COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

I'm trying to contain myself reading this abominable piece of tripe from the New York Times.

WASHINGTON, June 12 — The United States launched many more failed airstrikes on a far broader array of senior Iraqi leaders during the early days of the war last year than has previously been acknowledged, and some caused significant civilian casualties, according to senior military and intelligence officials.

Only a few of the 50 airstrikes have been described in public. All were unsuccessful, and many, including the two well-known raids on Saddam Hussein and his sons, appear to have been undercut by poor intelligence, current and former government officials said.

The strikes, carried out against so-called high-value targets during a one-month period that began on March 19, 2003, used precision-guided munitions against at least 13 Iraqi leaders, including Gen. Izzat Ibrahim, Iraq's No. 2 official, the officials said...

A report in December by Human Rights Watch, based on a review of four strikes, concluded that the singling out of Iraqi leadership had "resulted in dozens of civilian casualties that the United States could have prevented if it had taken additional precautions."

The poor record in the strikes has raised questions about the intelligence they were based on, including whether that intelligence reflected deception on the part of Iraqis, the officials said. The March 19, 2003, attempt to kill Mr. Hussein and his sons at the Dora Farms compound, south of Baghdad, remains a subject of particular contention.

The Times apparently thinks they have a 'gotcha.'

But in reality, they're just making a mockery of themselves, and demonstrating what utter ignoramuses they are when it comes to military affairs.

There's no mention whatsoever of maneuver warfare theory, of OODA-loops, of the ideas of Col. John Boyd.

But it is the theory of maneuver warfare which lays out the very foundations upon which the decision to make the strikes were built.

In maneuver warfare theory, it is not neccessary to kill the HVTs in order to have the desired effect on the battlefield. It's nice, sure, but it's not neccessary in order for the strikes to be successful. We target key individuals and headquarters facilities NOT so much to kill, but to disrupt the enemy's decision-making process. We go after them aggressively, we hit them hard, and we hit them again and again, and we don't let up, because we know that a headquarters staff which is constantly on the move is not nearly so effective at battle-tracking and making decisions as one left alone. We know that a commander who cannot use his satellite phone for fear of getting a missile up his ass cannot stay informed, cannot make sound decisions, and cannot inform his subordinate commanders of his decisions in a timely manner.

We know that if we keep after the headquarters facilities, the nodes of communication, the commanders themselves, then intelligence reports are not processed, maps are not updated, knowledge is not disseminated. The units in the field are left blind and leaderless. They cannot mutually reinforce. They cannot inform one another of a threat to the flank or rear. They obviously cannot react to those threats.

The effect on the battlefield is entire brigades and divisions bypassed--left out of the fight, because they cannot recieve instructions to conduct counterattacks. The effect on the battlefield is entire formations destroyed piecemeal, because they cannot mutually reinforce, because they cannot react to events on the ground. Or if they are, they're reacting to YESTERDAY'S events while US commanders are already executing TOMORROW'S. (This is called getting inside the enemy's decision cycle, or OODA-Loop. If we make decisions faster than the enemy can even process them, our advantage compounds geometrically, and the deterioration of the enemy's situation accellerates accordingly, until his whole army collapses like a house of cards. Which is essentially what, in fact happened! Both in 1991 and 2003.)

The effect on the ground means a war shortened, victories attained by maneuver and not by attrition, and innumerable (though unquantifiable) lives saved.

This is the moral and military calculus illuminating the decision to conduct raids on high-value targets.

But the New York Times staff is too ignorant of military affairs to even recognize and raise the right questions. They are simply not equipped to make an informed judgement or analysis. The holes in the story--the holes in their knowledge--are simply glaring to any reasonably educated military reader.

They do a pretty good job, though, of letting themselves get led around by the nose by Human Rights Watch.

Can you imagine how much better this article could have been--how much better the reader could have been served--if someone, ANYONE, on the New York Times staff happened to have been an officers advanced course graduate, and got a chance to contribute?

This article is the worst bit of journalism I've seen from the Times in a long time. It's an utter failure.

And it's a fine example of how wrong you can be without committing a single factual error.

Splash, out

Jason