Moral Courage

[Occhidiangela]

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But a pilot is not a fireman. Their job is to kill people, and to do so in a way that is known to kill lots of people you didn't intend to, even given extreme skill and the most sophisticated weaponry.

What I'm wondering is how people get this conviction that what they're doing is "right", not only in the sense that it is towards some nebulously moral objective, but is worth the known problems of killing and maiming people who didn't have very much at all to do with the war. I can understand how one might think fighting on the ground is worthwhile, where you're unlikely to kill too many things that you didn't intend to. But air warfare is much worse for civilian casualties. That's even discounting terror bombing, which I wonder how anyone at all manages.

Jester
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Jester:

To answer two posts in one.

Shock and Awe. Bah. A silly name for a standard method of attacking targets from the air. Had unguided munitions been used, much of Bagdad would be rubble. Glad it isn't. That would have been a real tragedy.

In a sick irony, car bombers in the past year and a half have spread the rubble plantations just fine on their own: the death of a thousand cuts. I found interesting the protrayal of that "Shock and Awe" episode via the media. A lot of long range shots of big explosions. Peter Arnett's use of the term "Mushroom Clouds." An explicit slice of a picture was being painted, with a purpose. And on the Official Rhetoric side, it appeared to many that a lot of smack was being talked. Wasted rhetoric.

No matter how it was said, quite a few things went "boom." Quite a few people died. Quite a few SAM's fired at Coalition aircraft fell back to earth, and landed in random places, with occasionally lethal effects. Gee, it is and was a war. War kills things. The war is not over. Someone has chosen to carry it forward, for their own ends, into a civil war. So, we fight them, rather than Saddam's Army. Jester, I think you and I will agree that it ain't pretty. It is ugly. (PS: Are you familiar with the writings of Chris Hedges? Very interesting commentary on war, from an on the ground correspondent's perspective. He got sick of it.)

What you might find remarkable is how little of Baghdad suffered any bomb damage during that air operation. Bagdad is a pretty big city. A few areas, and a bunch of Saddam's big bloody palaces (most of which are separated from built up areas by a park or other geogrpaphic buffer) took considerable damage. Due to weapons fusing, most of the bombs blew Up and not Out. That localized damage to some extent, but flying concrete and glass are still going to hit thngs and hurt people. The laws of Physics shall not be ignored. Given the tonnage that was dropped, I am still struck by how little of Bagdad suffered bomb damage.

As to your other points . . .

Point 1. Correct, a pilot is not a fireman, not sure why you offered that appleas and oranges. The primary purpose of an attack pilot, say in a CF-18, is to put weapons on targets in combat. He has many other tasks, however, to include scouting, reconaissance, armed reconaissance, etc. The fact that air attack is still being used as a method when "the big battlefield war" phase has ended is worthy of consideration. Reality? Urban warfare is ugly. Urban guerilla warfare is ugly. (Ask anyone who lives in Spain, after the years of ETA playing their games.) Part of what I saw going on in Falluljah, before the operation recently that "swept most of the foreign fighters from that city (really?) was a strange form of seige warfare imbedded in "normal life." One without the nicely drawn lines of Vauban's time.

Point 2. You appear to dwell on failure, and ignore that far more often than not, that pilot does indeed get it right. You also apear not to understand that on a vast majority of missions, particularly since May 2003, nothing falls from the sky. Nothing. On an enormous number of missions, far greater than on missions where bombs drop, a "low pass" or "Show of force" or "show of presence" defuses a tense situation on the ground, or stops a firefight. I saw this every day when I was over there. I am not surprised you do not see it, it is not often reported in the open press. Pilots do all of those missions as well.

More simply, to answer your question: Why do pilots do what they do? So that fewer people on their side die in combat. Simple. That is a positive purpose.

Being a victim of partial information can lead to a failure in reasoning: Your position seems to be that "If one error is made on a mission here and there, all or most of them must make lethal errors." That is nonsense. Risks of error are weighed on every attack decision, sometimes causing the bombs to stay on the rails. I saw that every week: the term of art is "Weapons Tight." But of course, the layman won't see that. It is not reported.

The other problem I have with your train of thought is: how far are you going to take your apparent lack of tolerance for error? "If it can't be done perfectly, don't do it at all." That is where your commentary appears to be headed. No one can afford that weapon, that plane, that sensor suite, that allows perefection. It has not been built yet, I don't care what the air craft and weapons manufacturers claim. No weapon has a Pk/Phit of 1.0. No weapons system has a success probability of 1.0.

I will guess, from your previous professions of pacifism, that you ask: why use force at all? I will point out to you that most of the warriors ask the same thing . . . up until the day the whistle blows and the shooting starts. Once the shooting stops, the warrior fulfills his role. That is why he, or she, is there.

Point 3. What's with the red herring in re terror bombing? Not a method currently in use, at least, not by our people. Of course, to anyone who is on the ground, friend or foe, when a bomb drops nearby with no warning, it is frightening as hell. Lethal too.

A few of your countrymen certainly knew that shock, a few nanoseconds before they got hit by "friendly fire" a few years back in AFghanistan. (Murphy's Law of Combat: Friendly Fire . . . isn't.)

Occhi