When an unplanned event happens once, it can rightly be considered an accident.

56 Die in “Mistake” at Qana.

Mistake kills Four UN Observers.

Fleeing Civilians Hit by Mistake.

US Bomb Hits Wrong House by Mistake.

US Bombs Wedding Party by Mistake.

Bombing Mistake takes 14 lives.

US Bomb Kills Adghan Civilians by Mistake.

US Bombs Journalists by Mistake.

Canadian Soldiers Bombed by Mistake.

US Bombing Mistake Kills Afghan Civilians.

To paraphrase Ian Fleming, once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, but when you kill the wrong people over, and over, and over, that’s depraved indifference.  And it’s time for it to end.
Let’s face it, we don’t know how to fight a modern asymmetrical war.  That’s been clear for more than forty years.   Just as the British were once baffled by a ragtag U.S. militia which refused to don colorful uniforms and form into neat lines, the tactics and weapons that won World War II have been befuddled by enemies that refuse to just “come out and fight.”

It’s a self-generating problem.  The more money we spend on having the best equipped, best trained, highest tech military in the world — the more we ensure that we have a massive disparity between our forces and those of any opposition — the less likely are we to find any opponent willing to face us in pitched battle.  Instead, at least since the time of Vietnam, we find enemies that seek to nullify our military prowess by using small units, hit and run tactics, and by secreting themselves among civilian populations.  And those enemies keep winning.

We have stubbornly refused to acknowledge such enemies as a serious threat, and continue to dedicate the vast bulk of our military resources toward development of weapons and tactics that would be effective only against an opponent who deployed in a manner similar to our own.  We have systems that lay waste to fast moving armored infantry.  Our fighter  jets are ready to spar at supersonic speeds with the best any other air force can field.  Our Navy can throw shells the size of a small car into the cities of our opponents from miles off shore.  Missiles guided by wire, by laser, or by satellite are at our command.

But there are no columns of tanks advancing on West Germany.  There is no squadron of Russian Foxbats ready to stir up the theme from Top Gun.  There are no stealthy attack subs to ferret out.  No millions of communist soldiers marching toward our lines.  

Instead there are men with tubes attached to the back of pickup trucks, and more men who have learned to turn a cell phone and an old tank shell into a mine, and still more who are willing to use their own bodies as “intelligent delivery systems” far more accurate that anything guided by electronics.

Every dollar we spend making our military better, has the perverse effect of making it more worthless.

In a modern war, civilian populations are held hostage, and while our “smart” weapons may be clever enough to backtrack the flight of a rocket or mortar shell, but they’re not smart enough to kill only those manning the launcher, and not the dozens of school kids next door.  Our orbiting spy satellites can pick out movement along critical roads, but they can’t tell if the people in those trucks are insurgents on their way to an ambush, or relatives on their way to celebrate a birth.  Every time we kill an enemy, odds are we generate a new one.  It’s as if we had gone to war with starfish, and decided the way to win was slice off their arms and toss them back into the ocean.

Since World War II, we’ve concentrated on weapons that can operate remotely and from great distances.  We’ve worked to win wars without subjecting our soldiers to dangers.

From one perspective, it’s an admirable goal.  However, from any perspective, that plan is an abject failure.  

In developing push button war, we’ve not only lowered the barriers that might once have kept us from initiating conflicts, we’ve also guaranteed that we can’t win.    The attitude that lauds smart weapons and dismisses civilian deaths as “collateral damage” is the biggest generator of new conflicts ever imagined, and a certain path to defeat.  Even from the standpoint of protecting our troops, this kind of tactic has proved counterproductive, as excess force against civilians has only served to prolong conflicts and unify even the people we’re supposedly there to help against us.

While we have proved time and time again that we don’t know how to win this sort of conflict, one thing has proven singularly ineffective: air war.  Even when guided to its target by a laser or aided by the infrared vision of a hovering drone — as was the Israeli bomb at Qana — these weapons have shown themselves both ineffective at reducing enemy forces and horribly wasteful of civilian lives.

Comparisons have often been made between the civilian losses due to bombing in the Middle East and the truly horrific losses at places like Dresden or Hiroshima, but these comparisons are less than useful.  Even if you believe the terrible price extracted in those cities were worthwhile, they represented the kind of war we are not fighting — direct conflict between sovereign nations with comparable military power.  And the civilian populations of those countries were fully engaged in the production of goods to service that war.  The involvement of civilians in a modern war is much less clear, but our actions are even more objectionable.

It’s as if when confronted by a bank robbery in which the robbers are holding hostages, our solution were to just blow up the bank and call it a day.  That’s an answer that would no be acceptable in an American city, and should not be acceptable on the battlefield.

Air war had — and may still have — a purpose on the battlefield, but it has no purpose among the cities and suburbs where the bombs are now falling.  It’s not enough to seek “better bombs” with even more accurate lasers.  It’s not enough to try and be more “selective” with targets.

An abundance of evidence shows that air war kills civilians.  In fact, it’s quite likely that in most recent conflicts bombing has killed far more civilians than participants in the fight.  It’s ineffective, brutal, and completely immoral.  

And it’s time for the United States to stand up and say that they will no longer employ such tactics.  It’s time for “shock and awe” to give way to recognition, grief, and new thinking.

Originally posted at Political Cortex.