At the end of the Cold War, the United States became the world’s only military superpower, with a global reach unprecedented in world history. In addition to more than seven hundred military bases and installations in twenty-nine countries throughout the world, its fleet of warships, submarines, and aircraft carriers patrolling the world’s oceans had long since transformed Alfred Thayer Mahan’s sea-power ambitions into a permanent reality. Since the end of the Vietnam War, it had bolstered its arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles, bomber fleets, fighter planes, and attack helicopters with a new generation of high-tech weapons that included radar-invisible stealth fighters, AC-130 gunships, laser-guided missiles, and laser-guided smart bombs. Following the abolition of the draft, a smaller and more streamlined professional army had taken full advantage of the technological revolution and laid the foundations for a digitalized battlefield command system that no other military in the world could match.
All these developments gave the military a unique ability to fight any enemy anywhere in the world, while making the United States impregnable. Yet hardly had the euphoria of the West’s “victory” begun to wear off than a pessimistic school of thought within the American political and military establishment predicted that the United States faced a new era of “persistent conflict” from an unpredictable array of natural and artificial enemies that include terrorists, rogue states, drug cartels and other mafias, and dictators armed with weapons of mass destruction, and that the maintenance of America’s global military presence was essential for national security and also for the stability of the international system.
In the same period, the military, its analysts and strategists, and key institutions, such as the Army War College and the Joint Readiness Training Center, increasingly stressed the importance of “military operations other than war” and “full dimensional operations,” in which the military was expected to prepare for a range of activities, from peacekeeping, “stability operations,” humanitarian assistance, emergency disaster relief, and “conflict termination.”
According to the concept of “three-block war” elaborated by U.S. Marine General Charles Krulak in the late 1990s, soldiers might be obliged to engage in combat, humanitarian, and stability operations simultaneously within the contiguous space of three city blocks. The idea that war could have humanitarian and altruistic objectives was often reinforced by the notion that new high-tech weaponry and more accurate targeting systems and sensors would make it possible to restrict “collateral damage”—civilian casualties and property destruction—to an acceptable minimum.
In 1996 the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Joint Vision 2010 claimed that precision targeting had made it possible to “achieve the necessary destruction or suppression of enemy forces with fewer systems” and deploy the “necessary concentration of combat power at the decisive time and place—with less need to mass forces physically than in the past.” New capabilities would also “relieve our Service men and women of the need to be physically present at the decisive points in battle or in other operations, or to be exposed to conditions of great danger and hardship.”1
The idea that the U.S. Army might be able to win wars without the need for its soldiers to be “physically present” on the battlefields was to some extent a product of a new sense of technological supremacy. But technology also made it possible, at least in theory, to limit the extent of wartime destruction at a time when it was becoming increasingly difficult to find a viable rationale for the use of military power as an instrument of American foreign policy and when interstate conflict was increasingly regarded as a historical anachronism. After more than a century in which American warfare had been based on annihilation of enemy forces and sometimes enemy civilians as well, a new era now beckoned in which the military would seek to become “preeminent in any form of conflict” without risking the lives of its own soldiers and while causing minimal destruction.
Operation Just Cause
These expectations shaped a range of armed conflicts in which America became involved in the aftermath of the Cold War, including three major wars, an on/off air war with Iraq, naval skirmishes with Iran, peacekeeping missions and occupations in the Balkans and Somalia, and the occupation of Haiti. In December 1989, these new doctrines were tested for the first time when the United States invaded Panama in order to topple and arrest the CIA protégé and narco-dictator General Manuel Noriega. Ostensibly intended to safeguard American lives and “defend democracy” in response to Noriega’s brutal crackdown on political opposition, the invasion was actually also motivated by the imminent implementation of the 1977 Carter-Torrijos Panama Canal Treaty, which was due to restore full sovereignty over the Canal Zone to Panama by the end of the century.
For the military, the invasion was an opportunity to dispel “Vietnam syndrome”—the humiliation of the world’s foremost industrial power being beaten by a Third World agricultural society despite its overwhelming firepower and the moral collapse of the U.S. Army and the loss of domestic prestige that accompanied that defeat. Panama also provided an opportunity to demonstrate America’s new technological weaponry and its tactical and operational prowess. In October 1989, General Carl Stiner, the commander of the U.S. Army’s Southern Command, presented to the Bush administration an invasion plan that called for simultaneous attacks against twenty-seven targets from land, air, and sea to rapidly destroy Noriega’s command-and-control structure. This plan became the basis for Operation Just Cause, which began at 12:30 a.m. on December 20, when a combined task force of 27,000 infantry, sailors, paratroopers, and special forces attacked some 14,000 Panama Defense Forces (PDF) personnel, police, national guard, and paramilitaries. Subjected to simultaneous naval, ground, and aerial attacks involving paratroopers, special forces, and regular infantry in addition to a stunning display of firepower from Apache and Cobra attack helicopters, Sheridan light assault vehicles, AC-130 gunships, and the new F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighters, Noriega’s forces were rapidly overwhelmed and effectively defeated by the time the sun came up.
Stiner’s strategic plan combined well-established American principles of speed, mobility, and overwhelming force with seamlessly integrated joint operations and the new technological weaponry at the U.S. Army’s disposal, but it was also subject to stricter rules of engagement than any previous American wars. Indiscriminate artillery and aerial bombardments and attacks on military targets close to “critical public facilities” were prohibited, and soldiers were obliged to show maximum restraint when firing at the enemy, even to the point of shooting at defended buildings rather than directly at their defenders in order to make them surrender.
These rules appear to have been mostly observed. When a stealth fighter attacked the main PDF barracks, it dropped a bomb fifty yards away in order to stun its defenders rather than destroy the building. Psychological operations teams equipped with loudspeakers played an important role in reducing the level of destruction by exhorting PDF forces to surrender or by simply calling telephones in defended buildings to persuade their defenders to give up—the “Ma Bell approach.” Twenty-four radio programs and leaflet distributions disseminated the same message of the futility of resistance.
The military’s concern with keeping civilian casualties and physical damage to a minimum was partly influenced by the close proximity of some forty thousand Americans in the Panama Canal Zone and also by the desire to leave as much of the country’s infrastructure intact as possible. These efforts also reflected the Pentagon’s new emphasis on media presentation as an important factor in shaping military outcomes and preventing a repetition of the “living-room war” in Vietnam, where militarists have often cited the impact of television coverage of civilian deaths on international and domestic public opinion as a decisive factor in the U.S. defeat. Media coverage of the Panama invasion was therefore carefully managed in the U.S. Army’s first use of the media pool system, and its specially selected correspondents saw little or nothing of the combat until it was over.
These efforts would not have surprised Sherman, who was famously hostile to the Union press and frequently banned Northern reporters from accompanying his armies. On one occasion, Sherman court-martialed the reporter Thomas Knox, who wrote a critical article on his failed offensive at Chickasaw Bayou, for making “sundry and false allegations and accusations” against the army “to the great detriment of the interest of the National Government and comfort of our enemies.”2 These charges were rejected at the court-martial, but Knox was banned from associating with Sherman’s army. Pentagon efforts to control media coverage of the Panama War were more subtle but no less effective. Reporters found themselves forced to watch CNN reports or official briefings in windowless rooms.
As a result, few journalists saw the controversial series of events that followed the U.S. attack on the PDF military headquarters in the heart of El Chorrillo, one of Panama City’s working-class districts, in the first hour of the invasion. Most of El Chorrillo’s fifteen thousand residents were asleep when the attack took place, and they woke to find that their neighborhood had become a battle zone, as helicopters blasted the comandancia building and U.S. soldiers and Noriega loyalists fought running gun battles in the surrounding streets. Fires quickly spread throughout El Chorrillo, forcing most of its people to flee their homes. Pentagon spokesmen accused Noriega’s paramilitaries of setting the fires, but residents insisted that they were spread by tracer bullets and artillery and some alleged that U.S. soldiers had intentionally burned down individual houses with incendiaries.
The Spanish journalist Maruja Torres watched what she later recalled as a bombardment—“a genuine, authentic, super-technical and modern bombardment by the most powerful army in the world, of one of the poorest neighborhoods in the capital” from her room at a Marriott Hotel.3 By morning fifteen blocks of El Chorrillo had been burned to the ground, and most of its fifteen thousand inhabitants were homeless. Both Panamanian and American critics of the occupation later claimed that four thousand to six thousand civilians were killed in the fighting at El Chorrillo and other places and that their bodies were secretly buried in mass graves under the supervision of the U.S. military.4
These figures seem unlikely. The U.S. military’s casualty figures reported 32 U.S. dead, 50 enemy dead, and 314 civilians dead. A Human Rights Watch report immediately after the war questioned the military’s estimates but discounted the possibility of thousands of secretly buried bodies. It nevertheless blamed the “inordinate number of civilian victims” on the “tactics and weapons” used during the invasion and suggested that “the devastation created in the neighborhood of El Chorrillo” was possibly caused by American shelling and tracer bullets. The authors also questioned the decision to attack the PDF headquarters in the first place as a violation of “the rule of proportionality, which mandates that the risk of harm to impermissible targets be weighed against the military necessity of the objective pursued.”5
Some of these “impermissible targets” were among the bodies lined up in the morgue in Panama City, which Juantxu Rodríguez, the El País reporter and colleague of Maruja Torres, photographed shortly before he was shot dead by U.S. soldiers in a crossfire. But these less-than-glorious dimensions of the war were swiftly forgotten, along with El Chorrillo’s thousands of homeless refugees, as television cameras captured Noriega’s opponents thanking “God—and the U.S. military” and as Noriega surrendered to U.S. troops in January after briefly taking refuge at the papal nuncio’s residence in Panama City. In March 1990, President George H.W. Bush hailed “the roll call of glory, the roster of great American campaigns, Yorktown, Gettysburg, Normandy, and now Panama.” The defeat of a few thousand soldiers and paramilitaries by the most powerful military force in human history was not the most obvious cause for such celebration. For the U.S. military, however, the invasion was a vindication of its new “surgical force engagement capabilities” and “a success, even a masterpiece of the operational art,” which demonstrated that “U.S. forces could deploy on short notice into an environment that required a combination of both violent engagement and sensitive restraint.” It heralded even bigger campaigns to come.6
The First Gulf War
Within a year, the military gave an even more convincing demonstration of the new American way of war against a far more powerful enemy. On August 2, 1990, the world was plunged into the most serious international crisis since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan when Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait. Though Saddam Hussein believed that he had implicit U.S. approval from the American ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie to carry out the invasion, the Bush administration ordered Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait without preconditions or face military action. These demands were supported by the United Nations and most of Iraq’s neighbors. As a result, the United States assumed leadership of an international military coalition charged with enforcing the UN Security Council’s Resolution 678 of November 29, 1990, which established a deadline of January 15, 1991, for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait and authorized member states to use “all necessary means” if the deadline was not acknowledged.
Though the United States officially fought as part of a coalition, the war was always an American-dominated and American-dependent enterprise. Of the 956,600 troops deployed in Saudi Arabia and other countries at the war’s peak, some 697,000 were American, and the U.S. military took care of the logistics and supplied most of the planes, missiles, and other weaponry for the ground and air campaigns. These forces faced some 545,000 Iraqi troops in forty-two or forty-three divisions, including elite Republican Guard units, equipped with some 4,200 tanks and 3,000 heavy artillery pieces, in Kuwait and along the southern Iraqi border. Expectations of potential heavy casualties shaped a coalition campaign strategy that was very different from Operation Just Cause.
The coalition commander, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, planned to use airpower to cut Iraq’s lines of communication with Kuwait. Having cut off the Iraqi army, the coalition would proceed to “kill it,” as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell put it, with a ground offensive that drew heavily on Liddell Hart’s indirect strategy.7 Rejecting proposals from the U.S. Marine Corps for an amphibious assault on Kuwait City, Schwarzkopf proposed to combine a two-corps assault on Kuwait from Saudi Arabia and western Iraq with a drive along the Kuwait coastline by marines of the First Expeditionary Force and Arab coalition forces. This would be followed by a “Hail Mary punch,” in which a combined force of 250,000 American and French troops would enter Iraq 480 miles to the west of Kuwait from Saudi Arabia and swing back to enter Kuwait.
On January 16, 1991, Allied planes initiated Operation Desert Storm with multiple air strikes in Iraq and Kuwait. Over the next forty-two days, coalition planes dropped 88,000 tons of bombs in the most sustained and relentless bombing campaign in military history. More than two hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from ships and carriers in the Persian Gulf added to the devastating technological assault. On February 24, the Eighteenth Airborne Corps, supported by the French Sixth Airborne Division and the 101st U.S. Airborne Division, entered Iraq from Saudi Arabia, having successfully reached their starting positions without detection.
By the end of the day, the Eighteenth Corps had advanced 170 miles toward the Euphrates River and the main highway connecting Iraq to Kuwait, completely circumventing Iraqi defensive positions farther south, before swinging back into Kuwait, where the 150,000-strong Seventh Corps had also made a decisive breakthrough. Battered by more than a month of air strikes, the much-vaunted Iraqi army quickly crumbled, and the “mother of all battles” never materialized, as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers surrendered in Kuwait and Iraq, while others attempted a chaotic retreat. On the night of February 26–27, more than a thousand vehicles, many of them carrying loot from Kuwait, were bombed and strafed by Allied planes along the Mutla Ridge on the road to Basra in what one U.S. pilot described as a “turkey shoot.” Macabre photographs of wrecked vehicles and burned corpses along this “Highway of Death” became iconic images of the disparity between the contending forces.
On February 28, Iraq agreed to a cease-fire, which was formalized on March 3. In all, coalition forces suffered fewer than two hundred casualties. Estimates of Iraqi military casualties initially ranged from 100,000 to 200,000 in the immediate aftermath of the war, but subsequent research put the number from the low thousands to 20,000–22,000 combat deaths cited in a 1993 survey by the U.S Air Force.8 The stunning rapidity of the ground campaign was partly a tribute to coalition tactics and strategies and partly a consequence of the unimaginative and often nonexistent leadership of the Iraqi components, but it was also made possible by a new kind of bombing strategy that seemed, at first sight, to bear out the new narratives of humanitarian war.
Dismantling Iraq
In the course of the war, coalition planes attacked more than three hundred targets in Iraq and Kuwait, many on multiple occasions. This campaign was intended to weaken and “degrade” Saddam Hussein’s military machine and destroy his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, but many of the bombs were dropped on “dual use” targets and inevitably killed civilians. Coalition spokesmen insisted that laser- and satellite-guided missiles and smart bombs made these raids less destructive to ordinary people than their predecessors. “For the first time we had a capability to focus on military targets and avoid civilian areas, “Schwarzkopf later declared, “so there was a degree of discrimination within the execution of the plan that made it much more palatable than it would have been . . . like the firebombing of Tokyo or something like that, that was just an indiscriminate destruction of the entire city.”9
The destruction was not always so “palatable.” There is no doubt that the bombing campaign was different from many of its predecessors. Residential areas were not systematically razed, and targeting systems made it possible to pick out individual targets with greater precision than in any previous war, while reducing the damage to the surrounding area. Nevertheless, the war was punctuated by incidents in which such discrimination was absent, such as the bombing of the Yarmuk Hotel in Diwaninieh, in which eleven civilians were killed, destruction of the Amiriyah Public Shelter No. 25 with a bunker-busting bomb that killed more than four hundred civilians, and the bombing of a plant that produced powdered milk for baby formulas. Most of these episodes were the result of poor intelligence rather than deliberate attacks, but after the war it was revealed that only 7 percent of the bombs dropped were guided (smart) and that even these didn’t always hit their targets; the conventional bombs were much less precise.
The rhetoric of “surgical” targeting also obscured the new forms of destruction resulting from a bombing campaign that targeted the “joints” of a modern industrial society, as opposed to indiscriminate carpet or area bombing. In addition to Baath Party headquarters and military bases, the United States blew up telephone and radio transmission towers and lines, food processing, storage, and distribution facilities, animal vaccination facilities, power stations, water treatment plants, irrigation water pumping stations, railroads, bus depots, oil wells and pumps, pipelines, refineries, and storage tanks to paralyze Iraq “strategically, operationally, and tactically,” as U.S. Air Force secretary Donald Rice described it.
In these attacks, as a Department of Defense interim report prepared for Congress noted after the war, “It was impossible . . . to destroy the electrical power supply for Iraqi command and control facilities or chemical weapons factories, yet leave untouched that portion of the electricity supplied to the general populace.” Yet the scope of the bombing campaign clearly went beyond “unavoidable hardships” and combined psychological, economic, and military objectives in a very Shermanlike attempt to target the enemy’s will to resist—a goal made explicit by one air force officer who told a reporter, “Big picture, we wanted to let people know, ‘Get rid of this guy and we’ll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding. We’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that, and we’ll fix your electricity.’ ”10
In 1991 the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal headed by former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark determined that “civilian vehicles including public buses, taxicabs and passenger cars were bombed and strafed at random to frighten civilians from flight, from seeking food or medical care, finding relatives or other uses of highways. The effect was summary execution and corporal punishment indiscriminately of men, women and children, young and old, rich and poor.”11 Human Rights Watch also reported eyewitness accounts of attacks on civilian vehicles, schools, mosques, wedding parties, and gas stations.12
The civilian death toll was initially calculated by Iraqi and other observers at more than 100,000, but later estimates revised it to as low as 2,500–3,000.13 Considering the intensity of the bombing, these figures were relatively low and appeared once again to vindicate coalition claims of surgically applied destruction and smart technologies. But these statistics did not fully encapsulate the impact of the war on Iraqi society. In March 1991, a UN report on the humanitarian situation in Kuwait and Iraq found that the conflict had “wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the economic structure of what had been, until January 1991, a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society. Now, most means of modern life support have been destroyed or rendered tenuous. Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age, but with all the disabilities of post-industrial dependency on an intensive use of energy and technology.”14 The report described a paralyzed and dismembered society in which “all previously viable sources of fuel and power . . . and modern means of communication are now, essentially, defunct.” Untreated sewage was being dumped directly into rivers from bombed water-treatment plants, the electricity grid had virtually ceased to operate, and Iraqis were able to communicate only by person-to-person contact as a result of the collapse of the telephone and postal systems.
Within a few months, most essential services in Iraq had been restored, much of its electricity grid was functioning again, and rationing was abolished. But the casualties of the bombing campaign were not limited to immediate wartime destruction. A 1993 study carried out by Beth Daponte and funded by Greenpeace claimed that 111,000 civilians, including 70,000 children and adolescents under the age of fifteen, had died from “war-induced adverse health effects” due to the disruption of food production and damage to water-treatment and sanitation facilities and the electricity grid.15
Though caused by the bombing, these deaths were seldom attributed to it, making it easier to sustain the notion of a “clean” conflict with minimal destruction. But as another Greenpeace report, on the environmental consequences of the war, pointed out, the “efficient destruction” of “crucial life support functions of the civilian population” was a new form of war, in which the “old fashioned definition of collateral damage . . . that shrapnel has to scar civilians, or rubble has to fall on them” had been replaced by a “new definition . . . that water, electricity, and fuel are taken away from civil society. People who live in cities, in modern societies, are dependent for their lives, not just their comfort, on such support systems. Thus their destruction is as much de facto terror bombing, as destruction of oil wells is environmental terrorism.”16
The “Most Perfect Instrument”
The unraveling of Iraqi society was not due only to the bombs and missiles. In his authoritative study of the impact of war on civilians, the Oxford humanitarian ethics scholar Hugo Slim has written, “The two main ways of using food and starvation as weapons of war are through policies of blockade or scorched earth—the former often being a more subtle and more easily disguised form of the latter.”17 Economic blockades have a long pedigree in American military history; they were used in the Civil War and in World War I, and also against Cuba, Vietnam, and Nicaragua during the Cold War. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson approvingly described the blockade against Germany and the Central Powers as “this economic, peaceful, silent deadly remedy.” In the 1990s the United States began to reemploy this “remedy” against a range of countries that included Haiti, Iran, and Serbia. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, the United Nations Security Council extended the embargoes against Iraq, introduced after the invasion of Kuwait, into one of the most comprehensive and stringent sanctions packages in history.
Ostensibly intended to “contain” Saddam Hussein’s regime and neutralize Iraq’s ability to reconstitute its chemical and biological weapons programs, sanctions also had a wider purpose. In March 1991, the New York Times reported that “the United States has argued against any premature relaxation in the belief that by making life uncomfortable for the Iraqi people it will eventually encourage them to remove President Saddam Hussein from power.” The U.S. deputy national security adviser Robert Gates also proclaimed, “Saddam is discredited and cannot be redeemed. Iraqis will pay the price while he remains in power. All possible sanctions will be maintained until he is gone.”18
Despite supposed exemptions for humanitarian and medical purposes, the UN sanctions prohibited key Iraqi exports and an extensive range of “dual use” imports that included syringes, medicines, and medical equipment and chlorine, spare parts, and new pumps for water-treatment plants, as well as fertilizer and farm equipment. Coming so soon after the bombings, these restrictions compounded the impact of the war on Iraqi society, creating what the journalist Andrew Cockburn has called an “immense slow-motion disaster,” in which the population was reduced to a “lower-tier Third World standard of living” where pharmacies were empty but hospital wards were filled with “sickly, wasted infants.”19
By the middle of the decade, 567,000 Iraqi children were reported to have died as a consequence of malnutrition, inadequate health care, and cholera, gastroenteritis, and dysentery caused by drinking contaminated water, according to an epidemiological survey by the British medical journal The Lancet. In 1995, the sanctions were slightly eased by the UN’s “oil for food” program, but many restrictions remained in place. In 1998 Denis J. Halliday, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, resigned, declaring, “We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that.” Two years later, his successor, Hans von Sponeck, followed suit, asking, “For how long should the civilian population, which is totally innocent on [sic] all this, be exposed to such punishment for something they have never done?”
In a 1999 article in the journal Foreign Policy, John Mueller and Karl Mueller compared the impact of the sanctions to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and argued that “a so far futile effort to remove Saddam from power and a somewhat more successful effort to constrain him militarily” may have constituted “a necessary cause of the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history.”20 The United States and its allies have downplayed this impact or blamed it on the allocation of resources by Saddam Hussein’s regime. In a television interview in 1996, however, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously replied that the price was “worth it” when asked if the deaths of half a million children were necessary to contain Saddam.
Other U.S. officials also argued that sanctions were essential to “keep Saddam in his box.” In an interview with the New York Times in 2003, James Rubin, chief spokesman for the State Department during the Clinton years, reiterated that sanctions had been necessary and predicted that such methods might be a preferable alternative to war in the future, when the United States would increasingly rely on such methods “in self-defense or with U.N. Security Council authorization . . . as the ultimate method of coercion in international relations.”21 Robert McBrien, the director of global targeting at the Office of Foreign Assets, which oversees U.S. sanctions programs, described sanctions to Andrew Cockburn as “the soft edge of hard power. They make people suffer. They hurt. They can destroy.”
Cockburn described the political advantages of “conduct-based targeting,” which enables the United States government to wage a form of “modern economic warfare” that “bends the global financial system to its ends and can blight entire societies, operates well below the radar, frequently justified as a benign alternative to military action.” In terms of their impact on the targeted society and their broader coercive intentions, sanctions can also constitute a “Sherman’s march” without armies or soldiers. And in the case of Iraq, their full impact would not become clear until U.S. troops entered Iraq a second time, thirteen years after Schwarzkopf’s troops hurtled through the Iraqi desert.
Hyperwar
Even more than Panama, the Gulf War was a watershed in American warfare; it confirmed and demonstrated to the world the technological and organizational supremacy of the U.S. military. In a 1993 article in the military journal Parameters, Major Wayne K. Maynard compared the war to nineteenth-century colonial wars that “pitted small numbers of disciplined, well-trained Western troops with rifles against hordes of tribal warriors armed with only shields and spears.”22 In the aftermath of the war, the Pentagon’s prime futurist thinker, Andrew Marshall, argued that the United States was in the throes of a “revolution in military affairs” (RMA), because of which it had outstripped any potential rival. Though Marshall and some proponents of the RMA worried that this supremacy might be only temporary, others emanated a sense of triumphalism and omnipotence and heralded the advent of a new form of American warfare, in which victories could be obtained by surgically dismembering armies and their command-and-control structures rather than destroying them, warfare in which computers and satellites would become as significant as soldiers.23
Some called this transformation postmodern war.24 Others saw the Gulf War as an example of hyperwar, whose essential components, according to the Federation of American Scientists, were “surprise, intensity, lethality, decapitation, scope, and mass” in operations directed at the enemy’s leadership, resources, infrastructure, armed forces, and population.25 In 1995 Colonel John Warden, one of the architects of the Gulf War bombing campaign, outlined a new strategy of “applying pressure against the enemy’s innermost strategic ring—its command structure. . . . It is pointless to deal with enemy forces if they can be bypassed, by strategy or technology, either in the defense or offense.”26 In Warden’s opinion, America’s domination of the battle space now makes it possible to carry out multiple simultaneous attacks in order to inflict “strategic paralysis” on the enemy “system” while avoiding “imprecision” that would be “too expensive physically and politically to condone.”
Other analysts made similar arguments. Some air force strategists saw the Gulf War as a paradigm of “effects-based operations” (EBOs), in which conventional military power and nonmilitary capabilities have broad “effects” on the enemy, without inflicting mass casualties, through simultaneous attacks on multiple targets that isolate and neutralize enemy armed forces without actually destroying them. The Department of Defense articulated a vision of “network-centric warfare” (NCW), in which a fully digitized U.S. Army would be able to “see” all dimensions of the battle space and achieve “unequivocal military decision with minimum cost to both sides.”
Technological omnipotence has not always been seen as a justification for restraint, however. In a report to the United States National Defense University in 1996, the naval officers Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade elaborated a strategic doctrine called shock and awe. They proposed that space-based observation systems, sensors, computers, and robotics now made it possible to inflict “instant, nearly incomprehensible levels of massive destruction” on people and their resources so as to nullify “the will, understanding, and perception of an adversary” through “the non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese.”27 According to the authors, “The Japanese simply could not comprehend the destructive power carried by a single airplane. This incomprehension produced a state of awe. One recalls from old photographs and movie or television screens, the comatose and glazed expressions of survivors of the great bombardments of World War I and the attendant horrors and death of trench warfare. These images and expressions of shock transcend race, culture, and history.” America’s future wars, Ullman and Wade recommended, could similarly develop the ability to “frighten, scare, intimidate and disarm” the enemy and induce a state of shock and awe. Though “humanitarian considerations . . . cannot or should not be ignored” in such campaigns, Ullman and Wade rejected “the attempt to keep war ‘immaculate,’ at least in limiting collateral damage” and reminded their readers that “one point should not be forgotten. Above all, war is a nasty business or, as Sherman put it, ‘war is hell.’ ”
The willingness to “frighten, scare, intimidate and disarm” was an essential component of Sherman’s low-tech campaign of destruction, and it is possible to trace other continuities in the visions of perfect technological warfare that percolated through the U.S. military in the last decade of the century. In a 1989 article in the Marine Corps Gazette, the conservative military pundit William S. Lind argued that the U.S. military had entered a new era of “fourth-generation warfare” (4GW) that differed radically from a first-generation war like the Civil War. On the fourth-generation battlefield of the future, Lind argued, “the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. . . . The distinction between ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ may disappear,” and attacks on traditional military targets, such as airfields, communications facilities, power plants, and infrastructure would “become rarities because of their vulnerability,” while psychological operations would become “the dominant operational and strategic weapon in the form of media/information intervention,” to the point that “television news may become a more powerful operational weapon than armored divisions.”28
In 1995 Colonel Richard Szafranski, the chair of national military strategy at the Air War College, proposed an even more comprehensive model of information warfare, in which military force could be directed against the enemy’s “knowledge or beliefs” and “epistemology” in order to “influence adversary choices, and hence adversary behavior, without the adversary’s awareness that choices and behavior are being influenced.” This outcome could be achieved by “deception and disinformation, radioelectronic combat, propaganda, and the whole gamut of ‘psychological warfare’ or command and control warfare attacks against enemy combatants at the operational level,” which would make it possible to “subdue without fighting or to reduce the amount of violence required.”29
Sherman also referred to war as an “epistemology,” and his campaigns in the South had likewise been intended to change the “knowledge or beliefs” of the Confederacy by providing civilians new “information” to counter what it received through the Southern press. The Pentagon’s attempts at media management in the last decade of the twentieth century were motivated by a similar determination to ensure that coverage of its wars didn’t affect their outcome, at a time when war was subject to unprecedented international media scrutiny. Thus the military stage-managed press conferences, disseminated information only through specially selected reporters under the pool system, and placed promilitary pundits on chat shows and news programs.
From the military’s perspective, the need for such management was underlined by the collapse of the U.S. military mission in Somalia when the deaths of eighteen U.S. soldiers and more than five hundred Somalis in the botched arrest in Mogadishu that Somalis now call Ranger Day led to a domestic outcry that forced the Clinton administration to withdraw. Restricted, false, or demoralizing information may be a weapon of modern war, but it’s available to all, and weaker opponents can use it to compensate for lack of military strength, as the Pentagon discovered during America’s last war of the century.
Kosovo
In its objectives and in the way it was fought, NATO’s seventy-eight-day aerial campaign to force Serbia to withdraw from Kosovo in 1999 exemplified the new paradigm of “humanitarian war” and the emerging doctrine of responsibility to protect (R2P). Whereas Operation Desert Storm had been dictated by clear geostrategic considerations regarding the threat posed by Saddam Hussein to the world’s key oil reserves, the NATO intervention in Kosovo was presented as an attempt to prevent “genocide”—the brutal repression of the Kosovar Albanians by the remnant of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) in its counterinsurgency operations against the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
On March 18, 1999, members of the NATO Contact Group presented the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) with an ultimatum at the Château de Rambouillet in France, which called on Slobodan Milošević’s regime to withdraw Serbian security forces from Kosovo and replace them with a NATO peacekeeping force. Milošević refused to accept, and each side blamed the other for the collapse of negotiations. On March 24, the ultimatum expired, and NATO warplanes began bombing targets in Kosovo, Serbia, and Montenegro as part of Operation Allied Force. As in the Gulf War, the U.S. military played the leading role in a nineteen-member coalition commanded General Wesley Clark, the supreme allied commander Europe (SACEUR). Unlike the war against Iraq, however, many members of the coalition had strong reservations about the use of force in Kosovo, and political considerations resulted in a very different campaign. Initially the coalition believed that Serbia would come to terms quickly through a limited and tightly regulated bombing campaign against “enabling” military targets, such as air-defense systems, army barracks, and antiaircraft installations, just as the Bosnian Serbs had done during NATO’s Operation Deliberate Force in the autumn of 1995.
The ambivalence of some members of the coalition obliged a reluctant Clark to adopt a gradualist bombing strategy that harked back to the Vietnam War, a strategy that the U.S. military continued to regard as one of the reasons for losing the war. In order to keep collateral damage to a minimum, all bombing targets had to be approved by teams of lawyers, and particularly sensitive targets had to be personally approved by President Bill Clinton, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and President Jacques Chirac in order to reduce the possibility of “unintended consequences.” These constraints resulted in a bombing campaign of remarkable precision. On April 3, the Serbian dissident journalist Jasmina Tešanović watched NATO planes bomb the Ministry of the Interior and other targets within twenty yards of the largest maternity hospital in the Balkans without damaging it, and she marveled at the skill of the NATO pilots “responsible for hitting military targets without harming a single new-born baby.”30
Such precision was not always present, and the war was punctuated by incidents in which civilians were killed and wounded in attacks on targets in residential neighborhoods, and refugees became casualties during attacks on public transport. On April 13, a mistimed missile attack on a railway bridge hit the Belgrade–Salonika train near Leskovac, south of Belgrade, killing 10 passengers. On May 13, NATO planes killed up to 100 civilians in an attack on Serb positions in the village of Korisa in southern Kosovo. In the course of the war, between 90 and 150 civilians were killed by cluster bombs, each of which deploys 150 to 200 bomblets in patterns designed to destroy as much property and kill as many people as possible in the affected area.
The worst incident took place on May 16, when a cluster-bomb attack on an airfield in the city of Niš killed sixteen people and wounded sixty more. As in the Gulf War, these incidents were mostly due to operational and intelligence errors, but such mistakes became more likely as the list of targets widened. Despite the Bosnian Serbs’ murderous ethnic-cleansing operations under Milošević a few years earlier, NATO was unprepared for Serbia’s defiance and caught completely off balance by its ruthless expulsion of more than 90 percent of the Kosovar population into neighboring countries, which provoked an even worse humanitarian crisis than the one the bombing was intended to address.
By week three of the war, the absence of tangible gains prompted even the establishment journal The Economist to question the U.S. Defense Department’s “post-Gulf-war prestige” and “the doctrines of high-tech dominance that the Gulf war encouraged people to believe.” Faced with continued Serbian resilience and unwilling to mount a ground offensive, NATO intensified its effort with a bombing campaign based on the “four Ds”—“demonstrate, deter, damage, degrade.” At the beginning of the war, the NATO “Master Target File” identified 169 targets. By its end, 976 targets had been hit, including oil refineries, petroleum depots, road and rail bridges, factories, the electricity grid, and “crony” targets—businesses and resources closely related to the regime. In theory, bombing was intended to prevent the Serbian security forces from carrying out military operations in Kosovo and force its government to submit to the terms imposed at Rambouillet. However, because many NATO members were reluctant or unwilling to undertake a ground invasion, airpower increasingly became a weapon of intimidation directed against civilians.
Though air strikes did not target civilians directly and NATO pilots went to considerable lengths to avoid civilian casualties, the coercion of the Serbian government was increasingly dependent on the use of force to make ordinary Serbs feel the impact of the war. In her wartime diaries, Jasmina Tešanović vividly describes the terror of her children, friends, and neighbors during the NATO bombings of Belgrade as they faced blackouts, water and food shortages, and the constant threat of death experienced by all civilians in such circumstances. Within four weeks, fifty-nine bridges, nine major airports, and 80 percent of Serbia’s oil production facilities had been destroyed, in addition to 70 percent of its electricity grid.
On April 21, NATO attacked a new “military” target, using three cruise missiles to destroy the Belgrade headquarters of Radio Television of Serbia (RTS), run by Milošević’s wife, Mirjana Marković, killing sixteen journalists and technicians. The attack on Serbia’s television network reflected the coalition’s frustration at the Milošević regime’s careful control of the foreign media inside Yugoslavia and the media’s role in mobilizing Serbian and international opinion. In a subsequent examination of NATO’s failure to achieve “information dominance” in the war, U.S. Air Force Major Wayne A. Larsen argued that the Serbian television and radio network prolonged domestic resistance through its patriotic appeals to Serbian nationalism and its exploitation of “collateral damage incidents” for propaganda purposes.31
In Larsen’s estimation, these “defensive” information operations made the Serbian media network a legitimate object of “offensive” military force. The designation of a television and radio station as a military target of “fundamental military importance” received widespread international criticism, however, and was rejected by Human Rights Watch, which concluded that “the purpose of the attack . . . seems to have been more psychological harassment of the civilian population than to obtain direct military effect.”32 Such harassment was always an implicit objective of the air campaign. By the time the war ended, more than a hundred thousand Serbs were out of work as a result of the bombing of factories, infrastructure, and transportation links, and Belgrade and many other cities were without water and electricity. Had the war continued, the destruction would have been escalated and widened still further, and so would its impact on the civilian population. On June 10, however, Serbia capitulated and accepted most of the conditions in the Rambouillet ultimatum, including the deployment of an international peacekeeping force in Kosovo.
The extent to which Serbia’s acquiescence was due to the fear of a ground invasion and pressure from its ally Russia are questions that have never been resolved. But NATO had achieved its objectives with no combat casualties on its own side and the loss of only two U.S. soldiers in a helicopter accident. Serbian military casualties have been estimated at between 5,000 and 10,000, while some 500 civilians were killed and 6,000 wounded. In Kosovo, 4,300 bodies of Kosovar civilians were exhumed by 2001, most of whom had been killed during the expulsions that followed the outbreak of war. In its after-action report, NATO hailed this outcome as a triumphant vindication of “the most precise and lowest-collateral-damage air campaign in history.”33 Some military experts, like the British historian John Keegan, heralded the advent of a new era of warfare in which wars could be won entirely from the air. Subsequent estimations have questioned such triumphalism. In his own account of the war, Wesley Clark described Operation Allied Force as a very different campaign from the Napoleonic “nation-state against nation-state” wars and the targeting of civilians in World War II.34 Because it was successfully conducted in the glare of the Internet, faxes, and satellite television, Clark asserted that Kosovo epitomized a new form of “modern war” that was “limited, carefully constrained in geography, scope, weaponry, and effects.”
A former critic of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign, Clark argued that the road to “compellence” in war lay through the use of “decisive force” rather than “failed gradualism.” He described Operation Allied Force as a form of “coercive diplomacy” that violated all the “principles of war” imbibed in American military academies. It was characterized by “extraordinary concern for military losses, on all sides. Even accidental damage to civilian property was carefully considered.” These claims have not been universally accepted. In 2000 a Newsweek investigation accused the Pentagon of deliberately exaggerating the number of Serbian military targets during the war and discounting the impact of bombing on the civilian population. In Newsweek’s estimation, “Air power was effective in the Kosovo war not against military targets but against civilian ones. Military planners do not like to talk frankly about terror-bombing civilians (‘strategic targeting’ is the preferred euphemism), but what got Milošević’s attention was turning out the lights in downtown Belgrade.”35
Despite the relatively low casualty numbers and the humanitarian pretensions, therefore, NATO’s “fight for justice over genocide,” as Secretary of State William Cohen described it, once again devolved into a war that was waged not just against the Serbian government and armed forces but against the population that supported or tolerated it. In this war, as in so many of its predecessors, these “psychological” objectives relied on the threat of continual escalation. And from NATO’s point of view, it was fortunate that Milošević capitulated when he did—otherwise the seductive fiction that a war could be fought for humanitarian reasons and with humanitarian methods would have been even more difficult to sustain than it actually was.