UK government says it can’t afford to fund benefits for the poorest and most deprived people but has no trouble finding money for missiles to bomb Iraq costing close to £1m each.
Richard Norton-Taylor
Bombing has not been decisive in any recent conflict. Far from it. It has been counterproductive and an expensive waste. In the past, pilots have quickly run out of targets. It will be even more difficult now, as RAF Tornado crews have already discovered, to find them as they continue to search for Islamic State (Isis) fighters in Iraq now.
Even in the first Gulf war, in 1991, when the enemy consisted of units of Saddam Hussein’s army, the US-led coalition soon ran out of targets. “We were bouncing rubble with billion-dollar missiles,” Colin Powell, American’s most senior military official at the time, observed after the war.
During the 1999 Kosovo war, Nato air forces ran out of military targets so fast they started bombing civilian factories, power plants, bridges and a television centre, claiming they were legitimate targets on the grounds that they were part of Slobodan Milosevic’s war machine.
Over 79 days, Nato warplanes dropped thousands of the most sophisticated – and expensive – bombs on dummy targets erected by Serb forces. They hit just 13 of the Serb army’s 300 battle tanks despite Nato claims of large-scale destruction of the country’s heavy armour. “When you’re travelling at 500mph at 15,000ft, it is easy to be fooled,” an anonymous Nato source was quoted as saying after the conflict was over.
“The limitations of air power in pursuit of … humanitarian goals were clearly demonstrated and this lesson must be learned,” the Commons defence committee noted. “Nato encountered significant difficulty in locating and positively identifying mobile ground targets.” (A key factor in ending the war, the committee stressed, was Milosevic realising that Russia was not coming to his aid.)
The “shock and awe” bombing raids that started the 2003 invasion of Iraq may have dispersed Saddam’s entire army, but they opened the way to rival militias and to a civil war that, for political and military reasons, tens of thousands of troops from the modern armies of the west could not end.
Air power played little or no part in Iraq after the initial onslaught. It has played only a minor role in more than 10 years of operations by Nato – the world’s most powerful military alliance – in Afghanistan where the Taliban remains undefeated.
Barack Obama’s admission on Sunday that the US overestimated the capabilities of the US-trained and equipped Iraqi army and underestimated Isis does not inspire confidence in the effectiveness of the 350,000 Afghan security force recruits trained by Nato.
British Tornado and Typhoon aircraft destroyed or damaged more than 900 targets during the bombing of Libya in 2011, and other Nato allies struck many more. The air strikes burst open arms depots, leaving as many as 20,000 shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, known as Manpads (man-operated portable air defence systems), available to Islamist rebels and militia in Libya and elsewhere in west and north Africa.
The RAF Tornados, based in Britain’s base at Akrotiri in Cyprus, can fire radar-guided anti-armour Brimstone missiles, which are conservatively estimated to cost £100,000 each; heavier Paveway IV bombs, estimated at £30,000 apiece; and long-range Storm Shadow missiles, estimated at nearly £790,000 each. A British Trafalgar class submarine is also believed to be in the area, probably in the Gulf, equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles estimated to cost £500,000 each.
British special forces are on the ground in northern Iraq and possibly in Syria as well. One of their roles is to identify targets for the RAF’s bombers. But air power is likely to be even less relevant, less appropriate and less effective in the campaign against Isis as it has been in previous armed conflicts over the past 23 years.
Source: The Guardian
