As expected [stderr] the wars in Syria and Iraq have devolved into a horror show of human tragedy. And, to exacerbate it, you’ve got America’s fondness for saturation bombing civilians with high explosive.
That probably seems like a strong claim, given that the US media have been carefully dancing around “coalition airstrikes” and “artillery support” but the numbers tell the truth.
The myth is that there is controlled, surgical, strikes against targets that have been identified, selected, and called in by steely-eyed artillery spotters and drone pilots. The reality is that you simply cannot fire that many aimed shots. [marinetimes] If they’re not aimed shots, they’re area fire: a war crime.
WASHINGTON – Marines providing artillery support to U.S.-backed Syrian fighters in Raqqa fired so many consecutive rounds they burned out the barrels of two M777 155 mm howitzers.
later:
“Every minute of every hour we were putting some kind of fire on ISIS in Raqqa, whether it was mortars, artillery, rockets, [High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems], Hellfires, armed drones, you name it,” Troxell told reporters on Monday. Troxell had visited Raqqa a couple weeks ago for a period of four hours.
4 whole hours? What a tough guy. But, seriously, there’s no way that’s all aimed fire. And let me call your attention to the highlighted bullshit above: no, they were putting some kind of fire on a city. A city in which, somewhere, there were probably some ISIS fighters who hadn’t left yet. That orwellian turn of phrase attempts to make it sound as though the US forces were only blowing up ISIS fighters, not the city of Raqqa. That is a lie.
They did not just hit ISIS fighters.
It doesn’t look like Dresden did after the bombing – but only because photos of Dresden are mostly monochrome.
They laid some fire down on those German Wehrmacht soldiers in Dresden, all right.
The US military chest-thumps and gloats a bit about its accomplishments: [marinetimes]:
A small Marine artillery battalion fired more rounds than any artillery battalion since Vietnam.
“They fired more rounds in five months in Raqqa, Syria, than any other Marine artillery battalion, or any Marine or Army battalion, since the Vietnam war,” said Army Sgt. Major. John Wayne Troxell, the senior enlisted adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Remember, the Vietnam war was characterized by massive bombardments, that were more severe than some in WWII.
“In five months they fired 35,000 artillery rounds on ISIS targets, killing ISIS fighters by the dozens,” Troxell told Marine Corps Times during a roundtable discussion Jan. 23. “We needed them to put pressure on ISIS and we needed them to kill ISIS.”
To put the numbers in context: During all of Operation Desert Storm, both the Marines and the Army fired a little more than 60,000 artillery rounds.
In the invasion of Iraq, just over 34,000 rounds were fired.
Dozens. Holy fucking flaming balls of fuck. They did that to killput pressure on ISIS fighters by the dozen. This is the American taxpayer’s dollars at work. Imagine if that was Seattle. Imagine the wailing and screaming if that was Seattle. You know what? The wailing and screaming would sound just like all the other wailing and screaming, everywhere, any time – because wailing and screaming civilians all sound the same. These assholes are bragging that they fired more whupass at Raqqa (and the civilians in Raqqa and possibly a few ISIS fighters) than was used in another massive war crime. Yay! We war crime bigly! We blew up a city harder than we blew up an entire country! USA! USA!
I do not support our troops.
The US’ actions created ISIS. So, arguably, we blew Raqqa flat in order to fix a problem we created. Look out, Flint Michigan – the US army knows how to ‘fix’ your problems.
Well of course they have to keep upping the shell count – defense contractor profits don’t grow year on year by themselves!
The buildings are too tall, but what the photo of Raqqa reminds me of most is the ruins of Pompeii. That was bombed by American planes during the Second World War too, as if Vesuvius hadn’t done enough damage the first time round. I am trying to imagine what archaeologists two thousand years hence will be saying about US civilisation from the traces they left across the Middle East. I doubt it’s going to be a rosy picture.
As a headline, “Marines set new record shelling city”, would probably have been too honest by far for the average news outlet. And let’s keep in mind that those “dozends” are probably subject to generous rounding. After all a key requirement to qualify as a terrorist is to have been killed by some “civilised” western military or their buddies in their quest to spread peace and democracy.
When shelling a city it must be easy enough to rack up a death toll and when everyone you kill fortuitously turns out to have been a terrorist you ge to write the most glowing reports. Also, medals for everyone.
P.S.: I’m slightly baffled by the inclusion of mortars on that weapons list. With everything else you might be able to pretend that they’re capable of precision. But while I have no real clue about them, mortars do not strike me as a weapon that is either precise or accurate. My understanding of mortars is that they lob high explosives in roughly the direction and over roughly the distance you’d like. Give or take. If so including mortars on your list of choice-weapons to bombard a city is a blatant admission (if any was needed) that you don’t care about civilian losses. If someone suggested to me to “surgically strike” a city with mortars I’d whack them over the head with their damned mortars.
Re: cartomancer (#1):
Marcus has posted pictures of destroyed cities before and what struck me then, as now, is that they look almost identical (excepting the odd utilities pole and some asphalt maybe). Time or place make no difference; once someone else (or nature) is done with your home it’s ruins are pretty much indistinguishable from anyone else’s homes/ruins. There’s probably a hidden meaning in that, something about “equality” while also acknowledging the general crappiness of our species.
It says in the article that if only they’d been closer maybe the gun barrels would not have burned out. It also admits that they can not completely wipe out ISIS, but yay, I guess, because ISIS “may” be going to Africa among other places. I think this means that then we can bomb the shit out of Africa! Hooray! And maybe next time they’ll shoot from closer in so they don’t damage the barrels on the guns.
Christ of the Andes. I know this is common to all wars but it’s still incredibly disgusting and horrifying to see people behaving as though it’s not their fellow human beings they are slaughtering – they’re just firing on “targets”. We were just talking to a financial advisor who was telling us how great it is that the stock for military will be going up. “Yay”. Makes me sick.
35000 rounds to kill “dozens” of baddies, that’s like *a thousand* shells per baddie. Something something precision bombardment something something hit the side of a barn something something.
… a war crime.
Nuh-uh. Unpossible, because American troops did it!
komarov@2 the US has a guided 120mm mortar round in service. Whether it was used in this case is something I don’t know. And it’s a GPS guided mortar round, so the guidance isn’t much use unless you can input the GPS coordinates of your target into it, which probably wouldn’t happen in a scenario like this.
Just survived another lecture from the Partner (one of the perils of my existence) about the stupidity of bombing cities like this. Apparently this was tried with Stalingrad and all that happened was the Soviets were able to hold it even better… turning the streets into rubble fields meant that *the people who bombed it could no longer get in there* without just walking in, whereupon they would be mowed down and killed. You can’t drive tanks over fallen-down bombed buildings. Also you can’t tell what has been fortified and what has not, because it will all pretty much look the same.
So. “Yay” us. We quite stupidly ignored history and failed to learn from past experience. Go, USA! Gosh at this rate, we will be #1 of losers! And still be murderers and war criminals! Hooray?
I was bored as well as disgusted so I played with some numbers.
I’m assuming a dozen dozen is the number if ISIS troops killed. Why? Because the term for that is a gross, which fits about as well as any numerical term will. Also, it’s not close enough to 200 to get rounded up to “hundreds” instead of “dozens”.
35,000 mortars to kill 144 people means you kill one approximately every 243 times you shoot. It also means your accuracy is under half of one percent.
I wonder what area coverage looks like with these things now and what all those misses add up to but I don’t know enough.
Judging effectiveness of fire as ‘enemy killed divided by shots fired’ is a drastic oversimplification; suppression (of enemy fire, movement, ability to poke your head up and look around, etc.) is more frequently the expected result of fire than actually killing someone.
Nor is ‘unaimed’ or area fire, in and of itself, a war crime. War crimes involve a lack of distinction and/or proportionality; area fire on a chunk of wilderness known to contain only enemy combatants is highly unlikely to be a war crime.
If you want to make accusations of war crimes in Raqqa, I think that there are far more effective places to start. How about the alleged use of white phosphorus? Unlike the incident described in this blog post, it’s hard to imagine a situation where white phosphorus could be used legally in any city.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that Raqqa was a very difficult situation: ISIL strategy appeared to include fighting in a way designed to create as much civilian collateral damage as possible in order to use this for propaganda. Given the ISIL methods of fighting, including even the use of human shields, everybody knew (or should have known) going in that there would be fairly extensive civilian casualties. The question in a situation like this is really, ‘are the civilians better off if we instead leave ISIL in charge of their city?’ (And not ‘better off’ in abstract terms like ‘amount of freedom’; ‘better off’ in terms of civilian casualties incurred directly as a result of how ISIL governs.) There’s a reasonable argument to be made there that the answer is ‘no.’
I’m all for going after western leaders and armies when they do bad things, but, on a bit of further research into this, I don’t think that ‘lots of shells were fired by artillery teams outside the city’ is an effective place to start.
komarov@#2:
P.S.: I’m slightly baffled by the inclusion of mortars on that weapons list. With everything else you might be able to pretend that they’re capable of precision. But while I have no real clue about them, mortars do not strike me as a weapon that is either precise or accurate.
The fancy high-tech mortars are extremely accurate. Not that that matters, in this situation, since they were certainly just blasting away at grid coordinates. Since WWII mortars have been pretty precise. Sazz said that there was a vietcong mortar operator outside of one of the firebases where he was stationed, who used an old 81mm mortar like a sniper – if he saw a high-ranking officer he’d try to drop one right on top of them.
lanir@#8:
I wonder what area coverage looks like with these things now and what all those misses add up to but I don’t know enough.
A 155mm will utterly demolish a building and/or will devastate a roughly circular area about 100 meters across. A 155mm white phosphorus shell can set half a city block to burning, if there is fuel (and there usually is because they first use high explosive to knock everything to pieces before they light it with the white phosphorus).A 120mm mortar round is comparable to a 155. Multi-launch ballistic rockets and Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) are 1,000lb bombs, and make a 155mm round seem like a kiss on the cheek in comparison.
The Marines report didn’t include the air strikes – doubtless there were a lot of bombs dropped as well. They usually portray that as precision air strikes, as well, and that’s also a lie.
Sazz told me he used to watch the 155s come in on the villages (he was an artillery spotter, sometimes – scout/sniper was often a dual role) and the shockwaves simply disintegrated things into puffs of dust. He said the bomber strikes left nothing but shattered wreckage but they weren’t very accurate. The big B-52 strikes would leave a large area – about 1/4 mile – looking like the Somme front lines in WWI – except it happened in about a minute. They claimed those were precise, too.
Arclight strike, Vietnam.
Curt Sampson@#9:
Judging effectiveness of fire as ‘enemy killed divided by shots fired’ is a drastic oversimplification
Of course. It only makes sense to talk about it in the context of when someone is bragging about how much firepower they deployed. It’s not a very good metric, but “firepower deployed” isn’t, either. I suppose what we’re really talking about is how hard the rubble bounced.
Nor is ‘unaimed’ or area fire, in and of itself, a war crime.
On this blog and elsewhere I have been unsympathetic to the US state’s fondness for arguing about definitions, using orwellian neologisms to deflect discussion about what appears to be happening. You probably shouldn’t expect my attitude on that topic to suddenly change.
Nor is ‘unaimed’ or area fire, in and of itself, a war crime. War crimes involve a lack of distinction and/or proportionality; area fire on a chunk of wilderness known to contain only enemy combatants is highly unlikely to be a war crime.
“Area bombardment” [icrc]
You’ll notice that Rule #13 could have been written to apply to Raqqa, but it wasn’t. It was, however, what I was referring to. And it does apply perfectly to Raqqa.
I’m also going to mention that your argument “area fire on a chunk of wilderness known to contain only enemy combatants” is more than slightly disingenuous. We are not talking about a chunk of wilderness known to contain only enemy combatants we are talking about a city known to contain thousands of civilians. Indeed, far more civilians than ISIS members. Attempting to shift the discussion away from the reality of the situation to an abstract hypothetical is the kind of trick I expect from Sam Harris, but I’m not letting anyone get away with it here.
If you want to make accusations of war crimes in Raqqa, I think that there are far more effective places to start. How about the alleged use of white phosphorus?
That’s classic “what aboutism” – implying that one crime is less important than another, because the other is worse. Actually, they’re both war crimes, and I forgive you for not knowing that I did, in fact, comment on the use of white phosphorus in Mosul [stderr] and pointed out that:
1) it’s a war crime
2) it’s a violation of the chemical weapons treaty (but the US has come up with an orwellian excuse for why it’s not, which ought not to fool anyone)
I’ll also point out that attempting to justify it as not a chemical/incendiary weapon is a tacit admission that it is a chemical/incendiary weapon, because if it was a conventional munition there would be no need to argue it’s not.
it’s hard to imagine a situation where white phosphorus could be used legally in any city.
I’d say it’s impossible to argue that in good faith. Yet the US fired a great deal of WP into Mosul. The video has been taken down by Youtube. I wonder why. But you can do your own searches.
The target in that image is a hospital, which apparently was occupied by ISIS. So they blew it up.
Perhaps you do not realize this, but if someone stations troops in a hospital, they are committing a war crime, and if you blow it up, you are committing a war crime, too. The fact that someone puts civilians at risk does not excuse an attacker for lighting those civilians up with white phosphorus.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that Raqqa was a very difficult situation
All wars, by definition, are a “difficult situation” – they are the epitome of difficult situation.
Naturally, a difficult situation means more care needs to be exercised, not less.
ISIL strategy appeared to include fighting in a way designed to create as much civilian collateral damage as possible in order to use this for propaganda.
I don’t think you have that right, though it’s really irrelevant why ISIS did what they did. What I’m talking about is why the US artillery units did what they did. ISIS was already well documented as committing crimes against humanity, but that does not excuse or justify committing crimes against the citizens of Raqqa who are non-combatants.
I find it a bit repugnant that anyone would even try to imply that there is some kind of moral tradeoff there. Can we leave that sort of thing to Sam Harris?
Given the ISIL methods of fighting, including even the use of human shields, everybody knew (or should have known) going in that there would be fairly extensive civilian casualties.
Everybody knew that there would be fairly extensive civilian casualties because ISIS’ maneuver worked. The coalition chose to respond to ISIS in exactly the way ISIS expected them to: by committing crimes against humanity. When someone proposes to take a bull into a china shop, one does not get to excuse the consequences by saying “that’s what happens when you take a bull into a china shop.” In fact, that’s exactly why you should not do that.
What’s the alternative? The alternative is to not use extensive artillery bombardment. That means more boots on the ground and more rifle and bayonet work. That’s what soldiers are for. Sure, the coalition would lose a few more troops. Basically, the coalition is showing it is willing to trade large-scale damage and civilian casualties against troop casualties.
The question in a situation like this is really, ‘are the civilians better off if we instead leave ISIL in charge of their city?’
That’s a bizarre question. Why don’t you ask the dead civilians how they feel about that?
Of course they are better off under ISIS rule than dead.
There’s a reasonable argument to be made there that the answer is ‘no.’
Really? You’re going to argue that it was better to blow the city flat than to allow it to exist under ISIS? That “in order to save the city, we had to destroy it”?
I’m all for going after western leaders and armies when they do bad things, but, on a bit of further research into this, I don’t think that ‘lots of shells were fired by artillery teams outside the city’ is an effective place to start.
How convenient.
Marcus @ 12: Thank you. Always learn so much from your posts as well as your comments.