Military experts nix calls to carpet-bomb

FORT HOOD — Tech. Sgt. Scott Henderson was carefully describing targets to a pair of Royal Dutch Air Force helicopter gunships circling a mile or so away.

“There are four vehicles?” asked one AH-64 Apache Longbow pilot during training here this month.

“Affirm,” Henderson replied from his observation post with a U.S. Air Force team. “There’s four vehicles in that formation. Request you take the two northernmost on the first pass.”

The Obama administration’s rules of engagement in warfare have been harshly criticized by Republican presidential candidates, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who made a much-publicized vow to “carpet-bomb” the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

But for decades, the U.S. military has been honing techniques and technology to fight enemies it can’t separate from populated areas.

“We know we can’t make warfare pretty

and pristine, but we want warfare to be directed at warfighting participants,” said retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael Longoria, who once commanded all the close-air support teams in Afghanistan and Iraq. “That is the American way.”

The observation post had a perfect view of the valley below. But if taking out four tanks on the west side of Cowhouse Creek looked easy, it wasn’t. Besides the chance of hitting civilians, there was the risk of striking the close-air support team itself if the gunship pilots mistook the energy emitted from a nearby laser designator for the targets.

So the ground controllers and the pilots talked a lot before anyone pulled the trigger.

Efforts to avoid civilian casualties in war stem from longtime policies rooted in international law and bolstered by counterinsurgency strategy, experts said. Restrictions against unnecessary killing of civilians and destruction of undefended buildings predate World War II, though they were often were ignored in that war, and again in Korea and Vietnam.

Conflating conflicts

Serious American efforts to avoid killing and maiming civilians have evolved since the era of “dumb bombs” and always have had critics.

Cruz, in a recent GOP debate, said his approach against ISIS would be “fundamentally different” from President Barack Obama’s, which he said requires U.S. service members to “fight with their arms tied behind their back.”

The U.S. carpet-bombed Iraqi troops during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, as Cruz pointed out — but that was a military target, said retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap Jr., a former deputy judge advocate general who now teaches law at Duke University.

Still, the Obama administration’s requirement that the military have a “near certainty that the terrorist target is present” and “near certainty that noncombatants will not be injured or killed,” outlined in a 2013 White House document, goes beyond what is required under international law, Dunlap said.

The tightening of the rules might stem from coun- terinsurgency doctrines put in place in Iraq under President George W. Bush, but it’s naive, Dunlap said, to think going that extra mile “will somehow win ‘hearts and minds’ among those being victimized by ISIS, the Taliban and al-Qaida.”

The enemy often blended in with civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq after 2001, and Cruz’s conflation of those conflicts with the 1991 war “reveals his really troubling ignorance of military doctrine, law and history,” said South Texas College of Law professor Geoffrey Corn, an expert on the law of war.

Precision as routine

The group of young airmen in a classroom recently at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland were not preoccupied with the policy debate. Nearing the end of a threemonth course, they were going through the exacting process of filling out a “9 line,” the elements required to call in an airstrike with precision-guided weapons.

They were studying to be tactical air control parties, called TACPs. They identified a mock target on the military’s Camp Bullis training range — a house used to build roadside bombs — then plotted the course pilots would take toward and away from it, designed for the crews’ best chance of survival.

Only when the TACP, often a sergeant, gives the order — “You’re cleared hot!” — can the pilot, an officer, drop a bomb. And if the TACP picks the wrong target or fails to see civilians or friendly troops in the area, innocent lives could be lost.

U.S. strategies have shifted as its military confronts insurgents operating in populated areas, said Chief Master Sgt. Matthew Nugent, a veteran of nine Ranger deployments to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq who runs the training. The United states needs “to be smart about attacking targets,” he said.

Political blowback over civilian casualties now cuts both ways. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, in a Feb. 6 interview, faulted Obama’s concern for civilian casualties, saying that until recently, “75 percent of all the sorties that left the base came back without dropping their ordnances (sic).”

That’s not new. When Nugent was coordinating airstrikes over Kosovo in 1999, he said, A-10 Thunderbolt II pilots sometimes dumped their ordnance when they couldn’t find their targets. The 1991 air campaign against Iraq, cited by Cruz for its carpetbombing, was the first time American pilots used Joint Direct Attack Munitions, dubbed “smart bombs.”

“I can’t imagine any current military leader thinking carpet-bombing or carpet-shelling is appropriate, and certainly I think the uniformed (services’) view is, it’s illegal,” said the Air Force’s top civilian during the Kosovo conflict, F. Whitten Peters, now a Washington lawyer. “It violates the law of war, it’s potentially a violation of international norms, and it’s not to be done.”

However, Dunlap agrees with Cruz that the United States can target ISIS more aggressively and still follow international law.

A recent U.S. attack on an ISIS bank suggests the administration is toughening its approach, though it hasn’t announced a change in policy.

Cruz didn’t respond to an interview request. A Cruz spokesman, Phil Novack, pointed to a lengthy exchange between his boss and ABC News’ Martha Raddatz from the Feb. 6 Republican debate in which Cruz called for rules of engagement similar to those of the 1991 air campaign.

Days before that debate, the commander of U.S. military operations in Iraq and Syria took issue with similar comments Cruz had made on the matter going back to early December.

“We are bound by the laws of armed conflict, and at the end of the day it doesn’t only matter whether or not you win — it matters how you win,” said the commander, Army Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland. “So indiscriminate bombing where we don’t care if we’re killing innocents or combatants is just inconsistent with our values.

“And it’s what the Russians have been accused of doing in parts of northwest Syria.”