The stunning success of the Air Force in dominating its domain since the 1991 Gulf War has created two looming problems for the service leadership: The Air Force no longer has any substantive experience in how to fight and win in a highly contested environment, and its current airmen have never experienced serious losses of people and machines in air combat.
.. The Air Force’s immense success resulting from the courage, skill, and technological superiority of American airmen has now perversely made the service much less ready to fight the next big war.
.. More U.S. airmen were lost in just the European theater than marines killed fighting in the Pacific.
.. No American warplanes have been shot down by enemy aircraft since at least 1991 and none lost to enemy air defenses since 2003.
.. As a result, an entire new generation of Air Force pilots have flown combat missions that have not involved any serious opposition.
.. The Air Force is most brittle in this domain since virtually no one serving in today’s force has personally experienced any wartime attrition of either airmen or their airplanes.
.. the peak of deadly air combat in World War II. The staggering losses of the strategic bomber community flying against German defenses over Europe in 1943 were strikingly portrayed in the classic movie Twelve O’Clock High. This compelling film shows the unrelenting and intense demands of Air Force combat leadership when losses were so great that virtually no aircrews survived to complete the requisite 25 missions before going home.
How the British fought the American Revolution—bravely
That is because, as we all know, Cornwallis was a coward, and it was just like him to find such a fittingly ignominious hole wherein to snivel and whimper while, in the defenses around the town, his troops were destroyed.
Because we have learned that is what British generals did in the war. They ponced about in their splendid red uniforms, dipped snuff, and looked down their snooty noses as the silly-billy Americans dared take on the Most Powerful Army in the History of the World. And the moment the cannons burped, they abandoned their troops to be slaughtered while they stayed safely out of harm’s way, lest their wigs get mussed.
It’s part of our national mythology that does not serve us well. By belittling the enemy, we diminish the magnitude of our American achievement. While well intended, this “History Channel” fairytale about Cornwallis, the other British generals, the troops they led, and the conduct of the war is counterproductive.
American Way of Life: a nation without limits: a threat?
In the 20th century, “our” side won because American industry and ingenuity produced not only superior military might but also a superior way of life based on consumption and choice—so at least Americans have been thoroughly conditioned to believe. A third assumption asserts that U.S. military power offers the most expeditious means of ensuring that universal freedom prevails—that the armed might of the United States, made manifest in the presence of airplanes, warships and fighting troops, serves as an irreplaceable facilitator or catalyst in moving history toward its foreordained destination. That the commitment of American armed might could actually backfire and make matters worse is a proposition that few authorities in Washington are willing to entertain.
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Not coincidentally, a Pakistani tribal elder talks about the effect that US drone attacks has on his community:
“Children stopped going to school, the women have become mental health patients, in my own house my four children, my daughter has mental problems, because of drones,” he said.
And the strikes are not fulfilling their aim, he argued.
“These drone attacks do not finish terrorists. When in one house two or three children and their mother or father are targeted by drone attacks, the whole household become terrorists against America,” he argued.
.. He said that American policy towards the Middle East is emblematic of a nation that does not believe it has limits.
In this view, America keeps making these catastrophic mistakes because we believe that wanting a certain outcome is enough to make it happen. We are rich enough, powerful enough, and, in our own minds, righteous enough that it should happen.
.. But come on, can we really say with a straight face that the hedonistic culture of the post-Christian West is no threat to their way of life? That they have nothing to fear from us, other than our drones and bombs?
Impossible Missions
“The military missions that the United States undertook succeeded. It was the political missions that followed, the efforts to transform the politics of the places where American arms prevailed, that failed.”
Why? Because political success was never within our control. Such normative transformations can only come from within, from the will of local actors to change long-embedded habits, overcome longstanding enmities or restore long-lost political traditions.
In each of these cases, argues Mandelbaum, political transformation “was up to them — and they were not up to it.”
.. The old autocrats also had vast oil resources or aid from superpowers in the Cold War to buy off their people. What if they now have bulging populations, dwindling oil revenues and can’t buy off their people or shut them up?