Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, time to welcome William J. Astore back to the show.
He's a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force and a history professor.
I didn't know that.
And he runs his own blog called Bracing Views and writes regularly for tomdispatch.com.
And plus we rerun, well, we rerun pretty much everything at Tom's about war and peace, but also a lot of Bill's stuff from his blog you'll find at antiwar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Thanks a lot, Scott.
I'm doing well.
Well, good.
Happy to have you here.
Very interesting story that you wrote here.
The Dark Side of Air Power.
Again, it's at antiwar.com under Tom Englehart's name and at tomdispatch.com.
The American cult of bombing, an endless war, 10 tenets of air power that I didn't learn in the Air Force.
Yes, Tom Dispatch articles have lots of titles, everybody.
Okay, that's just how it works.
Lots and lots of titles.
So you talk about here about the basic tenants, you even link to this PDF file of the fundamental tenants of air power from the US Air Force.
And I'm sure they're all about essentially how to accomplish strategic goals with the tactic of bombing, right?
So what's in there?
And what are they missing?
Well, yeah, I remember I had to memorize those because, believe it or not, as officers, we have to take occasional tests.
It's called professional military education.
So we learned about the fundamental tenets of air power, which, of course, those tenets of flatter the Air Force.
So they talk about, you know, flexibility is the key to air power, and they talk about concentration of effort and similar principles.
They don't really talk, as I mentioned in my article, they don't really talk anything about the morality of bombing, which is no surprise.
They don't talk about the fact that bombing has proven to be so frustrating and unproductive and so destructive in so many of our wars.
What those tenants are actually arguing is, essentially, if you can put bombs on target, if you can find the enemy, assuming you can find the enemy, you can put bombs on target accurately, we will win the war, basically, whatever war that might be.
And then, so that's pretty much it.
And as you say, even though that hasn't worked, did that ever work?
I guess people would say that they accomplished a lot in Japan with air power in World War II.
Well, yeah.
I mean, there's so much debate about this.
You know, coming out of World War II, you know, we had the combined bomber offensive.
And of course, World War II was because of the 75th anniversary of D-Day.
And, you know, coming out of World War II, the Air Force argued in the strategic bombing survey that air power had proven decisive in defeating the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, and Germany as well, Nazi Germany, as well as Imperial Japan.
But after the war, we did some very careful surveys of the bombing.
And it turned out that the Air Force, no surprise, had overstated the effectiveness of bombing, that most bombs had actually missed their intended targets.
And that actually, you know, Nazi Germany was defeated, not so much by Allied bombing, but by the Soviet military.
But we didn't really want to talk about that too much, coming after World War II, and the Cold War, and the Iron Curtain, and all that.
In Japan, I mean, yes, of course, bombing obviously hurt the Japanese, but at tremendous cost.
100,000 Japanese people killed at the firebombing raid on Tokyo in 1945, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed probably in the neighborhood of 250,000 people, if you add up all of the casualties after the war due to radiation poisoning and cancers and all the rest.
And yet, you know, Japan was on the verge of surrendering anyway, you know, by August of 1945.
The only sticking point was the status of the emperor at that point.
So, you know, but the Air Force, as you know, Scott, the Air Force wanted its independence.
It wanted to be an independent service, which it gained in 1947.
The only way it could really get independence is to argue that it was unique, that air power is unique, and that only the Air Force understands air power.
It's certainly not the Army.
And so, you know, it made that argument successfully.
And so in 1947, the Air Force gained its independence, and has been bombing ever since.
Sorry, hang on just one second.
Hey, guys, have you ever read The War State by Mike Swanson?
It's great.
It's a history of the rise of the military-industrial complex after World War II through the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations.
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I think you'll like it a lot.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
Well, it's funny, you know, you talk about the destructiveness.
Of course, you mean it as a bad thing, which of course it is, all of the things being equal.
But in this case, the idea is that, hey, look, I mean, and you can see it on TV.
They play it on Discovery Channel all day long that you drop a giant bomb on somebody from the sky, it'll kill them.
It'll blow up whatever building they're in.
It'll destroy whatever, you know, grouping of tanks or infantry guys are on the ground there.
And, you know, you can't argue against tactical success at least in some cases, you know.
But I guess what you're saying is that that doesn't matter.
But why doesn't it?
Well, I wouldn't say it doesn't matter.
But it matters in ways that are different from what the U.S. military and so on would want them to matter.
So the idea behind airpower is, or at least from the Air Force perspective, again, you look back at, let's say, the Vietnam War, which, you know, everyone knows about.
The idea was that we would be able to use airpower and, you know, drop enough bombs, enough napalm, defoliants, and all the rest, and you'd be able to convince the North Vietnamese, you know, to sign a peace treaty or to end the war, or to unify, you know, Vietnam under a communist rule.
And of course, that didn't work.
You know, rolling thunder from 1965 to 1968 didn't work.
Even the linebacker campaigns, you know, the infamous Christmas bombing, or say the bombing of Laos in Cambodia, I mean, all bombing did was to spread destruction and instability.
Now, of course, that's the 1960s and early 1970s.
And so, you know, Air Force today would say, well, those are times, you know, today airpower is much more accurate.
You know, we don't drop, you know, hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs.
We use precision weapons, guided by GPS and lasers and all the rest.
And so it's true that the number of civilians killed has decreased.
And yet, when you look at the results, when you look at Syria, when you look at Iraq, when you look at Libya, again, you know, it seems like, you know, bombing has not proven to be a war winning weapon.
It simply has spread destruction and instability throughout those regions.
When you look at cities like Mosul, for example, I mean, or Raqqa, they make you think of Stalingrad in 1942, 1943.
The level of devastation is so great.
Yeah, well, that's certainly true.
I mean, Ramadi was essentially flattened in Iraq War Three, again.
Well, but I mean, okay, so it did take nine months, but it was a few militia guys on the ground and essentially the US Air Force that did win the war against Libya, right?
Assuming that your goals were get rid of Qaddafi and then forget about it.
It's just controlling everything since then from the air that's proven so difficult, right?
Right.
Well, air power, you know, air power has no staying power.
And I wish I'd thought of that.
Actually, it sounds like air power has no staying power.
I mean, yes, you can go in, you know, you can bomb, you can destroy things.
And certainly, you know, you have Predator and Reaper drones that can stay up for hours at a time and loiter over targets and find terrorists or what have you.
But ultimately, you know, what happens on the ground is far messier.
And in fact, air power has a tendency to make things on the ground more chaotic.
So for us, as I say in the article, as you know, air power becomes a recourse for us to minimize our casualties, to minimize American casualties, to minimize the number of American boots on the ground.
It certainly is not a recipe for minimizing enemy casualties and the number of civilians who are killed and maimed as a result of air power, because power often goes wrong.
You know, even today, you know, missiles malfunction.
Intelligence often proves faulty.
You know, recently, as you guys covered it, at anti-war, there was a recent attack in Afghanistan where, you know, American air power assets, you know, misinformed, and we wiped out a police, you know, Afghan security force of about 18 people.
So, you know, there's an example of American fire against Afghan forces that are on our side.
Right.
And so that's the whole thing too, right, is I guess it makes sense, at least on the face of it, especially as you say, if you ask the air force now, they would say, well, look, if we had to go up against the Germans, we have these JDAM GPS guided satellites where we could go right after their infrastructure and not miss.
And that makes sense.
All those things are made out of steel and concrete and are tied to the ground.
And if you're talking about just hitting hard targets or bombing somebody's military base full of infantry, bombing their barracks or something like that, all that makes sense if that's the kind of war you're fighting.
But you look at Afghanistan, like you just mentioned, where they're bombing their own guys on the ground when they're not.
That was the other story at anti-war.com the other day, the New York Times had done that and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism had done that in-depth report about the killing of those 11 little children in that bombing last year.
And this is exactly how to make more enemies.
As you say, rule number three in here of the real rules is you just generate anger and blowback.
The whole, supposedly, the mission in Afghanistan is to these people, or it was anyway, I guess they forgot this, to win these people over so they like us so much they want America to be their security force or create their security force for them.
And it's pretty hard to do that when you're exploding their friends and loved ones and neighbors to death with high explosives.
But somehow both of these things are supposed to happen at the same time.
We're going to win their hearts and minds while killing some of their hearts and minds.
Right.
I think what also happens is, and this is one of my alternative tenets, and I think even the Air Force would admit this, is that people get used to being bombed or the enemy.
This happened, as you know, during the famous Battle of Britain, the last finest hour when the German blitz against London, when it actually brought the British people together against the Nazis.
Our bombing efforts against Germany during World War II, we assumed that they would be incredibly damaging to morale, but they really weren't, except in a couple of cases.
And so I think in Afghanistan, when we first started bombing Afghanistan in 2001, after 9-11, initial results were good in the sense that the Taliban had never been bombed like that before.
They were intimidated at first, and to a certain extent, it worked, until they got used to it.
And until we decided to go in there and make, basically Taliban had almost surrendered, we decided to go in there and cause more trouble.
And here we are years later.
Yep.
And of course, throughout the war, 18 years of war, essentially once a month or something, I don't know if anybody timed it, but there are constant atrocities, you know, mistakes and deliberate, and Lord knows how to characterize some of these screw ups where innocent people get killed from the air constantly, and including, you know, B-1s bombing our own guys on the ground, because they should be flying A-10s.
And that's another thing I'd like to ask you about.
You talk about the separation of the Air Force from the Army after World War II.
It seems like there's a real hatred there.
And part of that is, you can see the story of that in the A-10, where the real purpose of A-10 essentially is to protect Army infantry on the ground.
But the Air Force's idea is protect your own damn infantry.
We want to go carpet bomb something somewhere and not be here as you guys, guardian angels, you take care of your own problems.
We want to have an F-35 for ground support for infantry on the ground fighting insurgents in Afghanistan somewhere, which of course is completely unfit for the mission, but they don't care about that because they don't care about the mission.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, as you know, there's a long history there.
I wouldn't say there was hatred between the Army and the Air Force, but there certainly was a strong sense of rivalry.
And Air Force officers, it was the Army Air Corps, as you know, and then the Army Air Force, and then we got the Air Force.
Well, the Air Force never liked CAS, a close air support.
They never liked that subordinate mission.
It subordinated them to the Army.
You're basically following the troops.
There was one general during World War II who really believed in this, and this is General Pete Quesada.
And Quesada would believe that, yeah, we need those P-47s and P-51s and P-38s.
We need them to follow the troops.
And he was really instrumental in supporting Patton and the march against France in 1944.
But the Air Force in general has always believed in strategic bombing, taking the fight directly to the enemy's cities.
In some cases, as you say, carpet bombing.
That's the way to win the war, not following the Army's tent.
So this is what makes the whole story of the A-10 so fascinating, because I don't know how the Air Force ended up with the A-10.
In a way, it's a plane that the Air Force has always never really liked or never really wanted.
We would much rather have F-15 Eagles and F-16 Fighting Falcons and the F-35 Lightning II, because these are supersonic fighter bombers.
They are not slow, close air support following the troops.
And that's why the Army basically said, well, we can't count on you.
And the Army developed basically its own Air Force centered around helicopters.
So the Army has basically developed its own close air support system, because they really couldn't trust the Air Force to do it, which is a shame.
The A-10 remains a plane.
The F-35 is too fast.
It can't carry the payload.
It can't do the mission like the A-10 can do as far as supporting ground troops.
In fact, I know they're still having trouble putting a cannon, you know, putting a cannon that you could use for close air support in the F-35.
They've been having a lot of trouble doing that because the plane's really not designed for that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They can't get the camera to work or track anything on the ground, all these things.
As you say, it flies way too fast for something like this.
I've read about the A-10, I've read, I guess, A-10 pilots describing how they can fly at what essentially would be stall speed for anybody else.
They can see on the ground, those are my guys.
And on the other side of that little picket fence, there are the other guys and make their little loop.
And I guess they call it the titanium bathtub that the pilot sits in.
So he feels essentially impervious from small arms fire from the ground.
And he can just fly these low, slow circles and protect the infantry on the ground.
And it's just amazing.
Like you say, well, we can't have planes because that's against the rules.
So I guess we'll just have to create our own core of helicopters.
But then, so my understanding of that is that that's essentially just a gimmick because those helicopters are far more susceptible to ground fire than something like the A-10.
And so like in Iraq War II, in the invasion, they came in with fleets of Cobras and Apaches, but they had to pull them back real quick because they could get shot down just by RPGs and stuff like that.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, nature of helicopters.
I mean, we lost, I can't remember how many, but in the Vietnam War, I mean, the number, oh geez, it's in the number 7,000 sticks in my head and that's probably wrong.
But we did lose a lot of helicopters in Vietnam because they're simply more vulnerable to ground fire.
They're just not as fast and not as, you know, they're thin skinned.
Hang on just one second.
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Let's talk about, I'm not sure if this is a plus and a minus, rule number five on your list here, air power is enormously expensive.
Isn't that the whole point?
Yeah, I know.
No, when you think about it, yeah, I was thinking of this, you know, before you called Scott, you know, I think sometimes given the amount of money we spend on say the F-35 and now, you know, the Air Force wants to develop this, you know, a new stealth bomber, the B-21, you know, for the 21st century.
Nice little gimmick.
The amount of money, it's like 100 billion just to buy the B-21.
And of course, we already have the B-1 and B-2 and B-52.
So I don't know really why we need another new stealth bomber.
But the F-35 is roughly $400 billion to buy that.
In a way, the amount of money we spend on these, it's sort of like our version of the Egyptian pyramids.
It's just an enormous waste of resources.
But the Egyptian pyramids, they've lasted.
They've lasted for thousands of years.
You know, our F-35s are going to be sitting in some desert boneyard, you know, 50 years from now or 100 years from now.
So it's almost as if our airplanes are, you know, they have a larger purpose in our lives, almost a religious one.
And I don't know how far I would push that.
But there's just, when you think about all the money we spend, all the resources we devote to them, and I know, obviously, it's incredibly profitable for Lockheed Martin, who builds the F-35, and, you know, the other aircraft manufacturers, obviously enormously beneficial for Congress.
In every congressional district, there's, there's, you know, there's someone's building parts for the F-35.
As you know, they designed it that way.
They spread the parts out through as many congressional districts as they can.
Heck, even Bernie Sanders supports the F-35, because, you know, they're going to have some F-35s in Vermont.
So it's just amazing.
Yeah, the F-35s that don't just fall right out of the sky.
I'm surprised they're brave enough to even deploy these things anywhere, because they do keep breaking down.
They just lost a couple in the last couple of months.
So that's going to keep happening.
You know, here's something funny that Andrew Coburn said on the show, was about how the rules at Boeing forever, were that the guys on the military side were not allowed to mess with the civilian aircraft side at all, because it was recognized by the corporate leadership that the incentive structure over on the military side is completely screwed up.
And we can't have that kind of shoddy workmanship and, you know, lackadaisical, good-enough-for-government-work attitude when it comes to selling planes in the market, or we'll, you know, get cooked.
And then eventually this failed, that firewall, you know, was torn down.
And so now they have the same kind of problems on their civilian side with the 787 and the 737 MAX and all this stuff.
That's a direct result, essentially, of the military side of Boeing's culture, corporate culture, infecting the civilian side of the company.
Yeah, I actually, I heard that interview, Andrew Coburn, talk about that.
And he's absolutely right.
And when you think about it, the other part of it is the mission of the designers is very different as well.
When you're designing a civilian airliner, the number one concern, obviously, is safety.
You know, safety of flight is everything, safety and stability.
Now, when you look at something like the F-35, you know, safety and stability are number one.
You know, you want a very nimble aircraft.
You want an aircraft that is very powerful.
And you're willing, possibly, to accept a little bit of a lack of safety, a little bit of lack of stability for combat effectiveness.
So that, you know, the designs, the whole idea of the design of those planes, very different parameters.
So I can perfectly understand the need to keep those two design teams very different.
And also, exactly for the mindset that you said.
So, listen, number 10 on your list here, pounding peasants from two miles up is not exactly an ideal way to occupy the moral high ground in war.
And you're certainly right about that.
And for its sake, that's its own very important point that even if there's no consequences at all, this is really wrong and bad.
And it's been going on for a very long time here.
And any other person but a government employee going around tearing people's lives apart with high explosives like this is a murderer.
And this is what our country is doing.
And they successfully dressed it up in either, you know, red, white and blue, you know, sports, you know, shtick, or they just ignore it right out of the consciousness of the American people.
We don't even talk about it, don't even care about it, except those of few of us who, you know, really care and people like you, who write about it all the time and that kind of thing.
But the rest of the American society is essentially just tuned out from this.
And then there's, of course, the whole question, again, a blowback to that.
You know, obviously, I know in war, it's not supposed to be a fair fight, you're trying to kill the other guy and stay alive and win, you know, but at the same time, when you're hiding out in a trailer in New York State somewhere, hiding essentially with the entire diameter of the earth as your shield, flying a remote control robot over killing people in Pakistan and that kind of thing.
That is a level of unfairness never seen before in battle.
You know what I mean?
It just seems so incongruous.
And it seems like it must be the case.
And we've seen examples of this, where on the other side, on the receiving end of this, it just drives such outrage that people are having to live their lives under these drone assassins flying.
That's in Yemen, in Pakistan, in the Gaza Strip, where people live like this.
It drives them absolutely mad.
And of course it would.
And we act like that makes it that much easier, which I guess it does.
But it seems like that kind of built in level of unfairness it virtually demands a response somehow, you know, and we've certainly seen attempts like with Faisal Shahzad, when he tried to blow up Times Square as direct revenge for a drone strike in Pakistan, for example.
No, no, Scott, you're right.
I remember talking about this with a retired major general.
And his point to me was that if this was being done to us, if people were using drones from thousands of miles away and bombing our wedding parties, and then saying, whoops, sorry, I didn't realize that was a wedding party, we thought you were terrorists.
But if we were being bombed the way we bomb other people, he said we would see it as a cowardly form of war.
We would say that this is what cowards do.
They strike from thousands and thousands of miles away.
A real man or a real warrior would come face to face and fight, you know, not this bombing from thousands of miles away.
And that always stayed with me that he would actually say that he saw it as a cowardly way of war.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, a B-1 bomber pilot over Afghanistan ain't risking much.
It's not like there's anti-aircraft that could deal with a B-1 over there or anything like that in the hands of the Taliban.
But I mean, I guess conceivably he could run out of gas or blow a gasket and have to bail out or something.
You know, there's at least someone taking some risk.
But a drone, it just seems like it's just rubbing people's nose in the ability of us, of our side to get away with fighting in that manner in a way that they can't for now.
Well, I think the other part of it, too, is that when people now, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya or wherever, when they think of the United States, I mean, back in the old days, I think maybe they thought of the Statue of Liberty or they had these ideas that America, the streets are paved with gold or whatever.
But however inaccurate that may have been, you know, they thought of America in a positive sense.
Now, I think when they think of America, they think of a killer drone hovering overhead.
Yeah.
And, you know, too, man, there's this article in the Washington Post one time, I guess quite a few years ago now, about the Gaza Strip.
And the whole first half of the article is about how poor Israel has to do this this way.
But anyway, then you get to the second half of the article, and it's about how the people in Gaza live with Israeli drones flying over them, the buzz sound of those drones.
And then every once in a while, they vaporize somebody.
And so people essentially, including little kids, you know, they go to houses down to play with their friend.
And when they go outside, they can hear the drone.
They know it's armed.
They know they're being surveilled by the enemy foreign nation that has them captive there.
And they know that they probably won't, but they might be exploded to death today.
That's realistic in a way that when I go outside, I'm not going to be drone bombed.
But they can hear the drone in the sky.
And sometimes it does kill their friends and neighbors.
And living like that, of course, drives people absolutely crazy, in the very worst way.
It's a form of torture itself, to subject people to that.
And yeah, especially children, too.
Yeah, I remember reading, Scott, about an Afghan child who, you know, they asked him, you know, he said basically that he hates sunny days.
A sunny day means that the drones are going to be out in force.
Whereas, you know, bad weather is actually better.
In bad weather, you have less fear that today there's going to be a drone strike nearby.
Yeah.
Well, oh, well, I guess let's just put our hand on our heart and sing a song about how much we love the government and forget all that, because I don't know.
Yeah, that's right.
I tell you, man, that Bureau of Investigative Journalism piece with the New York Times about the 11 kids that were killed there, that is really worth looking at.
I don't know, that one little boy, he just reminds me of a little boy that I knew in the neighborhood when I was a little boy, right?
Like, he could be an American.
He doesn't look so alien at all, does he?
You know, he looks just like a kid who could very well have been a friend of mine when I also was four, you know?
And then to think about how he died, they don't show the pictures, you know, we don't get to see exactly.
But, you know, if he was completely blown apart, it would have been a mercy, right?
Rather than only having his legs blown off and then bleed out to death and this kind of thing.
I mean, we're talking about absolute beyond a horror movie level of violence that our government is inflicting on these people, these helpless people constantly.
Like you're saying, this is all they know about us.
You know, this is what America means to them.
A generation of hell fire raining down from the sky, from reaper drones.
I mean, what kind of satanic evil is this anyway?
God dang.
You know, it's like they're trying to, and they are trying to rub it in.
I know I've been to Fort hood and they have the big, you know, the grim reaper and his giant sick, you know, they're tough guys, but God, man, I don't know.
I think, you know, of course you've, you've heard of the, the, the old, you know, bomber and missile gaps from the late fifties, early sixties.
The real gap we face today is the, is the empathy gap.
Uh, we, we just seem to have very little as, as a people, we seem to have empathy.
Uh, and every now and then you, you see like, you know, a few years ago, remember, you know, that poor Syrian little boy who, who washed up on the beach and there was a photo of him and that, and that seemed to, that seemed to encourage some, some empathy for once, for, for the plight of the Syrian people.
Uh, and yet, and yet these images are, are, it's, it's like the famous photograph from the Vietnam war of, of, of the little girl who had just been burned by napalm.
Uh, and that generated a little bit of, of empathy, but nowadays you're absolutely right, Scott, we just don't see photos of the dead.
Yeah.
And if you do, it's like the case of that little boy in Syria where they just exploit it to the nth degree, like September 11th for their own warmongering purposes.
You know, that little boy, his family was fleeing American backed CIA, terrorist, jihadist, suicide bomber, head chopper, murderer, mercenaries.
And, uh, they said, Oh look, a dead baby.
Come on, we have to bomb Assad.
Cause he's the monster here.
Not the CIA backed Al Qaeda terrorists and not the American CIA that's backing them, you know?
So there's your empathy.
They just turn around and stab you with it, you know?
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Anyway, I'm sorry, man.
Um, I'm just ranting at you now, but I sure like talking with you.
Thanks so much for all your great work, Bill.
Okay.
Thanks, Scott.
Uh, good to, good to talk to you again.
Yeah, man.
All right, guys, that is William J. Astoria.
He is a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force.
His website is bracingviews.com and he writes regularly for tomdispatch.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
