Michael Barone in US News on bombs gone astray.
What is remarkable about American precision bombing is that it works as well as it does. Since the Vietnam War, our military has developed laser-guided weapons that home in on targets with remarkable, though not total, accuracy. In the old days, something on the order of 90 percent of bombs missed their targets. Today, something on the order of 90 percent hit them. That means that we can inflict militarily significant damage nine times as great with the same quantity of explosives. And in the process, we reduce civilian casualties and collateral damage by a similar order of magnitude. This is a great triumph of American ingenuity.
What is newsworthy is not that there are still occasional civilian casualties. What is newsworthy is that so many bombs hit their targets. This is the story the news media should tell, while pointing out that accuracy is still less than 100 percent.
There’s a reason why huge flights of bombers were sent over German industrial targets in WWII. It’s because it took that many — and sometimes multiple visits by them — to knock out factories, rail yards, etc., because the accuracy was so poor. Or why the Brits, driven to night bombing because of casualties, preferred to use incendiaries, dropped when a city’s lights appeared.
Ironically, Pentagon “See how whiz-bang we are, so won’t you appropriate more money for us?” PR has made the American public appalled at anything less than perfection, so that when civilians are hit, it is at best a sign of American recklessness, at worst a sign of American genocide.
Virginia Postrel, commenting on this story on 11/2, notes:
In fact, the operation in Afghanistan is not primarily retaliatory. If retaliation were the goal, it could be accomplished far more quickly, with no concern for precision. Instead, we are embarked on a war to eliminate an ongoing threat before it can become much deadlier. That is a trickier undertaking.
Finally, it’s worth noting that the civilian casualties on September 11 were achieved with nearly 100 percent accuracy. They were intended. The civilians murdered were not “collateral damage.” They were the targets. The only exception to the terrorists’ 100 percent accuracy was Flight 93’s crash in Pennsylvania, which caused fewer casualties than intended.
She also notes in an 11/1 post:
I think the American people, and the world, need to see Ground Zero—the way it really looks, not the distant, sanitized version for TV and tourists. They tell us they don’t show us out of respect for the families of the thousands of people who were crushed, pulverized, or blown to bits. Maybe they’re right, but if it was me, or my loved ones, I would want the world to see the slaughter of the innocents. Now you turn on CNN and see people-in-the-street saying George Bush is wrong to call the perpetrators of this massacre “evil doers,” because that phrase is so black-and-white, so biblical and judgmental. So uncool, so unsophisticated, so earnest. So true.
(Via Dynamist)