The Spoils of War

Power, Profit and the American War Machine

Andrew Cockburn

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839763663
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Impérialisme

Fully updated from the original edition. As the retreat from Kabul shows, America goes to war not to bring democracy, or glory, but in the pursuit of profit. In The Spoils of War, leading Washington reporter, Andrew Cockburn, reveals the extent of the rot that stretches from the Pentagon and the White House, to Wall St and Silicon Valley.The American war machine can only be understood in terms of the "private passions" and "interests" of those who control it - principally a passionate interest in money. Thus, as he witheringly reports, Washington expanded NATO to satisfy an arms manufacturer's urgent financial requirements; the U.S. Navy's Pacific fleet deployments were for years dictated by a corrupt contractor who bribed high-ranking officers with cash and prostitutes; senior marine commanders agreed to a troop surge in Afghanistan in 2017 "because it will do us good at budget time."Based on years of wide-ranging research, Cockburn lays bare the ugly reality of the largest military machine in history: squalid, and at the same time terrifyingly dangerous.

PART I

Warfare

1

Tunnel Vision

February 2014

An Afghan farm family were slaughtered as they brought their animals in for the night; one tragedy among millions. But the deaths of Shafiullah and his wife and children reveal much about America’s way of war, to which reality is always an irritant.

Early on the evening of May 26, 2012, an instructive hourlong radio conversation attracted a growing audience among listeners in NATO forces across the Afghan theater of war. On one end of the conversation were the pilots of two US Air Force A-10 “Warthog” attack planes, who had been patrolling the eastern province of Paktia, not far from the Pakistani border. They were on call for any ground unit needing “close air support,” a task for which the A-10 was expressly designed.

On the other end was a Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC), a specialist whose job is to assign and direct air strikes. The JTAC was reporting Troops in Contact (TIC)—meaning that American soldiers were under fire. Although the entire, acronym-sprinkled transmission was on a secure “strike frequency,” such communications customarily enjoy a wider audience, not only among the crews of other planes in the neighborhood but at various headquarters across the country and beyond. Such was the case with this particular mission, making it possible to piece together an account of the disaster that followed.

After reporting the TIC, the controller, who was inside a base headquarters somewhere in eastern Afghanistan, informed the pilots that the enemy force was a large one and read out a grid coordinate. Reaching the designated spot, however, the pilots reported “no joy”—i.e., no sign of action. They were directed to another grid, and then to a third, with the same result. At the fourth location, the flight leader reported the presence of a farm building. People and animals were visible, he said, but no one with a weapon, nor was there any sign of military activity.

The JTAC refused to accept this conclusion. According to one listener, he told the pilots that the ground commander, who was most likely sitting in the same room, “has determined that everybody down there is hostile.” He then ordered them to prepare for a bombing or strafing run for the A-10, whose 30mm cannon is capable of firing 4,200 rounds per minute.

The pilots continued to insist that they could see nothing out of the ordinary, reporting “normal patterns of life.” The JTAC had at least a rough means of confirming this situation: like many other aircraft, the A-10 carries a “targeting pod” under one wing, which in daylight transmits video images of the ground below, and infrared images at night. This video feed is displayed on the plane’s instrument panel and is relayed to the JTAC’s array of LCD screens in his operations center, and frequently to other intelligence centers around the globe.

The pilots, who could fly low and slow close to the target and study it through binoculars, had a much more detailed view. Circling above the mud-brick farm building, they affirmed it to be a “bad target.” Suddenly, a new voice joined the conversation. A B-1 bomber, cruising high above the clouds, was checking in and reporting its position to the JTAC. Originally developed to deliver nuclear bombs to Moscow at supersonic speeds, the 150-ton plane with its four-man crew lacks the A-10’s low-level maneuverability and detailed views from the cockpit. It relies instead on crude video displays coupled with instructions from the ground to hit its targets. Yet it is commonly employed for the same purpose as the A-10: close air support. Speaking on the common frequency, the B-1 pilot was offering to take on the mission. Meanwhile, the controller, sounding increasingly frustrated, continued to insist that the farm was a hostile target. Finally, his patience snapped, asking the A-10 flight leader if he was willing to prepare for an attack.

“No,” replied the pilot. “No, we’re not.”

The controller addressed the same question to the B-1, which had been privy to the A-10’s ongoing reports.

“Ready to copy,” came the quick, affirmative reply.

Down below, the unwitting objects of all this potent dialogue, a farmer named Shafiullah and his family, were settling in for the night. They would not have understood what it meant when the whine of the A-10s was replaced by the deeper rumble of the huge bomber, which was meanwhile confirming that it had “weap-oneered” a mixture of large and small satellite-guided bombs. As the A-10 pilots headed for home, they saw the darkening sky suddenly light up in their rearview mirrors as three huge explosions tore apart the farmhouse, killing Shafiullah, his wife and five of their seven children, the youngest only ten months old. Two other children were wounded but somehow managed to survive.

This obliteration of almost an entire family drew some attention in the media, though reporters had no idea of the real circumstances of the attack. NATO claimed that a ground patrol had come under heavy fire by more than twenty insurgents and had asked for close air support. “We are trying to determine whether the mission has any direct correlation to the claims of civilian casualties,” a NATO spokesman told the New York Times. Shafiullah’s relatives meanwhile took their complaints to the Afghan government, which duly investigated and concluded that the dead were neither Taliban nor Al Qaeda but civilians. According to Shafiullah’s brother, Gul Khan, the Americans then admitted that the family had been killed by accident. Both the US ambassador and the military commander “shared their condolences and asked for forgiveness,” he told me—but the promised compensation never arrived.

The death of the Shafiullah family might easily be one more addition to the sad roster of CIVCAS, as the military calls the civilian victims of our post–9/11 wars. It fits what has become a traditional pattern: a fatal strike elicits an official denial, followed by concession of responsibility (sometimes grudging and partial, and occasionally accompanied by an offer of compensation), followed by a pledge to mandate stricter procedures. But the events of this particular evening are worth further examination, for they tell us a lot about the way our military operates these days.

The A-10 pilots were able to make a detailed, independent judgment about the target because their aircraft was designed for that very purpose. Its bulletproof armor, along with other features such as reinforced fuel tanks, meant the plane could fly low without fear of enemy ground fire. On the other hand, no one was going to risk a lumbering, $300 million B-1 within easy range of rifles and machine guns, let alone thread it through narrow mountain valleys. (By contrast, the inflation-adjusted price tag for an A-10 is about $20 million.) Confined to high altitudes, and limited by its huge wingspan and turning radius, the B-1 is precluded from close observation of the ground below. Like our fleet of thin-skinned supersonic fighter jets—and like drone operators—it must rely largely on video.

The consequences are frequently bloody. In May 2009, bombs from a B-1 killed at least 140 men, women and children in Farah, Afghanistan, because the pilot, according to the Pentagon’s own explanation, “had to break away from positive identification of its targets”—i.e., he couldn’t see what he was bombing. Other mass CIVCAS incidents in the same conflict, such as those in Kunduz (ninety-one dead) and Herat (ninety-two dead), can be traced to the same fatal dependence on video-screen images rather than the human eye.

Video will often supply a false clarity to preconceived notions. One A-10 pilot described to me an afternoon he spent circling high over southern Afghanistan in May 2010, watching four people—tiny figures on his cockpit screen—clustering at the side of a road before they retreated across a field toward a house. Everything about their movements suggested a Taliban IED-laying team. Then the door to the house opened and a mother emerged to hustle her children in to supper.

“On the screen,” he explained, “the only way to tell a child from an adult is when they are standing next to each other. Otherwise everyone looks the same.”

“We call the screens face magnets,” remarked another veteran, Lt. Col. Billy Smith, a former A-10 squadron commander who flew tours over Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. “They tend to suck your face into the cockpit, so you don’t pay attention to what’s going on outside.”

Smith recalled a 2003 night mission in pursuit of a Taliban contingent close to the Pakistani border: “We were looking for them under the weather in a deep, narrow valley, with steep mountains going up to 15,000 feet. Suddenly I saw a glow from a fire in a cave on the side of the mountain and called the ground commander.” Smith was immediately cleared to attack the cave. Yet he still wasn’t sure he had located the enemy. “So with my wingman covering me, I put my plane on its side and flew along the mountain so I was looking straight up through the top of my canopy into the cave. Didn’t see anybody. Just to be sure, I turned around and flew back the opposite way, and this time I saw a whole family at the mouth of the cave, waving.”

The characteristics that enable the A-10 to observe the battleground with such precision, and safely to target enemy forces a stone’s throw away from friendly troops, should ensure it a long life—at least until a superior replacement is developed. But the Air Force has other plans. Assuming the leadership gets its way, all A-10 units will be disbanded in 2015 and the aircraft itself will be junked. Close support will be assigned to the B-1 bomber fleet, along with various jet fighters, including the F-35, which has yet to undergo operational testing and is estimated to cost $200 million per plane.

This decision, which practically guarantees that more civilians as well as American soldiers will die, may seem bizarre and irrational, but in light of the core beliefs that give the Air Force its sense of identity, it makes absolute sense. Deep in the Air Force’s psyche is the irksome memory of its early life as a mere branch of the Army, with less status and a smaller budget even than the artillery. Its subordinate role was widely recognized: in his 1931 sketch of the capital’s social pecking order, the Washington columnist Drew Pearson described an official so lacking in status that he was routinely seated at dinner “beside the wives of the Second Assistant Postmaster General and the Commander of the Army Air Corps.”

Consequently, the Army Air Corps (AAC) nurtured dreams and schemes of independence, on the presumption that strategic bombing could ensure victory without any need for armies or navies. This dogma they derived from the writings of an Italian artillery officer, Giulio Douhet, who argued that bombing the enemy heartland could, by itself, crush any foe. By the time World War II broke out, these crusaders had convinced themselves that the destruction of a limited set of targets supposedly vital to the German economy, such as electrical-generator factories, would bring victory within six months.

Politicians, including Franklin Roosevelt, took the bait. Drawing up war plans before Pearl Harbor, they budgeted for a huge bomber buildup. Then, thanks to a leak that makes the revelations of Edward Snowden appear trivial by comparison, the full details of this “Victory Plan” appeared on the front page of the isolationist Chicago Tribune just days before the Japanese attack. Suspicion fell on an Army general of alleged German sympathies. But the Tribune’s Washington bureau chief at the time, Walter Trohan, told me years ago it was the Air Corps commander, Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold, who had passed along the information via a complicit senator. Arnold believed the plan was still too stingy in its allocation of resources to his service, and so aimed to discredit it at birth.

Attempts at daylight precision bombing of strategic targets in World War II proved ineffective. The bombers suffered heavy losses, and the enemy had to be defeated the old-fashioned way, with massive armies slogging across Europe or, in the case of Japan, the invasion of outlying islands together with strangulation by blockade. (These factors had already brought Japan to its knees by the time the atomic bombs were dropped in 1945.)

Air power did play a decisive role—but not in the way envisaged by Douhet’s disciples, who considered fighter planes of secondary importance. One such fighter, the P-47, rugged and maneuverable at low altitudes, turned out to be ideally suited for attacking ground targets threatening friendly troops. This weapon proved so successful that during the Third Army’s spectacular advance across France in the summer of 1944, Gen. George S. Patton depended almost entirely on close air support to protect his force’s exposed right flank.

Meanwhile, back in the bowels of the newly built Pentagon, the AAC had put together a team to plan the most important campaign of all: winning independence from the Army and grabbing 30 percent of the defense budget. By design, none of these officers had any background in fighter planes—indeed, few had combat experience of any kind. With World War II in its last throes, they still believed that Douhet and his prewar adherents had been right all along: strategic bombing was the key to victory. Close air support, which essentially meant helping out ground operations, was definitely not on their agenda. They had much bigger things in mind, especially after they learned of proposals to create a postwar United Nations dedicated to preserving world peace.

Surely, argued the Air Corps staffers, this new authority would need a law-enforcement arm, an International Police Force—and the most obvious candidate to fulfill this role was the US strategic bomber fleet. As one 1943 planning document put it: “The essential nature of any Post War I.P.F. will be based on the application of Air Power, and such a force will essentially be an air force … [The I.P.F.] will eliminate subversive or dangerous focal points before they can develop to the point where they become a danger to the security of the world.”

This dream of policing the globe in UN garb never panned out, but in 1947 the United States Air Force was finally born, complete with its own uniforms, budget, and exclusive control of all fixed-wing aircraft operating from land (the Navy managed to fight off attempts to take over its own planes). The Army feebly consented to this arrangement, having extracted a promise that the Air Force would always be there with close air support when needed.

Three years later, the Korean War broke out. The new service found itself in action as part of the overall US expeditionary force, but sent only unsuitable fighters to support beleaguered infantry units, many of which were consequently overrun. Meanwhile, heavy bombers soon succeeded in incinerating every city, town, and village in North Korea with little effect on the course of the war, which was once again decided by armies fighting it out on the ground.

Asked at the end of the Korean conflict what useful lessons had been learned, an Air Force general replied, “Nothing.” A decade or so later, when the service was once again called on to provide ground support in Vietnam, it initially deployed jet fighters that flew too fast to keep targets in sight. The Air Force would ultimately make use of the A-1 Skyraider—which, though highly effective, was an unwelcome expedient, since it was not only old, dating back to 1945, but had been developed by the Navy.

The Navy, of course, was not the only rival on hand. By the late 1960s, the Army’s burgeoning helicopter bureaucracy had conceived the notion of a fast, complex, heavily armed attack vehicle—which would lessen its dependence on the airmen. So ambitious was this project that the proposed machine, the AH-56 Cheyenne, promised to cost more than a jet fighter. This presented a serious threat to the Air Force budget: if the Cheyenne won a constituency in Congress and the industry, the close-air-support mission might be lost. Politically sensitive staff officers whispered in the ear of Gen. John P. McConnell that he was in danger of going down in history as the first Air Force chief of staff to lose a mission and the budget that went with it. Something had to be done.

The solution came from one of the “Whiz Kids,” the brilliant group of analysts recruited by defense secretary Robert McNamara to challenge the hidebound orthodoxies of the military. Pierre Sprey was a mathematics prodigy who had been admitted to Yale when he was fourteen, then spent his summers during graduate school working at the Grumann Aircraft Engineering Corporation. Soon after arriving at the Pentagon in 1966, he had earned the enmity of the Air Force with a study demonstrating that its strategy for a war against the Soviets in Europe—deep-strike interdiction bombing—was essentially worthless. A rigorous empiricist, Sprey examined recent military history and concluded that close air support was the most useful contribution the Air Force could make to any conventional war.

McConnell’s advisers reasoned that despite Sprey’s otherwise repugnant views on air power, he might be just the man to help develop a close-air-support plane—something demonstrably better and cheaper than the dreaded Cheyenne helicopter. Accordingly, Sprey and a select group of Air Force staffers were detailed to draw up the requirements for such a plane. His research had already revealed, for example, that the majority of losses to antiaircraft fire were caused by fuel from punctured tanks leaking onto hot engines and igniting. So manufacturers bidding for the contract were required to separate these two components in their designs. “They howled about that,” recalls Sprey, “since they were so used to wrapping the fuel tank around the engine.”

Sprey’s analysis led to other requirements: a tight turning radius at slow speeds, an ability to land on dirt strips, bulletproof armor enclosing the cockpit and a quick-firing 30mm cannon to devastate tanks, machine-gun nests and the like. Circulated to manufacturers, this checklist elicited a variety of designs, and ultimately the first-ever fly-off between two competing prototypes, from which the A-10, manufactured by the Fairchild Corporation, emerged victorious. Congress quickly approved a buy of 750 planes.

By 1977, when the A-10 first went into service, it had already fulfilled its primary mission. The Army threat had been beaten off, and the Cheyenne was canceled. Now, however, the Air Force had to live with the instrument of its victory, an aircraft that represented everything that it had fought so hard to escape. From early on, the A-10 was treated as the poor relation, unwelcome at the feast. During the Reagan years, a golden age for the military-industrial complex, the Air Force showered money on such cherished programs as the B-1 bomber and the F-15 and F-16 fighter jets. Meanwhile, the generals shut down the A-10 production line in 1984 (thirty-seven of the original 750 were still to be built) and firmly nipped in the bud any initiative to develop a replacement. In 1988, Gen. Robert Russ, head of Tactical Air Command, announced in the semi-official pages of Air Force Magazine that the A-10 had been far outclassed by such favorites as the F-16. “Slow ducks,” Russ told his readers, “will be dead ducks.”

Two years later, the United States deployed a huge force to Saudi Arabia in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait. No A-10s were included in the initial air deployment. Legend has it that Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander-in-chief of the expedition, was well aware of the plane’s potency against enemy armor, so he demanded of his air commander, Gen. Charles Horner: Where was the A-10?

“Oh,” replied Horner, “the F-16s can do the job.”

“Don’t give me that Air Force political bullshit,” snapped Schwarzkopf. “Bring me the A-10!”

It was a wise decision. While precision-guided bombs and missiles captured the imagination of the media and the public, thanks to the new CNN-funneled video footage they provided, these weapons turned out to be less useful at destroying targets—especially if the targets were moving. It was left to 144 grudgingly deployed A-10s to dispatch the bulk of the Iraqi armor, along with truck convoys, rad...