The Mythology of War

Beyond their ostensible peaceful social orientation, democratic states, like all collections of people, clans, and tribes, possess a specialised ‘war­rior’ stratum in their societies known as the armed forces.

Nevertheless, the battlefield is not Rambo or any other cinematic rendi­tions that are seen in the contemporary West. Enemies do not generally die quietly, quickly or without the messy detritus that clean and intact organic bodies automatically produce when punctured. Heroes are not bulletproof and tend to be incapacitated/killed by just one round from a modern assault rifle. And the overarching sound of victory is not stirring credit music, but rather the agonising noise of the wounded screaming for help, their mothers, or simply mercy. Paul Fussell, a World War II combat veteran turned professor, who knew the face of war better than most, cites the poet Charles Sorley to capture what happens when people die in com­bat: ‘First man; then, when hit, animal, writhing and thrashing in articu­late agony or making horrible snoring noises; then a “thing” [when dead]’ (Fussell 2013, 136, explanation added). It is rare to see such depictions of battlefield reality in modern movies, where orcs, goblins, clansmen, and bad guys die with routine brevity, remarkable stoicism, and without all- too-human qualities.

Interestingly, notwithstanding these popular depictions that have tre­mendous social appeal around the world, warriors have always been, even during the great conflagrations of the twentieth century, a minority occu- pation/profession in the modern age. The vast majority of people will thankfully never see, hear, or experience a battlefield in their lifetime, which appears to support Pinker’s general thesis of a decline of violence in human affairs (Pinker 2012, xix). This bald fact means that the preponderance of people are susceptible to manipulation/management of perceptions about the modern battlefield or war in general, because few have or will have first­hand experience of it. Emulating Barthes’ ‘message’ idea (2013, 218), the mythology of war in the West through various mediums communicates an acceptable/plausible reality that wittingly or unwittingly supports legiti- matisation strategies for the use of force in international relations.

The Antiseptic Battlefield­

in the Global War on Terror (GWOT), from 2001 to the present day, the United States and its principal coalition partner, the United Kingdom, have been extremely active in terms of military operations in foreign coun­tries, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both cases, these nations com­mitted military forces to invading both countries and sustaining garrisons without the initial consent of the original indigenous political administra­tions. There is a popular and long-standing notion that battlefields are isolated antiseptic places where armies battle against each other unencum­bered by non-combatants and civilians. In previous centuries, this was true to a degree when kings and city-states organised large scale encounters in agreed places. This notion also survived into the early twentieth century when large armies faced each other across the Western Front in Europe divided by no man’s land. It is largely forgotten that just behind the front lines, towns and villages existed that would eventually reclaim the valuable agricultural land and destroyed inhabitations located between the great hosts when the armistice was declared in 1918.

In the twenty-first century, the idea of the antiseptic battlefield, a place clean and free of civilians and non-combatants, has been replicated in its modern form in the political message of regime change, that somehow coalition forces were just fighting undesirable regimes, not their people, in order to liberate the latter. In reality, the ‘Freedom Wars’, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq, have been fought within the social landscapes of these nations. The puta­tive separation of people from regimes has been a myth: the applied social violence was fought through and across villages, towns, and cities in Afghanistan and Iraq with inevitable wider effects, or what the military describes euphemistically as ‘collateral damage’, the unintended killing/ wounding of civilians.

The term ‘collateral damage’ is a powerful mediating myth that com­municates a lack of intent to harm and therefore in some way absolves or redirects guilt towards the victim. A corollary narrative that keeps popping up in explanations (formal and informal) with regard to civilians deaths is the phenomenon of ‘human shields’ that somehow people, especially women, voluntarily throw themselves in front of their menfolk and so com­batants had no choice but to shoot them. From Black Hawk Down to the film portrayal of the death of Osama Bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty, these narratives are thrown out akin to perceptual smoke grenades to explain why ‘civilians’ were killed in particular operations. Yet the evidence for such incidents is highly contestable and against human nature. Most non­combatants in a combat situation or fire fight, as the military describes it in dehumanised terms, usually throw themselves to the ground, hide, or try to get away. This suggests that the notion of human shields as with collat­eral damage is a myth that mitigates the horror of accidental and unlawful killing of non-combatants to protect the legitimatisation of a particular military action. Otherwise, it would potentially carry grave legal conse­quences for all those involved, from the political leadership that authorised it to the soldiers whose conduct led to the deaths.

Since the 1990s, scholars in the field of international relations have highlighted a disturbing trend manifest in so-called new wars: the ratio of military dead to civilians has been disproportionately shifting away in terms of preponderance from the former to the latter (Kaldor 2012). The origi­nal claim was that ‘the ratio of civilian to military casualties was 20 % at the turn of the last century, around 50 % in World War II and exactly reversed at 80 % in the 1990s’ (ibid). These figures are contested, but nevertheless evidence from the Global War on Terror would suggest civilians make up in a disproportionate sense the largest number of deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The reasons why so many civilians have been killed in these conflicts are manifold, but to a significant degree, the accidental killing of people was inevitable in view of the fact that the ‘battlefield’ in these modern wars fits Rupert Smith’s new paradigm of ‘war amongst the people’ (Smith 2006). Smith argues elegantly that ‘war as cognitively known to most non-combatants, war as battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs: such war no longer exists’ (ibid). His thesis about ‘war amongst the people’ is quite simple: ‘it is the reality in which the people in the streets and houses and fields—all the people, anywhere—are the battlefield’ (ibid). The invasion and occupation (whether technically correct or not as a term) of Afghanistan and Iraq by predominantly US/UK forces and smaller coalition partners, with subsequent outbreaks of major insurgencies in those countries, found civilians living within the contested fighting space. Casualties were unavoidable, due if nothing else, to the prominence and proliferation of assault rifles and machine guns as the most numerous tech­nology of violence in these theatres of operation.

It is an accepted truism that killing enemy combatants with modern personal weapons demands vast quantities of bullets to be expended in order to achieve just a single confirmed kill. During the American Civil War in the nineteenth century, some estimates suggested that ‘one round in 500 ever hit anyone’ (Guelzo 2013, 38).

In 2015, a British national newspaper by means of a Freedom of Information request revealed that the British Army in just one province of Afghanistan (Helmand) fired 46 million rounds of ammunition in total against the Taliban (Hughes 2015). In the context that only 30 million people live in Afghanistan, it is clear that the intervention of foreign forces has led to an exponential rise in the number of bullets (measured in multi­ples of millions per year) flying around these countries with the vast major­ity of them missing their intended targets. The British expenditure alone in just one province of Afghanistan represents more than one bullet for every inhabitant in the entire country. Logic and simple physics suggest that the vast quantities of expended bullets must have generated significant unintended, but not unforeseen, effects in a impoverished social landscape where people cannot afford to abandon homes, properties, and livestock due to the absence of modern insurance safety nets that the advanced nation-states in the West take for granted. Equally, if such quantities of ammunition were expended in towns, cities, and villages in the USA and the UK, then the howls of outrage and concern would reach a rapid cre­scendo; yet in the Global War on Terror, these figures barely cause a ripple within the communities who are sponsoring these military actions.

Precision Killing

The idea of war in the West, even in the twenty-first century, is overshad­owed by two images: World War II and the Vietnam War. The unifying element between both wars, often buried by mediating myths, is the hor­rifying amount of destruction caused by the blunt application of air power. In the last year of World War II, the Allies dropped ‘1.18 million tons of bombs on Germany and German-occupied Europe, or 83 percent of the tonnage dropped throughout the war’ (Overy 2010, 48). This caused the deaths of approximately 410,000 German civilians, 60-70,000 for­eigners (labourers, prisoners and prisoners of war), 60,000 Italian civil­ians and 60-70,000 French civilians (Overy 2010, 43). In Japan, USA air power killed 900,000 civilians (Pape 1996, 129), a significant proportion of which were burned to death in an ‘incendiary campaign’ (Muller 2010, 73) that used the Japanese predilection for wooden construction in their towns and cities as a means to ‘burn out’ vast swathes of inhabited areas. In the Vietnam War, the United States managed to drop eight million tons of bombs (Thompson 2010, 107) in what was technically a ‘limited war’, which was many times the amount dropped on Germany and Japan in World War II. By the last decade of the twentieth century, strategic bomb­ing (the cause of the bulk of the major visible destruction in World War II and the Vietnam War) had a deservedly poor reputation tinged with atroc­ity as a means of force that had somehow strayed outside the boundaries of legitimate violence. This reputation, however, was rescued by the myth of precision killing that was born out of a perception of strategic bombing in the Gulf War of 1991.

Operation Desert Storm was in many ways a ‘poster’ of a model form of warfare that deeply suited the West. It was mercifully short (it lasted just over five weeks), against a recognised ‘bad man’ of international politics in the form of Saddam Hussein (a staunch ally of the West until the Gulf crisis in 1990), and placed an emphasis on air power, as the ground cam­paign only lasted 100 hours (Olsen 2010, 177) after five weeks of strategic bombing. The USA-led coalition dropped just 90,000 tons of munitions on Iraqi targets and the enduring image of the heavily media-controlled campaign was of television or laser-guided munitions (so-called precision- guided munitions or PGMs) hitting their targets, usually buildings with no sign of human occupation, with remarkable accuracy. What is generally not known is that the numbers of PGMs used in the Gulf War of 1991 amounted to just 8 % of the total munitions dropped in the fighting. So while the dominant imagery of war is one of precision killing, the reality was quite different, with a liberal use of B-52 bombers carpet-bombing Iraqi positions in Kuwait and also a significant use of cluster bombs (Finlan 2003). Nevertheless, it was the Gulf War of 1991 that created the myth of precision killing that has dominated and mediated narratives about strate­gic bombing throughout the Global War on Terror.

The notion of precision killing since the end of the Gulf War has appeared to reach new levels with the widespread introduction of satellite- guided munitions that were first used in the Kosovo campaign in 1999. These technologies that harness the power of global positioning satellites or GPS (that are very similar to the ‘sat nav’ systems in cars today) enable older types of bombs, often referred to as ‘dumb’, to enjoy a quantum leap forward in terms of accuracy when fitted with the relatively cheap GPS ‘nose and tail’ kit. Ostensibly, they offer a comforting narrative to air forces (and the political administrations that use them) that air power is now a precision instrument, akin to a scalpel, instead of a crude mallet to apply force from the air. In World War II, it took roughly 100 aircraft to destroy a target due to the accuracy shortcomings of unguided bombs (Finlan 2003); now a single aircraft can do it instead. This claim is true with regard to expensive laser-guided bombs that possess pinpoint accuracy, but at a price for the aircraft: the target has to be continuously ‘painted’ by a laser beam either from a specially designed/equipped aircraft or a buddy aircraft flying near the target or from soldiers on the ground. Both means involve a degree of vulnerability for the aircraft/pilots loitering over a defended target or for soldiers on the ground located in enemy territory. Additionally, pinpoint accuracy only occurs, if the weapon system works perfectly, without human error or interference with the laser beam by the simplest of environmental conditions such as dust (Singer 2010, 57).

In contrast, satellite-guided weapons can be dropped from any type of aircraft, and they are ‘fire and forget’: in other words, aircraft do not have to loiter or rely on ground troops. The myth enveloping satellite- guided munitions, whose relative cheapness in comparison to laser-guided systems and ease of use has made them the weapon of choice in strategic bombing campaigns, is that accuracy is relative: they are more accurate than unguided weapons, but their accuracy is not pinpoint. Just like ‘sat nav’ systems in domestic cars, the first generation (used widely in the GWOT) had an accuracy of three to nine meters and, as this generation of bombs called Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) were 2000lb bombs (a very powerful explosive yield), the scope for collateral damage in built-up areas was extremely high. In Operation Enduring Freedom, ‘nearly 60 percent’ of all the bombs dropped were precision-guided (Lambeth 2010, 270). A final caveat with these technologies that bedevils domestic car drivers as well: the links with the satellites are relatively weak, can be subject to inter­ruptions, jamming, or simple mechanical failure. Precision-guided muni­tions appear to offer a perceptual salve to the destructive capacity of air power, but its effects are distinctly limited and mask the limitations that remain with the alluring air-power technology that has always promised more than it could deliver, from World War I to the present day.

Killer Applications: The Rise of the Drone

The hallmark of warfare in the twenty-first century in the West is encapsu­lated in the emergence of what Peter Singer describes as the ‘Killer App’, a technology term for ‘new products that change the rules of the game’ (Singer 2010, 29). These technologies span land-based battlefield robots and aerial drones. It is the latter category that has generated the most pro­found impact in the Global War on Terror and has perpetuated the myth of precision strike or the ability to attack insurgents at will, anywhere in the world, from the air without cost to friendly human life. The Predator drone is perhaps the best known of these technologies. It is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that can loiter over a specific area for twenty-four hours and is flown by a pilot often located thousands of miles away from the theatre of operations in the United States or the United Kingdom by means of satellite relays. Drones are nothing new in warfare, but the GWOT wit­nessed the birth of armed drones for use in combat. The original Predator drone could carry two laser-guided Hellfire anti-tank missiles, but its suc­cessor, the aptly named Reaper drone, is much bigger and more powerful, with the ability to carry four Hellfire missiles and two 500lb GBU-12 laser- guided bombs (RAF website). The significance of this technology is that it offers countries that possess it the ability to operate in hostile environ­ments (often in breach of their territorial sovereignty), such as in Pakistan, and engage suspected insurgents without risk to a pilot. It is arguably the most seductive form of warfare on offer to political administrations and societies in the West: a risk-free force option that offers pinpoint accuracy.

Nevertheless, the notion of cost-free warfare is another potent myth. The problems with this technology are manifold. Having an eagle-eye view of the battlefield at 50,000 feet is just that, a top-down panoramic perspective that lacks a human ‘ground’-based perspective. As such, the scope for error is high. Equally, the precision kill technologies are designed to kill large objects such as tanks, rather than human-size targets. In others words, the ability to calibrate the amount of ‘collateral damage’ by virtue of the weapons used is very narrow. Recent reports suggest that attempts to kill forty-one specific targets using drone technologies led to the deaths of 1147 people (Ackerman 2014). The notion of ‘targeted killing’ using drone technologies is a powerful mediating myth that obscures the actual reality involving this technology: far more innocent people are killed than the intended targets. Nevertheless, this myth remains influential because drones offer the fastest and most risk-free military option for casualty­sensitive political administrations in the West, which feel they must do or be seen to do something in response to a specific threat. Drone technolo­gies superficially seem to offer the holy grail of modern warfare: cheaper intervention/military force options that provide a military solution with few body bags and without any geographical boundary issues, and with enough drones, the ability for 24/7 air coverage over a particular terri­tory. It is a revolutionary development and one that with future automa­tion (the drone taking the kill decisions) will see humans being killed by machines: a potentially dark military age in human affairs that turns the ability to wage warfare into a purely digital activity.