Monday, February 04, 2008

Does Airpower Create Insurgents?

From the website Defense Tech comes this gem...

...the American military's use of airpower is not helping us win the war...

...Operation Iraqi Freedom has rung in the new year with a bang - literally. On Jan. 10, U.S. warplanes dropped 40,000 pounds of bombs on the southern outskirts of Baghdad, one of the largest air strikes of the Iraq war. This attack reflects the increased use of air power as a component of Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy (Gen. Petraeus is the commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq and the primary author of FM 3-24, the Army's counterinsurgency manual). In 2007, the U.S. conducted more than 1,100 air strikes, a more than five fold increase over the previous year...


As someone who has participated in this conflict a couple of times now, I find the carping and armchair generalship displayed by people like these laughable at best and disgusting and counterproductive at their very worst.

The authors and commenters seem to believe that B-52s are carpet bombing Baghdad as I type this...at least that's the impression you get from them. Wanton civilian casualties are causing more people to go over to the other side, causing more harm than good...or so they say. Having seen quite a few airstrikes go in, I can tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. But since when did the truth have anything to do with any of these stories anyway?

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