Wayne O'Leary

The Ghost of Billy Mitchell

Everyone, it seems, loves bombing. When it comes to responding to the international threat posed by ISIS, the quasi-military Islamic extremist organization currently terrorizing the Middle East, bombing is by far the first choice of Americans. The public overwhelmingly favors it, say the polls; so do President Obama and Congress, though some in the president’s party remain a bit ambivalent.

Not so the war hawks of the Republican party; for them, bombing is the ultimate and preferred deterrent, and the only question is, what took so long? This is especially true of the Senate’s chief war hawk, John McCain (R-Ariz.), himself a Navy pilot in Vietnam and a true believer in air power. After years of goading his colleagues and the country (“bomb, bomb Iran”), he’s finally gotten what he’s always wanted, an honest-to-God air war. There’s just one fly in the ointment: it doesn’t seem to be working.

According to the latest reports, ISIS, generally impervious to the U.S. air strikes that began over the summer and intensified in September, is brushing off our attempts to “degrade” its infrastructure and reverse its methodical advance throughout Iraq and Syria. There have been some momentary successes, but as this is written, ISIS is on the verge of overrunning Kobani, Syria, and has more or less surrounded Baghdad in a relentless offensive reminiscent of the 1954 siege of Dien Bien Phu (also defended from the air) that wrote finis to the French occupation of Indochina.

So far, all of the expensive high-tech firepower American taxpayers have funded by pouring money into the black hole that is the Pentagon budget — cruise missiles, carrier-based and land-based jets, stealth bombers, remote-control drones, attack helicopters — has been unavailing against the desert version of a guerilla army. Yet, the Obama administration, as well as Congress and the public, persist in the stubbornly hopeful belief that American air power can do the job, because under no circumstances do we want to commit, in that hackneyed phrase, “boots on the ground” — at least not our boots.

After nearly 15 years of war in the Middle East, the public at large is sick of armed conflict and the sacrifices it demands. Still, there is a reluctance to let go, founded on the ingrained belief in “American exceptionalism,” the notion that America always wins, indeed must win to be true to its own self-mage, which is that we are not only uniquely different from, but innately superior to, other countries.

This has gotten us into trouble before: The French couldn’t stop Ho Chi Minh’s Communist insurgency in Vietnam, but the US, being superior to France, would succeed there; the British couldn’t reorder and westernize the Middle East and ultimately withdrew, but Americans, being superior to the British, would succeed where they failed.

And one of the things that makes this country exceptional, Americans believe, is our technology, which in a military context is most often expressed through the concept of air power, the key component of what even reluctant warrior Barack Obama was moved to characterize as the greatest military in the world, the indispensable force against which no enemy (least of all ISIS) could stand.

Americans believe in the efficacy of air power partly because they are fascinated by technology and technological solutions to problems; it’s a national character trait. In addition, air power is clean and antiseptic. Remember those televised images of so-called pinpoint bombing from the early days of “shock and awe” prior to the invasion of Iraq? It’s much pleasanter to fire missiles or fly over at 10,000 feet and obliterate our enemies — bomb them “back to the Stone Age,” as irascible Air Force General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) in the 1950s, liked to say — than to engage them in face-to-face ground combat. And it’s safer, if (like ISIS) they don’t have anti-aircraft batteries or fighter planes.

The primacy of air power in the American imagination when thoughts turn to warfare dates back to the early part of the last century. Much of the credit goes to Army General William “Billy” Mitchell, an iconoclastic advocate of air power who, in the 1920s, argued for an independent air force, championed the use of aircraft carriers, and urged the development of strategic bombing. Despite a celebrated court-martial for public insubordination, his theories had become consensus military dogma by World War II, paving the way for the massive use of air power by all sides.

Among the followers of Mitchell were Herman Goering, German air minister, who directed the night bombing of London and other British cities during the Battle of Britain; Arthur “Bomber” Harris, British air marshal, who carried out saturation-bombing tactics against German cities, including the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden; and the aforementioned Curtis LeMay, who as an Air Force commander in the Pacific was in charge of the fire-bombing of Japan. The common objectives were identical: shortening the war by destroying crucial infrastructure and productive capacity, terrorizing civilian populations, and sapping the morale of the enemy. And in each case, it failed; the will to fight was reinforced, not diminished.

Nevertheless, a myth of the invincibility of air power was established because the side that did the most bombing won; it’s a myth reinforced by the postwar claims of US Air Force generals that air power actually won the war. It didn’t, any more than in Vietnam, despite the US dropping more bomb tonnage than in all of World War II. Even the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, credited with Japan’s capitulation, took place after the Japanese had already decided to surrender.

The limited impact of air power during the war was laid out in exhaustive detail in a monumental 1945 assessment called the US Strategic Bombing Survey, consisting of 300-plus volumes produced by a 1,000-member, mixed military-civilian staff of experts. Its conclusion, summarized neatly by economist John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the survey’s directors, was that strategic bombing had not won the war. “At most, it had eased somewhat the task of the ground troops who did.”

So, it may well be that we have to confront ISIS militarily; that’s a political decision. But the happy thought that bombing alone will lead to victory is misguided. It will take boots on the ground, and those boots, more than likely, will have to be our own.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy.

From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2014