War by Remote
How armchair generals pretend they’re on the front lines.
To hear our government talk, all is going well with Operation Inherent Resolve, the war against the Islamic State. “Today, we have heard from the secretary that the strategy is sound, the strategy is working,” said a senior military official following Defense Secretary Carter’s recent conclave of three- and four-star generals in Kuwait. Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry recently announced the elimination of “fifty percent” of the enemy’s top command and the recapture of 270 square miles from the Islamic State. Finally, it might seem, years of bloody experience are paying off, and we have learned how to fight a flexible, loosely organized enemy and win.
Unfortunately, news from the front line suggests otherwise. “The level of centralized execution, bureaucracy, and politics is staggering,” reported an embittered A-10 combat pilot in an email that has gone viral in the defense community. “In most cases, unless a general officer can look at a video picture from a [drone] over a satellite link, I cannot get authority to engage. . . . The institutional fear of making a mistake, that has crept into the central mindset of the military leadership, is endemic.” As a result, he recounts recently spending hours watching “a couple hundred small tanker trucks lined up at an oilfield in ISIS-held northeast Syria”—which he could easily have destroyed in minutes—“go unfettered.”
http://harpers.org/blog/2015/03/war-by-remote/
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