WAPO Op-ed on airpower

[Entropy]

This op-ed came out today and it's generating a lot of controversy.

There are so many problems with this essay it's difficult to know where to begin. It's not just the opinion itself, but also the supporting facts which are almost completely without merit.

The author's penchant for hyperbole is striking. She cites Pentagon numbers that kinetic strikes decreased from 6% to 5.4% of sorties. From that small number she concludes:

- We are "avoiding the death of innocents at all cost"
- We have "all but grounded" air support
- We have "largely relinquished the strategic advantage of American air dominance."

Such claims apparently appeal to the editors at the NYT but are obviously bogus to anyone with minimal knowledge of the topic.

Some excerpts and commentary:

But news reports indicate that our troops under heavy attack have had to wait an hour or more for air support, so that insurgents could be positively identified. “We didn’t come to Marja to destroy it, or to hurt civilians,” a Marine officer told reporters after waiting 90 minutes before the Cobra helicopters he had requested showed up with their Hellfire missiles.

Waiting 90 minutes to receive air support has nothing to do with Gen. McChrystal's directive restricting use of kinetic air operations. The restrictions are meant to caution against the use of ordnance, not the use of aircraft. If it takes the Marines 90 minutes to receive Cobra support (an organic asset) then that means they were probably supporting another unit or were delayed because of some operational factor. As I understand it, there's nothing in the guidance that restricts getting an aircraft overhead - in fact that is typically encouraged because aircraft provide additional situational awareness for the ground forces in addition to being ready to employ munitions if needed.

While the number of American forces in Afghanistan has more than doubled since 2008, to nearly 70,000 today, the critical air support they get has not kept pace. According to my analysis of data compiled by the United States military, close air support sorties, which in Afghanistan are almost always unplanned and in aid of troops on the ground who are under intense fire, increased by just 27 percent during that same period.

Correlation =/= causation. Why would anyone expect the number of CAS air sorties to rise in lock-step with troop levels? Regardless, the author subsequently cites data which directly contradicts this argument:

Pentagon data show that the percentage of sorties sent out that resulted in air strikes has also declined, albeit modestly, to 5.6 percent from 6 percent.

And then:

According to the military’s own air-power summaries, often when the planes or helicopters arrive, they simply perform shows of force, or drop flares rather than munitions. It is only a matter of time before the Taliban see flares and flyovers for what they are: empty threats.

I last deployed to Afghanistan in 2005. Shows-of-force were very common then and their continued use is nothing unusual. Enemy forces do not typically see them as empty threats particularly since munition employment is only somewhat more restricted under Gen. McChrystal's guidance and not banned outright. The author is assuming, wrongly, that aircraft are performing shows of force because they were denied authority to drop ordnance, which is almost never the case. Typically, a ground unit will requests a show of force for its own sake and not because weapons employment was denied.

Perhaps the directive against civilian casualties could be justified if one could show that Afghan lives were truly being saved, but that’s not the case. According to the latest report by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, the number of civilian deaths caused by Western and Afghan government forces decreased to 596 in 2009, from 828 the year before. But the overall number of civilian deaths in the country increased by 14 percent, to 2,412, and the number killed by Taliban troops and other insurgents rose by 41 percent. For Afghan civilians who are dying in greater numbers every year, the fact that fewer deaths are caused by pro-government forces is cold comfort.

This is one reason the Taliban is so unpopular in Afghanistan, but the argument that Afghans will cut us some slack for only killing one civilian for every five the Taliban kill is particularly egregious and uninformed.

Clearly, however, the pendulum has swung too far in favor of avoiding the death of innocents at all cost. General McChrystal’s directive was well intentioned, but the lofty ideal at its heart is a lie, and an immoral one at that, because it pretends that war can be fair or humane.

For the author some irrelevant and contradictory statistics along with cherry-picked anecdotes count as clarity. I could not disagree more.