Global Policy Forum

By David Isenberg *

When planning war, military officials have various targets: enemy combatants, their support forces, the surrounding civilian population, and their national infrastructure. But there are other targets as well, although these are not always discussed publicly. Among the most important of these is public opinion, both the world at large, and the highest priority - that of their own public. This holds true especially in a democracy, when one is fighting a war of choice - as in invading another country - instead of fighting a war of national survival.

In such wars, issues like human rights and civilian casualties loom larger. Since such casualties are inevitable, special pains must be taken to explain them away. But how to do so? In a word, spin. Such is the conclusion of a just-released monograph, "Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan and the Idea of a New Warfare" by Carl Conetta of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA).

Of course, the idea of shaping public opinion is hardly new. For example, a 1975 study by the Congressional Research Service, a division of the Library of Congress, in analyzing possible United States takeovers of Persian Gulf oil fields, wrote: "The administration, Congress, or both - assisted by the mass media - could take steps to sway public opinion one way or another if they believed it advisable."

But the PDA documents how the Bush administration has taken spin to a new level. It notes that increased international and domestic attention to the collateral effects of military operations has been a persistent concern of the US defense community since the Vietnam War. And thus has it taken significant steps to minimize that concern. The "US Defense Department, State Department and White House conducted large-scale perception management" or "strategic influence" campaigns in support of Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, as well as in support of the broader "war on terrorism" according to the PDA study.

One of the Iraqi war incidents analyzed by the PDA was two market bombings in Baghdad that together claimed more than 70 lives early in the war. US and British authorities quickly suggested that these might have been the result of Iraqi air defense missiles falling back to the ground.

But this was an unlikely scenario, according to the PDA study, for two reasons: the relative numbers of suitable weapons used by the two sides in Baghdad, and the attack vectors and performance characteristics of these weapons. In regard to the first point, coalition air-to-surface weapons outnumbered Iraqi surface-to-air missiles by a ratio as large as six-to-one. Second, minor errors and inaccuracies - even standard ones - in the delivery of air-to-surface missiles could have produced the market attacks. The PDA study states: "Shooting downward into thickly populated areas is simply a very dangerous and demanding endeavor. By contrast, for an air defense system to have been at fault would have required a string of errors and failures - some catastrophic - in the employment, performance, and functioning of both the system and its failsafe mechanisms."

Nevertheless, US and British officials kept making this claim even after a British reporter found and confirmed that debris from the second marketplace bombing came from a US HARM anti-radar missile.

Of course, such implausible claims could not have flourished without a complicit partner, the media. The PDA study states: "Spin is a form of misdirection on emphasizing the minor aspects of an event or promoting a tendentious or idiosyncratic interpretation of it - one that favors one's own interest. However, for spin to work, there must be a media willing to 'take the pitch' (so to speak), rather than letting it fall flat. With regard to the marketplace bombings; the news media's willingness to adopt the uncertainty frame and give the coalition 'the benefit of the doubt' divided along predictable lines. While the marketplace bombings reverberated loudly in the Muslim and Arab worlds, the story has no 'legs' in the United States and only short ones in Britain."

Another tactic used by the Pentagon was what the study calls "lawfare"; the manipulation of both public perceptions and international law that aims to create or reinforce the impression that one's opponent is violating either the letter or spirit of the law. The goal is to undermine international and domestic support for the opponent's actions or causes.

A case in point was the US-British framing of the Baghdad "shock and awe" air campaign. At the same time that coalition forces were bombing the city, they also complained about the legality of Iraq's placement of air defense systems in and around residential and industrial areas of the city. In this "the coalition's case [regarding] air defense was overstated", according to the PDA study. "It implied strictures that would have precluded any adequate air defense of the city - an outcome not consonant with the intent of international law. In fact it is not uniformly illegal to operate in or near civilian areas if such operations are militarily necessary. For better or worse, international law gives wide berth to military necessity."

Particularly questionable were coalition complaints about Iraq placing air defense systems within 300 feet of residences. In fact there is no international law or rule of warfare that prevents that. Reached by phone, the study author, Carl Conetta said "their rhetoric implies that unless you place your systems at a distance from a target we chose to hit, that won't hit anyone, it's illegal. It's a typically Orwellian approach."

But these issues represented ad hoc attempts at perception management in the view of the PDA study. The Pentagon also put forward broader ideas to help frame the view of its conduct of warfare. Most important was the concept, which had arisen before the Bush administration took office, was the idea of a "new warfare". This has four distinct subsets:

- US precision attack capabilities have revolutionized warfare making it possible to wage war with greatly reduced casualties and reduced damage.
- US armed forces go to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties and are doing more than anyone has done before.
- The number of war casualties cannot be known with certainty.
- The number of casualties is not especially meaningful in assessing the success or progress of a war effort.

But these claims are both deceptive and meaningless. The standards on which expectations about the "new warfare" are based - weapons precision and care in targeting - do not reflect actual casualty and damage outcomes on the battlefield. The basis for making such claims is the technical performance of the weapons, such as their circular error probable (CEP), which is the radius of a circle centered on an aim point within which some percentage, usually 50 percent, of weapons fired at the aim point will fall. But this only measures the relationship between the aim points and impact points as determined in controlled tests, not the battlefield reality.

The study notes that the ease with which public discourse has adopted the language and frame of "precision warfare" is surprising. As noted above, just a few years ago military professionals would not have described most of the guided weapons used in the Iraq war as "precision" instruments, reserving this adjective instead for systems with a CEP of three meters or less. Common, civilian usage of the term "precision" is even more restrictive. Not many practices in civilian life that routinely miss their mark by 20 to 40 feet would be considered "precise" - and especially not those involving the use of hundreds or thousands of pounds of high-explosives: That the expenditure of six kilotons of explosives in aerial attacks (and more than this in ground attacks), some involving guided weapons and some not, should gain the moniker of "precision warfare" reflects a singular triumph in branding.

It is little appreciated that "precision" weapons are not error-free. Many of them have inherent errors in the sense that they reflect limitations in the systems employed that cannot be removed without improving or changing the systems. Beyond that other factors contribute to errors, such as bad intelligence, including intentional deception by allies; mechanical or electrical malfunctions in guidance, navigation, flight control or bomb release systems; human error on the part of pilots or ground controllers; and unexpected or severe weather conditions.

Furthermore, even if weapons work perfectly they are still likely to cause damage simply due to their destructive power. This is because they carry hundreds of pounds of enhanced high-explosives wrapped in hundreds of pounds of steel. Most everything will be severely killed, damaged or destroyed within 20 meters of a 500-pound bomb blast and 35 meters of a 2,000 lb blast.

Weapons performance and procedures for limiting collateral damage are only two variables in a complex equation. Other more important factors are operational plans and methods, which determine the types of missions that will be attempted; political-strategic factors, which include the goals for which a war is fought; and issues of national strategy, which determine the role of force in a nation's foreign policy.

These facts, despite precision attack capabilities and specific targeting procedures, help explain why US military operations have claimed the lives of 50,000 people worldwide (combatants and non-combatants) during the age of precision warfare (beginning with Desert Storm in 1991, while during the preceding 14 years overt US operations claimed the lives of approximately 2,000 people).

In fact the goal of limiting civilian casualties has not been met. The PDA study notes that the non-combatant fatalities during the one month of major combat operations in Iraq last year actually outnumbers those suffered during the three years of the ongoing intifada by the Palestinians against the Israelis.

Insofar as the claim by the US that civilian casualties cannot be known, the study calls it "casualty agnosticism". It found that the US administration distorted the casualty issue by depreciating the value of information flow from recent battlefields, categorically dismissing hundreds of detailed casualty reports and positing an unnecessarily high standard for what constitutes a useful degree of precision in aggregate casualty estimates.

In regards to that standard, the study noted: "The proposition that it is impossible to calculate a casualty figure that is both absolutely certain and exact is true. True but facile. This truth holds not only for the Afghan and Iraq conflicts but for all wars and genocides. No one has individually counted and verified all the victims of the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, for instance, much less the victims of the World Wars or the Indochina conflicts. Nonetheless, we accept some of the casualty estimates associated with these events as sufficiently accurate and precise to usefully inform policy."

In fact, the flow of open sources of information from the battlefield has never been richer than in the Afghan and Iraq conflicts. These were the most intensively reported wars in history.

The study concludes that the administration's perception management efforts can only impede a full appreciation of the war's blood cost and its repercussions, thus making a dispassionate assessment of the war option more difficult. Bottom line, "The efforts were antithetical both to well-informed public debate and to sensible policy-making."

About the Author: David Isenberg, a senior analyst with the Washington-based British American Security Information Council (BASIC), has a wide background in arms control and national security issues. The views expressed are his own.