Chuck Spinney, one of the Boyd Acolytes, discusses the problems of a strategic bombing campaign on Iran.
Though he doesn’t say the words he is criticizing the EBO logic that dates back to Douhet. I think it is a solid point. To get the other side of the argument see John Robb’s year-and-a-half old post Collapsing Iran. Note that both of these gentlemen — while representing opposite sides of the EBO debate — are former airmen.
via Zenpundit’s snazzy new site zenpundit.com
Get the RSS
Comments to this entry
Dan tdaxp
November 26, 2007
1:30 pm
Arcane
November 28, 2007
5:31 am
First of all, I hate to do this, but the Boyd "acolytes" that write for D-N-I are sort of kooks and the site is dominated by isolationist and anti-interventionist editors, so anything you see on there is going to follow their little party line (basically meaning that Boyd's theories are molded to fit their ideology).
Secondly, 1,500 "aim points" is not a very high level of "magnitude" as the author is implying; 1,500 targets could be destroyed, with a mixture of cruise missiles and sustained precision bombing operations, in less than a week.
Third, the purpose of this campaign would not be "strategic bombing" with the intent to destroy the enemy's "will to resist." It is meant at destroying specific sites and capabilities, and nothing more. The number of "aim points" would only proliferate to the extent that additional sites are discovered, but in no way is precision bombing, or the intent of the planners of this operations it seems, ever intended to destroy the enemy's "will to resist."
Fourth, he cites numerous examples of strategic bombing failures, but he obviously has done little research as to whether or not they were actually failures. For example, he mentions the "combined bomber offensive against Germany," which is cited by many anti-bombing advocates as a failure due to the fact that even as bombing increased from 1942-45, German war production quadrupled from 1942-44. What is left out is that this was not due to a failure of the bombing, which largely succeeded in destroying Germany's capability to build Germany's more sophisticated weapons systems, but due to the appointment of Albert Speer as the new head of war production; he did numerous things to increase output, such as deregulating German markets, allowing women into the workforce, and utilizing large amounts of slave labor. Another example he mentions is Rolling Thunder, but as any military theorist knows that was a failure largely due to a lack of clear objectives and objective targeting decisions (targeting was subjected to the chaos that is politics as civilian politicians largely took control of it and priorities changed rapidly and there was an unwillingness to attack North Vietnamese systems). This was remedied in Linebacker I and Linebacker II, which were both huge successes and go unmentioned by Spinney (like I said earlier, the stuff on that site is largely dominated by ideology). I won't attack his other examples because this is already getting too long and those would require much more detail.
Fifth, Spinney continues to separate himself from reality with the idea that the 1,500 "aim points" are part of a doctrine of attrition. Quite the opposite, what we are doing with Iran now is attrition, ie, hoping that by cutting off some trade it'll somehow slow Iran down long enough for Iran to eventually collapse in on itself. If anything, bombing is a move away from attrition.
And, of course, at the end he just can't keep his anti-interventionist tendencies capped for even one article about "bombing yet another Islamic country that had nothing to do with 9-11, in the seething caldron of Southwest Asia."
Words to the wise: be skeptical about everything written on D-N-I.
Arcane
November 28, 2007
5:43 am
Vince P
November 30, 2007
9:25 am