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The
Death of a Myth
The lure of a sterile, distant, "clean" airpower victory
seems to be embedded in the human psyche. Many politicians,
and a certain breed of warrior, are deeply troubled by the
prospect of face-to-face confrontation. And, while they
want desperately to inflict their will upon their opponent,
they strive to find some way to do so without having to
physically confront that opponent, and without having to
personally witness the effects of their actions.
Thus
the myth of distant punishment fulfills a deep-seated need,
rooted in the avoidance of personal confrontation and a
need to deny the consequences of combat. And across the
generations airpower adherents have believed with all their
hearts, in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary,
in the myth that they can just "wave the magic bombers and
make the bad man go away."
The innocent civilians they kill in this process they euphemistically
deny by simply terming them "collateral damage." And
the consistent history of the ineffectiveness of distant
punishment they simply choose to ignore, or to rationalize
by saying, "This time it will work because...our bombs are
more accurate...or more powerful." Or whatever. But
they refuse to acknowledge that, while the nature of weapons
may change, the basic nature of human beings does not change.
Human nature is one of the constants of warfare, and what
did not work before will not work now.
Our perennial airpower adherents base their calls for distant
punishment on a myth, which in turn is based on long-debunked
"scientific conclusions" that are close to a century
old--the equivalent of basing your space program on the
flat earth theory. Thus it is time to drive a stake through
the heart of this myth and bury it once and for all. The
basic concept is about as morally, scientifically, and politically
sound as claiming that you can police New York City with
cruise missiles.
Outside the trenches of denial among what is a small minority
even in the Air Force, there is no significant body of support
for the airpower adherents. Except in the recurrent wishful
thinking of politicians and the twisted, self-serving logic
of the aerospace industry, both of which are pandered to
quite shamelessly by the bomber lobby.
I would submit to you that using distant punishment to influence
a nation is like trying to get rid of the rats living in
an inhabited residence, without ever entering the building.
You can successfully influence the rats' behavior by burning
the house down (as we did in Dresden), or blowing the house
up (as we did in Hiroshima), or even by tossing in canisters
of nerve gas. But the human inhabitants of the building,
on whose behalf we are supposedly working, and the residents
of neighboring houses, all tend to strongly disapprove of
such strategies.
The obvious answer is to go into the building with our traps,
cats, ferrets, and rat terriers, and to clean up the filth
that the rats live in and on. But instead of doing this,
some among our military community are still too fastidious
to enter the building and confront the rats, and they have
come up with the bizarre idea of placing snipers at the
windows and periodically firing at the rats with shotguns
and high powered rifles. The fact that this strategy is
totally ineffective at controlling rats, and that it seriously
endangers the innocent residents of the building, is completely
inconsequential to the adherents of this distant punishment
strategy.
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