IraqSlogger: Fighting an Insurgency With F-16s

IraqSlogger has a great post entitled 'Fighting an Insurgency with F-16s: Need to Minimize Collateral Damage Leads to Tough Choices'. It gives some real insight on how limiting collateral damages and respecting IHL can in fact 'complicate' war-fighting. Have copied out the text from Michael Yon's observatino of watching an F-16 and a Shadow circling a house where an insurgent ran after shooting a gun at US forces:

'The F-16 and Shadow both beamed down live images of the house where the terrorists had hidden after firing on US forces. Now was option time. Which weapon to use? There were so many choices: mortars, missiles, and cannons of various sorts, among others. With the enemy hiding in the building, an F-16 and a Shadow orbiting in the black above, both peering down on thermal mode, the Battle Captain asked the Air Force experts,(the JTACs) what weapons the F-16 was carrying. As a JTAC started ticking off a long list, I was thinking, “How in the world to do those little jets carry all that?” In fact, I believe they were reading down the list for two jets flying in the same package. They carry a mixture of weapons cross loaded between the jets so that they will have the black magic needed for a likely situation.
In addition to the F-16’s bombs of various sorts, there was the MLRS rocket system dozens of miles away that had been precisely punching rockets through Baqubah rooftops for days. The MLRS had been flattening buildings that were rigged as giant bombs. There were the 155mm cannons on this base that can hit and flatten anything in Baqubah and beyond. The Apache helicopters could spin up with their rockets and cannons. Infantrymen could just roll in. Or tanks. Or Bradleys. Or Strykers. Even Humvees. The idea was to use just the amount of force to kill the enemy fighters, but leave everyone in the surrounds unscathed, if possible. If that was not possible, often they would simply not fire, but other times they would. Judgment call.

By about 0400, the Battle Captain had decided to use 120mm mortars. As a reference, if a 120mm were to land on a car, the car would be obliterated, but a 120mm would not be enough to flatten a decent house. The first round was shot, and the explosion left a black-hot thermal cloud on the two video screens. The impact looked hundreds of yards off target. Successive shots did not hone it, but got worse. It was starting to look like a turkey shoot, so the Battle Captain ordered the mortars to cease fire and refused to consider using the mortars again for that mission.

They discussed dropping a JDAM (a special type of bomb from one of the jets), but were worried about CD (collateral damage). The idea of a strafe run came up but that would likely cause even more CD, and so that idea was also nixed. Things sure look different from the comfort and safety of the TOC, even though the TOC is still so close to the battlefield that often the explosions can be felt from there. Still it’s like being a thousand miles away by comparison to being with the infantry in the dark and danger. (TOCs do get hit by rockets or mortars sometimes.)

The MLRS rockets and JDAMs were good enough to actually hit buried IEDs, and could easily take the house. The F-16 was carrying at least one concrete bomb—literally, just a bomb made from concrete, like throwing boulders at people—but a JTAC said, “We are not dropping a concrete bomb.” For some reason he didn’t want to just throw a rock. Personally, I don’t like to see bombs explode because it means we are still at war. But a strange feeling came over me: I wanted to see the F-16 drop a boulder on the people that shot at our guys. I knew if the rock hit them, the neighbors would be fine.

While they were discussing how best to kill the guys, the F-16 was running low on fuel. The jets flew low in a show of force and rumbled away. I walked to breakfast at 0515 while they were still plotting. I have no idea if they killed them and if they did, what method they finally settled on. But I know that when there is that kind of careful deliberation in the TOC, combined with excellent combat soldiers on the streets, (the low number of civilian casualties) that otherwise would seem unbelievable are believable.'

Research- US Marines unlikely to report civilian abuse -study

Some interesting statistical data on the percentage of US soldiers deployed in Iraq. The Pentagon report stated that only 40% of Marines and 55% of Army soldiers would a report a fellow serviceman for killing or injuring an innocent Iraqi. The survey found increasing rates of mental health problems for troops on extended or multiple deployments.

There have been some interesting pieces on the relationship between the prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib and a sharp rise in scenes of torture on prime time television. The prime culprit is the Fox show 24, where hero Jack Bauer is regularly torturing, terrorists, friends and even US officials, all justified by a patriotic sense of 'the end justifies the means'. While we can't make a scientific link, the same Pentagon survey found that over one-third of soldiers and Marines believe torture should be allowed to elicit information that could save the lives of American troops or gain knowledge about Iraqi insurgents. Art imitates reality- or vice-versa?

Soldiers are no longer the key to winning conflicts

A good article that unpacks the changing nature of the battlefield and the rationale of using force.

The punchline was very much oriented around the importance- and challenge- of creating alliances around legitimate military objectives:

'The Iraq war and Israel's wars with Hamas and Hezbollah show the limits of what military power can achieve, as well as vindicate diplomacy and conflict resolution. When it comes to tackling complex political and cultural conflicts, forging international and regional alliances around a legitimate objective is more important than sheer military capacity.'

Fixing the collateral damage

This editorial piece in IHL starts off well:

ISAF's chief spokesman, Brigadier Richard Nugee, recently admitted: "The single thing that we have done wrong and that we are striving extremely hard to improve on is killing innocent civilians."

The point of the article is a good one, and doesn't escape the reader: gosh, but NATO really has to win the hearts-and-minds of the population over. Oddly, the subtext to the article is a bit 'off': avoid killing civilians, it suggests, as it's simply bad press, poor marketing for the success of our military effort. What about IHL? 'War crimes'?

Holewinski unpacks the issue competently, going further to understand why key states aren't willing to do more even for those civilians that do become collateral damage. She doesn't find more convincing answers there, either. Her conclusion?

'This is a war you can't win unless you win the people.'

Afghanistan: US Should Investigate Civilian Deaths

Military events in Afghanistan have prompted calls for investigations, following the deaths of civilians caught in crossfire.

On March 4, insurgents in a civilian van carried out a suicide bomb attack on a US military convoy on the Jalalabad highway in eastern Nangarhar province; reports suggest that US forces shot indiscriminately at civilian vehicles and pedestrians as they sped away, with 8-16 killed and 25 wounded.

In the second incident, Afghan officials announced that 9 civilians had been killed after a NATO airstrike linked to skirmishes between US forces and insurgents.


HRW made an interesting IHL-based argument:
"Suicide bombers in Afghanistan regularly pose as civilians, but that doesn't give coalition forces carte blanche to respond with indiscriminate fire," said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "The fact that the insurgents violate the laws of war doesn't absolve the US and its allies of the need to observe them."

'Human Rights Watch said that the US military should ensure that meaningful investigations take place in both cases. Appropriate action, including disciplinary measures and prosecution, should be undertaken as warranted. Human Rights Watch welcomed the Afghan government's intention to participate in these investigations.'

On 06 March, hundreds of Afghans protested the killings in eastern Afghanistan, while NATO launched a major southern offensive called Operation Achilles, said to target Taliban and narco-traffickers.

Nearly 800 Iraq Contractors Killed

It might seem a bit tangential to the question of civil-military relations, but the issue of outsourcing military tasks to civilian organizations is one germane to the issue. Firstly, the scale of outsourcing is simply astounding:

"The U.S. has outsourced so many war and reconstruction duties that there are almost as many contractors (120,000) as U.S. troops (135,000) in the war zone."

In this description, we have a huge group of people, largely grouped as Private Security/Military Companies (PSC/PMC) undertaking both military and civilian tasks. Given that they are deployed with and without uniforms (often the same as their employer's national armed forces) and with and without guns, it becomes increasingly difficult for combatants to discern who is a legitimate military target, and who is 'just another armed civilian contractor'....

The article is quite clear of one key advantage of using such contractors- their deaths are not included in the official body counts. It should be underlined that this is the case not only for the military, but also for humanitarian organizations.

Suicide bomb wounds 6 US soldiers in Afghan hospital

In an earlier posting we saw the appeal to insurgents and Coalition forces in Iraq to avoid compromising the civilian character of hospitals and medical centres. In this article, we find an interesting example from Afghanistan where US soldiers in an Afghan hospital are wounded by a suicide bomber disguised as a doctor.

IRAQ: Armed groups occupying hospitals and kidnapping doctors

A more exceptional example of the relationship between humanitarian and military actors in this story from Reuters AlertNet. Exceptional in that humanitarian actors were using IHL in their dialogue with multinational armed forces, and not limited to questions of coordination.

The NGO Coordinating Committee in Iraq (NCCI) and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI) made appeals to Coalition Forces and Insurgents to respect the neutral, civilian character of hospitals in Iraq.

Not surprisingly, the presence of arms carriers around hospitals in Iraq attracts attacks, and as such keeps civilians from having access to medical care. For medical staff, there is the risk of being coerced into providing treatment to combatants, of being kidnapped, or accused of collusion by the opposing forces.