As the armor and artillery attack Fallujah, few observers of that conflict can doubt that the assault will cost hundreds if not thousands of civilian casualties. As the preparations mounted, public opinion was softened by an artillery bombardment of lies. The American forces talk about precision bombing, but we should discount it. A 500-pound bomb that will take off a man’s head with shrapnel at 200 yards is not a precision weapon. The hospital in Fallujah that lies in ruins is a product of that same precision bombing. What we are looking at is a city being stamped into the ground, as brutal and as hard as a good kicking in a Detroit alley.
The American Army has an unenviable reputation for brutality and the crushing use of force. If we are to believe observers, the whole Fallujah problem kicked off with the indiscriminate use of firepower by the 82nd Airborne in killing 13 unarmed protesters in Fallujah. Retaliations followed, and so now the technological might and firepower of the U.S. Army and Air Force are delivering the coup de grace.
How did the Americans manage to get this awful reputation? Ironically, it is through the application of a doctrine designed to save lives, a doctrine that dates back as far the American Civil War and World War I. It was a doctrine that kept Americans alive when their forefathers died on the battlefield. It is a doctrine based on firepower.
The antique battles of the American Civil War seem so remote to us now that we scarcely give them a thought. But even in human terms, they were not that long ago. The last Confederate widow died this year at the age of 98. The conflicts of what was America’s greatest war are reenacted and written about to this day. But the casualty lists and the memorials make for sobering viewing. Nearly one million Americans were killed or wounded in a war that lasted four years and extracted a huge toll on a population that numbered just over thirty million in 1860.
One of the culprits was an innocuous piece of lead called the Minie ball. Not a ball, but a conical bullet invented by Captain Minie in 1849, the Minie ball had a hollow base that allowed the bullet to expand and grip the rifling of the barrel. No longer were muskets smoke and thunder machines that delivered goodies to an accurate distance of only 50 yards. Suddenly the musket evolved into the rifle, accurate at 300 yards and with a punch that would leave a hole as big as a fist in a man’s belly.
As usual, military thinking was a step behind technology. Generals trained at West Point in manuals written for the wars of Napoleon could not grasp that the tactics of bayonet assault would wither in the face of the vastly improved firepower available to the defense. In Pickett’s charge, the Confederates lost 60 percent of their attacking force in a futile attempt to break the Union line in a Napoleonic charge. Fifty years later, the British lost more men in one day on the Somme than the Americans lost in the all of Vietnam, sending brave men against bullets.
It was a lesson that the American military never forgot. They summarized it in a neat maxim: “Never send in a man where you can send in a shell.” Thus was born the doctrine of overwhelming firepower; a doctrine that was designed to save lives, but is now taking them.
The Americans carried this doctrine into WWII. Faced with a suicidally determined Japanese enemy, dug in to bunkers along a whole series of fortified islands across the Pacific, the American army gave a demonstration of exactly what they meant by firepower. Massive aerial and naval bombardments prefaced any infantry assault. These punishing barrages eliminated much enemy resistance. Many Japanese never got to see an advancing American; they were entombed in their bunkers and gun emplacements.
Fast forward a generation to the Vietnam war. The same tactics were applied through napalm, carpet bombing, and aerial gunships. But the results were more mixed, because the insurgents were mixed with the native civilian population. The doctrine of firepower led the Americans to raze entire villages in response to a lone sniper. Inhabited areas were fire-bombed to the ground to exterminate one platoon. Slowly the doctrine of “Never send in a man where you can send in a shell” became a catchall for the indiscriminate use of firepower and disregard for civilian life that has come to characterize the American military.
And so we come to Fallujah today, where that same formula is being applied with tragic results. Even more than Vietnam, this is a civilian war. A vast military machine, built to crush Cold War armies and founded on the lessons of the 19th century, is poised to grind up a city of lightly armed defenders with women and children. From the ashes of the death agony of Fallujah will come the Hydra’s teeth of a new generation of terrorists, orphaned by the ordnance of the United States.
There is another way. It is founded on talk and dialogue. It is conducted by diplomats, and it is guarded by professional soldiers who are trained in the selective use of force. It was used by the British in Northern Ireland. It is slow and boring and often frustrating. But it saves lives and American politicians and soldiers need to learn it.
