Marvin Gandall wrote:
>
> I'm not sure it did differentiate. In fact, I think it was a distillation of
> experience from the Gulf War. Harlan Ullman and his co-author, James Wade, a
> former defence undersecretary, brought together a group of staff and field
> commanders from Gulf I and published their theory on the basis of those
> discussions. This was, of course, before Kosovo. Anyway, as you know,
> leapfrogging over the enemy's armies to terror bomb civilians in cities and
> provoke regime change is not really new doctrine; it begins with the
> development of air power in WW I. The advent of precision weapons, as you
> note, does promise to reduce the number of civilian casualties, but at the
> same time it probably makes it easier for the US to coerce populations by
> threatening to ("humanely") destroy overnight the entire economic edifice
> they built over generations.
The military, like journalists, continuously invents new phrases for standard material. It the Russian accounts of the fighting around Basra are accurate, we are seeing the results of 80 years of Air Force determination that it will be used only for terrorist purposes, and its consequent incompetence at front line tactical support.
During the Normandy invasion, they sent over a huge armada of B-17s to support the breakout. The bombers released their bomgs 1000 yards prematurely, slaughtering a large number of U.S. troops.
Probably the fate of Basra is foreseen in the following poem by Bryan Floyd, who served with the marines in Vietnam:
CORPORAL CHARLES CHUNGTU, U.S.M.C.
This is what the war ended up being about:
we would find a V.C. village,
and if we could not capture it
or clear it of Cong,
we called for the jets.
The jets would come in, low and terrible,
sweeping down, and screaming,
in their first pass over the village.
Then they would return, droppping their first bombs
that flattened the huts to rubble and debris.
And then the jets would sweep back again
and drop more bombs
that blew the rubble and debris
to dust and ashes.
And then the jets would come back once again,
in a last pass, this time to drop napalm
that burned the dust and ashes to just nothing.
Then the village
that was not a village any more
was our village.
Incidentally, during the first Gulf War there was the same vacuous chatter about smart bombs, etc. that we are seeing on this list now. It is almost certain that they are "smart" in ways not essentially different from the jets in Floyd's poem.
Carrol