Airstikes Soaring in Iraq?

[Cavguy]

This discussion kind of relates to something that has been bugging me for awhile - both here and other sites. We tend to get into absolutes - i.e. "dropping bombs=bad", "tanks=bad", "kinetics=bad."

All these weapons are first and foremost tools that have varying effects. The issue with firepower and COIN isn't whether you use a particular tool, but whether you use it "smart". Dropping bombs on small arms contact in dense areas is often foolish. Dropping the "right" bomb in a specific place to acheive a specific effect, with consideration to the 2nd and 3d order effects (such as impact on perception and infrastructure) is "smart."

We have all heard the phrase "You kill one insurgent and you make five others." The counter to that is (and stolen from a slideshow I viewed recently) "not if you kill the right ones".

I have written before about how 1/1 AD used tanks, bradleys, artillery, and airstrikes as part of its Ramadi campaign to establish company outposts that enabled the "flip" of Anbar. The flip would not have been possible without the application of focused, deliberate firepower to fix and attrit the AQIZ forces in that area through security stations and human terrain analysis. Non-kinetics were applied in conjunction with the kinetic campaign to win the population and enable an "Anbar Awakening". Was using firepower wrong, as some absolutists would say? I offer a sound "no" to that. The platform and tool. 3ACR did a very similar heavily kinetic campaign in Tal Afar in conjunction with a non-kinetic campaign as well, and executed more than a few airstrikes doing it.

It's not the tool, it's how you plan and use it. And I still offer the observation that it still takes a very high level of approval to drop a bomb, and is usually an option only exercised after analyzing the effects - kinetic and non kinetic, of the weapon.

So while it may seem the tenants of 3-24 are being violated, the spirit is being executed through more focused and considered application of effects nested in a proper campaign plan.