Another public debate over the use of air power, another round of commentators and Twitter-mobs worrying about collateral damage and dead women and children, some saying that only 'boots on the ground' can get right in to terminate the enemy without a general bloodbath. The MoD media office must be busy enough already steering press coverage in its desired direction, but they've obviously felt it necessary to publish under their own cover a
statement on how careful our aircrews are, how precise and controlled the weapon effects are, etc. This is good stuff.
However, I think that advocates of air power need to take a more robust stance and challenge more directly the enduring link in the public consciousness between air strikes and collateral damage, as if air power is somehow inherently less discriminate than other forms of military force. Plenty of material to build such a case is available in the series of UN reports on civilian casualties in Afghanistan (
2015 midyear report here and others easily Google-able under "UN Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict Report"). Taking one example from the 2014 report:
it is pretty obvious that ground war is far, far worse for civilians than air strikes. Even if our ground troops cause few casualties themselves (as was the case in Afghanistan) the use of asymmetric tactics against them, including IEDs, rockets, mortars, suicide bombs and urban ambushes, creates far more suffering than anything air power has managed in recent times. I can only conclude that the negative public sentiment towards air strikes derives from the fact that when air strikes go wrong, they can go REALLY wrong, as in the Kunduz hospital attack, the oil tanker strike in Afghanistan some years ago, and a goodly number of (possibly apocryphal) wedding parties. Events such as these certainly grab the headlines, but our 'talking heads' should make more of an effort to point out that the continuous drip-drip of casualties of land warfare makes it, in the long run, far from a discriminate option. Not to do down land forces in any way - but to try to put some perspective into and take some emotion out of the debate that always emerges at times like these.
A second chart from Afghanistan:
can be used to make a moral case that we should worry less about causing civilian casualties ourselves, and worry more about defeating the enemy quickly before he causes a far greater number. A tricky case to make, for sure, but the obsession with "zero civilian casualties" may not always be the morally-defensible cause that it seems on first sight.
Thoughts?