature of that destruction. A dehumanized rhetoric of technique reduced
the enemy to quantifiable abstractions. Statistics of man-hours lost and
workers dehoused objectified many of the enemy's experiences and banished
almost altogether one category, his death, (pp. 234-235)
By late in the war, there were 400 OR workers in the Army Air Force.
They spread their calculations and their technical perspective relentlessly.
One key part of this discourse is to refuse to focus on actual enemy deaths,
especially civilian deaths. For example, the Committee of Operations Analysis
(COA), in its report on the potential of incendiary attacks, made no
estimate of casualties. Instead, it preferred to measure the potential damage
with other statistics: 180 square miles of urban areas devastated, and 12
million people, or 70 percent of the total population in the 20 cities, rendered
homeless (p. 228).
Most analysis was couched in safe language. Destroying residential
neighborhoods was called "dehousing." It was
the favorite euphemism for a variety of virtues perceived in an incendiary
assault, some spelled out—workers' absenteeism, lower morale, paralyzed
systems—some usually left unspoken: the maimed bodies and bewildering
toll of the dead. Target analysts recognized that such an assault would inflict
scant damage on primary military and industrial establishments. But few
questioned the moral or strategic wisdom of the planned campaign, (p. 232)
Even the weather was enlisted in maximizing enemy casualties. Helmut
Landsberg, a German-born meteorologist on the 20th Air Force staff, suggested
firebomb attacks be timed with cold weather to precipitate influenza