Military Precision versus Moral Precision
Military Precision versus Moral Precision
Now that the long period of peace-seeking pretense has ended and George W.
Bush has unleashed his dogs of war on Iraq, many of the questions that have
occupied us during the past year have been dispatched by the fait
accompli of the U.S. invasion. Even in the midst of war, however, certain
questions remain relevant, and one of the most important pertains to
precision—to hitting, so to speak, what one aims to hit.
Television
viewers are being treated, if that is the right word, to much expert commentary
by retired military officers and other experts on the conduct of war. A great
deal of this commentary has to do with technology, and once again, as in 1991,
the technology of modern warfare is receiving high praise. News people seem
awe-struck by the accounts of bombs and missiles that not only hit, say, a
targeted building, but enter the third window on the second floor and strike the
handle of the hot-water faucet on the basin in the washroom. Golly, General
Turgidson, that's fantastic!
If the extreme accuracy being claimed for
today’s bombs and missiles were being considered only in relation to the
munitions’ purely military utility in demolishing the persons and property
selected for destruction, we might let the matter pass without extended
consideration, treating it as a topic of special interest only to those
fascinated with the technology of death, but the people responsible for
employing these instruments of war have themselves taken pains to connect their
use with—of all things—morality.
Thus, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld
recently remarked on “the care . . ., the humanity that goes into” the use of
so-called smart bombs and similar munitions. No doubt we should take note when
the minister of war expresses solicitude for those who otherwise might be
written off as “collateral damage.” Still, amid the dazzling, often
video-illustrated descriptions and accounts of the wonderful precision of these
munitions, the reporters, the talking heads, and, one fears, the television
viewers as well are losing sight of what, precisely, is going on.
To
begin, one must distinguish between the precision with which a bomb or missile
hits its intended point of impact—often claimed to be only a few meters most of
the time—and the area within which lethal damage will be wreaked when the
warhead explodes. In Iraq, for example, the much-used Joint Direct Attack
Munition (JDAM), a 2,000-pound Mark-84 dumb bomb with a
global-positioning-system (GPS) guidance kit attached to enhance its accuracy,
is supposed to strike within 13 meters of its intended point of impact, as
compared to an error range of some 60-70 meters for its dumb counterpart.
Evidently, this difference is what elicited Rumsfeld's remark about the humanity
of the use of such weapons: whereas the dumb bomb places at risk innocent souls
70 meters away, the smart one spares everybody beyond, say, 15 meters. If only
it were so.
Recalling the hugely exaggerated claims made for precision
bombing in past wars, we are entitled to skepticism even with respect to the
accuracy claims themselves. According to some authorities, perhaps 7-10 percent
of the smart bombs fall beyond the claimed accuracy radius—some of them miles
away—because of mechanical and electrical malfunctions. The potential harm
caused by a 2,000-pound bomb hitting substantially off target in a city will be
sufficiently obvious to anyone.
For purposes of the present discussion,
however, let us concede that the bombs and missiles strike with all the accuracy
claimed for them. What happens then? As described recently by Newhouse reporter
David Wood, the 2000-pound JDAM “releases a crushing shock wave and showers
jagged, white-hot metal fragments at supersonic speed, shattering concrete,
shredding flesh, crushing cells, rupturing lungs, bursting sinus cavities and
ripping away limbs in a maelstrom of destruction.” Hardly anyone survives within
120 meters of the blast, where pressures of several thousand pounds per square
inch and 8,500-degree heat simply obliterate everything, human and material.
Metal fragments are spewed nearly three-quarters of a mile, and bigger pieces
may fly twice that far; no one within 365 meters can expect to remain unharmed,
and persons up to 1000 meters or farther away from the point of impact may be
harmed by flying fragments. Of course, the explosions also start fires over a
wide area, which themselves may do vast damage, even to structures and people
unharmed by the initial blast.
I am no munitions expert, but I am pretty
good at basic math. Baghdad is a city of some 6,400,000 persons living in an
area of approximately 734 square kilometers—roughly comparable to the urban
areas of Boston or Detroit. If it were a perfect square it would be
approximately 27 kilometers (17 miles) on a side, but the central, most densely
populated part, where the prime military targets are concentrated, is a much
smaller area. What are the odds that the damage wreaked by exploding 2000-pound
JDAMs and other powerful munitions, such as the 1000-pound warheads on the
Tomahawk missiles, will not touch the ordinary people of the city? Well, the
odds are zero. Such powerful warheads, which the U.S. forces are expending by
the thousands, cause explosions whose effects undoubtedly reach vast numbers of
the city’s civilian inhabitants. To conclude otherwise, one would be obliged to
deny either the well-advertised power of the weapons themselves or the axioms of
geometry.
As Marc W. Herold has written, “along with the U.S. military
planners’ decision to bomb perceived military targets in urban areas, the use of
weapons with great destructive blast and fragmentation power necessarily results
in heavy civilian casualties.” Which brings us back to the matter of
morality.
Many people, unfortunately, will maintain that such “collateral
damage” is simply an unfortunate side effect of modern warfare, and if we are
satisfied that the war itself is justified, then we are obliged to swallow hard
and accept, however regrettably, the deaths and destruction wreaked upon the
innocent in the neighborhood of the selected military targets. Some, including
President Bush, even go so far as to place the blame for such harms on Saddam
Hussein, who stands accused of cynically employing his “own people” as shields
and of exploiting their destruction for public relations purposes. This argument
is a curious defense of the bombing—after all, no bombing, no such collateral
damage—and the whole world knows that nothing required the President to go to
war against Iraq: if ever a war was freely chosen, this war is the
one.
In truth, aerial bombardment of urban areas using powerful munitions
is inherently undiscriminating. The reporters, retired generals, and talking
heads can huff and puff as much as they like, but the reality is that dropping
2,000-pound bombs in densely populated cities will certainly kill and wound many
innocent people—men, women, and children.
How can those who choose to
employ such weapons in such circumstances continue to argue against, say, the
hijackers of September 11 on the grounds that those evil men chose to kill
innocents? Killing innocents is killing innocents. To conduct warfare as the
United States is now conducting it in Iraq is necessarily to indulge in immoral
conduct. The imprecision with which this sort of warfare treats the guilty and
the innocent, by simply disregarding their differences, cannot withstand moral
scrutiny. It will not do to say that the United States could avoid harming the
innocent only by refraining from carrying out the war and that the no-war option
has been ruled out. Someone has ruled it out, and that person, George W. Bush,
along with his subordinates carrying out his war of aerial bombardment all the
way down the chain of command, has chosen to act immorally. We are not dealing
with a gray area here. This kind of intrinsically indiscriminate killing is
deeply, outrageously immoral.