Guardian | Power tool

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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From: 
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 23:14:10 -0600
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Guardian | Power tool

Interesting, talks about how the Tomahawk has fundamentally redefined
how politicians, generals, and the public approach war.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4630027,00.html

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Power tool 

Perhaps the least surprising thing about the second Gulf war is that it
began with a volley of Tomahawk missiles. Since they were first used in the
1991 conflict, they have become the ultimate symbol of US military power.
Oliver Burkeman reveals how a hi-tech weapon that promised blood-free combat
changed the way America thinks about war

Oliver Burkeman
Friday March 21, 2003
The Guardian

At 1.30pm on Monday June 20 1977, tranquillity prevailed in the calm waters
off San Clemente island, a chunk of land 60 miles from the coast of
California that is home to a hook-billed songbird called the loggerhead
shrike, a rare species of fox, and a handful of US Navy scientists. Then, at
1.33, the silence was shattered by a roar. A slim grey missile blasted from
a military submarine, through the ocean's surface and shot towards the sky.
It reached an altitude of 2,000ft. Then it wobbled. And then millions of
dollars of research and development money came crashing back down into the
Pacific, and silence returned.
As missile tests go, it was hardly one of the more auspicious. President
Carter made no public comments about it, and it received barely a mention in
the newspapers of the day. The navy scientists watching in the company of
the loggerhead shrike (and, most likely, a Soviet spy satellite) could not
have known that they were witnessing the beginning of an era that would come
to redefine not only the shape of the US military arsenal but the very way
that America - and the entire world - thinks about killing and war.

The weapon that failed so emphatically that day was an early model of the
Tomahawk precision-guided cruise missile. And once the problem had been
corrected - tiny wings had been supposed to sprout from the missile's sides
once it reached its cruising altitude, and hadn't - it was to spearhead a
revolution that would see precept after precept of military thinking turned
on its head. 

The idea that going to war carries a near-certain risk that thousands of
your own soldiers will die; the idea that mass civilian casualties on the
enemy's side are inevitable, or that whole societies must inevitably be
obliterated in targeting their leaderships; the idea that wars are massive,
all-or-nothing undertakings between entire peoples that cannot be entered
into lightly or with limited commitment: all would tumble - in the strategic
thinking of America's military planners, if not always in reality - in the
era that began with the San Clemente test. It reached its fullest expression
on Wednesday night in Baghdad, when around 40 Tomahawks, fired from
battleships in the Persian Gulf, rained down on "leadership targets". A
terrifying initial bombardment of 3,000 more cruise missiles was expected, a
staggeringly higher number of "smart missiles" than have ever been used in a
single conflict before.

"The truth of the matter is that the way the Tomahawk has come to be used is
to make the use of force politically palatable," says William Arkin, a
former army intelligence analyst and veteran scholar of the US military.
"It's a very expensive piece of equipment, and properly used it would allow
you to go after targets that would be tougher to hit if there was robust air
defence. But it has become the weapon you use when you want to save yourself
politically - because you want to avoid the political implications of losing
a pilot." 

The United States' projection of its military presence in the world, in
peacetime as in war, has always been about "shock and awe". But the B-52
bomber, which was formerly the ultimate symbol of American military might,
conveyed a meaning that was different in almost every other way. The
40-year-old colossus of the US air force communicated to the enemy nothing
so much as overwhelming brute force and irresistible size. Boeing's
workhorse plane is still very much in use - B-52s dropped a third of the
bombs used in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm and they will be used in
this conflict - but it has been replaced as the symbol of the American
military. 

The new symbol is 21in in diameter, 18ft long, weighs 2,650lbs, has a range
of 690 miles, costs $600,00 and is packed with circuit boards manufactured
at a secret facility run by Raytheon, the defence contractor, outside
Phoenix, Arizona. Since its debut, claims of its accuracy - it is now
capable, the air force says, of guiding itself past obstacles and around
corners to within 7m of a pre-programmed target - have prompted
breathlessness among the media. It can hit "a target the size of a mailbox
with almost as much accuracy as the postal service," Fortune magazine
declared, as early as 1990.

Today, on CNN, anchors make little effort to conceal their excitement as
they display "baseball cards" (their words) listing the Tomahawk's
capabilities. The message it communicates is not one of brute force, but of
sheer, unmatchable technological superiority, enforced from a safe distance.
"It's still seen by many as a somehow unnatural development in the culture
of war," says the military historian Antony Beevor. "We have still failed to
realise what an astonishing technical development there has been in a very
short period of time. Human perceptions of change are simply not flexible
enough." 

The Tomahawk's public debut came shortly after 1am Gulf time on the first
night of the 1991 war - one was fired from the USS San Jacinto - and it has
since played a central, and frequently controversial, role in US military
exploits in Sudan, Kosovo and Afghanistan. But the decision to plough
billions into a programme to develop a flagship cruise missile was many
decades in development. Central among the motivations, of course, was the
impossibility, after Vietnam, of a US-waged conflict in which American
troops returned home in bodybags by the hundred. But that hardly meant that
the army or the air force embraced the idea.

"They just wanted to continue to produce the same old stuff," says Richard
Garwin, the physicist who played a central role in eventually persuading the
US military to adopt the Toma hawk, after helping to develop the hydrogen
bomb. "The services were set up to procure platforms: the navy procures
ships and the air force procures aircraft. So you would have the
chief-of-staff of the air force not really understanding that in Vietnam, on
average 50% of the targeted bombs fell within 700ft of their targets, and
the other 50% were simply unaccounted for." The generals were obsessed with
"military presence - but in wartime the mission is not to fly sorties. It's
to destroy targets."

By the time the first Tomahawk left the San Jacinto in 1991, its precision
in reaching its targets and minimising civilian casualties was still a
matter of intense debate, and it still is today. But the central importance
of minimising casualties among the US military was well entrenched. "It's a
phenomenon that completely shapes our policies - it's amazing how far it's
gone," says Professor Harvey Sapolsky, a political scientist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). "The American empire is limited
by our own willingness to provide soldiers for this empire. This is an
all-volunteer force, big compared to most countries, but not big compared to
the task of global US military domination." And even putting public opinion
aside, "It's just a question of getting the people. If you put people in
harm's way, you're just not going to get a lot of people turning up for it."

It fell to John Warden, a relatively obscure air-force colonel in the Gulf
war, to make the crux argument finally seen as shifting the military from a
stance in which planes and missiles backed up massive ground forces to a
strategy led from the air. "During the second world war, an average B-17
bomb during a bombing run missed its target by some 2,300ft," Warden told
General Norman Schwarzkopf and the then defence secretary Dick Cheney,
according to David Halberstam's book War in a Time of Peace. "Therefore, if
you wanted a 90% probability of hitting a particular target, you had to drop
some 9,000 bombs. That required a bombing run of 1,000 bombers and placed
1,000 men at risk. By contrast, with the new weaponry, one plane flown by
one man with one bomb could have the same probability." And Tomahawks, it
seemed, could do similarly well without even that risk.

The missiles have thus come to serve a twin political purpose, allowing
political leaders in the US - and the UK, which purchased its first shipment
of 65 Tomahawks in 1995 - to declare that they are intent on minimising both
military losses and civilian casualties. But as news of the civilian
devastation of the first Gulf war began to trickle in, Tomahawk was widely
condemned as having failed the second test. Early navy claims of 80%
effectiveness, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported, were based on
a novel definition of a successful missile launch: one in which the missile
had not become stuck in its launcher. What or whom it hit, it turned out,
had not entered the calculation.

But that didn't stop the missile from becoming the ultimate weapon of
Clintonian politics: a hi-tech way of making brief forays in foreign
countries, precise enough to convey a sense of liberal-humanitarian
intervention - and without the risk of US military deaths that public
opinion would not tolerate. Tomahawks played the central role in Operation
Deliberate Force in Bosnia in 1995, the no-fly-zone enforcement operation
known as Desert Strike in 1996, the attack on al-Qaida training camps in
Afghanistan in 1998, and in Kosovo.

In the longer term, of course, this was almost as galling to the armed
forces as a single, high-loss conflict might have been: it opened the door
to a world of little wars, all the time expensive and equivocal military
operations with uncertain aims and uncertain endings. "Cutting-edge
weapons... could allow us to fight a war without casualties," the political
journalist Nicholas Thompson wrote in the Washington Monthly. "The Devil's
bargain is that they could allow us to fight a war without causalities."

It seemed a long way from the keystone American military philosophy
associated with Andrew Jackson, the nation's seventh president and a general
in the Revolutionary war: the idea, in the words of the foreign policy
writer Walter Russell Mead, that military violence is not a "dimmer
switch... Either the stakes are important enough to fight for - in which
case you should fight with everything you have - or they are not, in which
case you should mind your own business and stay home."

But the technology continued to develop; the Tomahawks' accuracy, even
critics acknowledge, did improve. Computer-image mapping, where the missile
overlays a pre-programmed photograph of its target with the image it sees as
it approaches, were being radically improved, and complemented by global
positioning systems. (The new generation of Tactical Tomahawks, of which the
US is due to take delivery in 2005, will reportedly be able to shift between
any of 15 pre-programmed targets mid-flight.) And, says Harvey Sapolsky at
MIT, a new way of thinking about civilian populations in enemy countries was
taking hold. 

In the build-up to war on Iraq, he says, "There have been lots of
indications that we're not going to destroy very much, partly because we're
going to rebuild what we destroy. We hit bridges in Baghdad in the last war,
the electrical power system, but these are parts of the infrastructure that
will have to be used for rebuilding and governance." And in a conflict about
which the world is so divided, he goes on; "This is intertwined with public
opinion. A lot of the opposition is expressed as the fear that we are going
to kill innocent people, that the war is not worth innocent lives. The
second world war was a war against the Germans, a war against the Japanese.
A lot of civilian casualties, but people thought, so what? Nobody wanted to
say we were doing it intentionally, but this is quite different. Today, you
always start a war by saying it's not against the Iraqis, the Serbs... this
time it's not even the Iraqi army we're after. We want them to surrender."

But even if the missiles hit their targets, and casualties on both sides
really are minimal, it is worth noting another potential problem with the
Tomahawk-led arsenal: its effects on public opinion in those regions where
the US, and the UK, have never needed public support so badly.

"The hi-tech, low-bodybag war is seen, particularly within the Islamic
world, as cowardly, as technological arrogance, and I think it creates a
tremendous degree of resentment and anger," says Beevor. "In the Ottoman
empire, or the Soviet Union, the populations of villages would cry when
their troops went off to fight because they knew they would never see them
again. That mentality has not changed - it's hard enough even within our
society to keep up with the rapidity of technological change, but for an
Islamic culture which instinctively rejects so many aspects of that society,
it is so much the worse."

Bafflement and disdain for the new American military, with the Tomahawk as
its figurehead, is not confined to the Islamic world. It was Philippe
Morillon, the flamboyant French commander in Bosnia, who snorted of the US
military: "Who are these soldiers who are ready to kill and not ready to
die?" 

And there is another problem, Prof Sapolsky points out: the notion of using
smart missiles to "decapitate" a regime relies on a very particular notion
of how societies work. "In the case of a dictatorship like Iraq, it may turn
out to be pretty simple: get rid of the really evil guy, and everybody else
in the regime starts running... but what is this idea that there are objects
that will somehow destroy [a government] - do you knock out the phone
exchange? Or the waterworks? What? In the cold war, the theory was pretty
robust," he adds, with a heavy irony. "With nuclear weapons, at least you
didn't have to worry about what to destroy."

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