Slaughter

Posted on February 10, 2003    Posted by John Scalzi      3 Comments

In the e-mail on Friday, an e-mail from a stranger (but not spam) with a link to a video of an AC-130 gunship taking out a suspected Al Qaeda/Taliban holdout in Afghanistan. Writes the correspondent:

“This video shows one – *ONE* – AC-130 gunship destroying an entire Taliban installation suspected of harboring members of al-Qaeda. I was for the war in Afghanistan, and was initially for the war with Iraq. This video changed my mind, because it demonstrates both the unbelievable power of our armed forces and the ruthlessness of same. In several instances running men blown to [sic] their feet by explosions are visually inspected to see if they are dead. If they move, they’re hit with another round from either the 40mm Gatling Cannon or the 55mm Howitzer that each AC-130 carries on board.

I’m not trying to proselytize you, just give you food for thought. Because any war with Iraq will be a massacre, and here’s the proof.”

I watched the video, which as advertised shows a collection of buildings, vehicles and people being turned into small chunks by the aforementioned AC-130 gunship (the video also features audio of the crew going about its task), but I didn’t have the same reaction as my correspondent. He was horrified at the amount of devastation a single plane could visit on multiple targets (and, I assume, specifically, multiple people). I, on the other hand, looked at the ratio of enemy killed and material damage caused the enemy versus the ratio of death/damage to our troops and equipment in this exchange. The Taliban and Al Qaeda experienced it all; ours troops experienced none. This is a very good ratio.

Let’s leave aside the philosophical question of whether war (any war, or, if you choose, the war we will most likely be conducting within a few weeks) is a moral and correct thing to do, and instead take as a given that two antagonists will soon pit themselves against each other in a contest to beat the hell out of each other, and that one of those antagonists happens to be the US, and therefore our military — with its constituent of American sons, daughters, wives, husbands, fathers, mothers and friends — is presented to take the field. It is my opinion that this military should be presented with every technological and material advantage possible to achieve its objectives as quickly as possible and with as little loss of life as possible.

An AC-130 gunship, as an example, is an excellent way to achieve these objectives: It has a relatively small crew (13) and can project a substantial amount of force (read: it can blow up a lot of things) that would otherwise have to be provided by a much larger number of infantry and equipment. I don’t think anyone is under the impression that a US infantry assault of an Al Qaeda/Taliban installation would have come away with no casualties of any sort; our military was almost certainly better armed and better equipped than the enemy was in this case, but it doesn’t take much brains to pull a trigger, and the number of troops required to do the same job as an AC-130 would have presented a lot of opportunities for targets.

An AC-130 doesn’t fly without risk — from what I know of it, it’s a slow-moving bird, and it’s not likely to be used if the enemy has substantial and successful air defenses — but it seems better able to do a number of tasks that would otherwise fall those with a better chance of getting a bullet in the gut.

Those of us who get our sense of military honor from the Klingons or the 12th Century may grumble at the lack of face-to-face time our men and women have with the people they will have to kill, but I think that’s missing the point of a war. We don’t wage wars (or, at least, shouldn’t) because we want the members of our military to generate honor by killing another soldier mano a mano. We go to war because we have objectives to achieve and (hopefully) we’ve exhausted other methods of achieving them. That being the case, let’s achieve the objectives as quickly as possible, and one of the best ways to do that is utterly overmatch the enemy’s military capability. If you can make it so that your enemy is always bringing a knife to a gunfight, the sooner the gunfights can be over.

I think one of the major objections to the warfare at arm’s length that the US has the option of performing is that it’s dehumanizing — that if you never see the people you’re dropping bombs on, you don’t think of them as human. And I’ll concede that it’s probably easier to kill someone from a few thousand feet up than from a few yards away. But I would also suggest that one of the great dehumanizing agents in history is protracted war — not just for soldiers, who are in the circumstance of having to kill other humans as their job for long stretches of their life, although that’s not an inconsiderable factor — but also to the societies that are in those wars. People in warrior societies don’t spend much time seeing members of other societies as people, particularly those with whom they are at war.

The United States, whatever else is wrong with it, is based on the premise of human equality — the shorter the war, the less time we have to pretzel ourselves against our humanizing inclinations. I’d rather those in our military have an easier time of killing the enemy quickly than our entire society having a harder time seeing an enemy as fundamentally human.

(While we’re on that, I’d make a note that the AC-130 gunship crew in the video was under strict orders not to destroy one specific building — the one identified as a mosque. And so while it destroyed everything (and everyone) else, that building remained standing after the assault.

Now, one can reasonably ask about the utility of leaving a mosque standing when one is blowing up those who would attend it, but I suspect the utility is twofold — one, to remind those on the ground that we’re not blowing them up because they’re Muslim, but that we’re blowing them up because they’re terrorists, and two, as a piece of psychological theater, it’s effective to leave one building standing amid the rubble to point out the fact that, yes, we can hit whatever we want — and not hit whatever we want, too.

Both of these provide interesting proof of American humanism, in that a) you don’t leave sub-humans recourse to their Gods, and b) you don’t waste time and effort psyching out people you’re planning to eradicate completely.)

I’d still be very pleased not to have a war in Iraq, but I don’t think that such a desire is realistic at this point. That being the case, I want the war to be quick and I want it to be as lopsided as humanly possible. I don’t want Iraqi soldiers dead (I’ll be very happy to see them surrender in droves, a la Gulf War I), but if the Iraqi soldiers decide they’re going to fight, I want them taken out of commission as quickly as possible, so that as few as our people as possible find themselves on the wrong side of a bullet. If a display of overwhelming firepower convinces Iraqis to cave, that’s great. If it doesn’t, that’s fine, too, because very quickly what threat they represent will be dealt with. The sooner it’s over, the better off we’ll all be.

That’s why the AC-130 doesn’t fill me with horror. If anything, it gives a sense of relief, in that it’s an indication that we have a reasonable chance of getting this war done quick, and getting our people out of harm — which also means the Iraqi conscripts and civilians will be out of harm’s way as well.

I don’t think it’ll be a massacre. A society that leaves mosques standing isn’t interested in indiscriminate killing. I just think it’ll be fast. As far as wars go, that’s not a bad way to go.