i've been doing a little research to find out how many bombs we've dropped on Iraq since the war began ... maybe some of you military types can help me out here ...
here's what i was able to find out so far ...
a recent article by Seymour Hersh (see below) reported that, according to a press release put out by the 3RD Marine Aircraft Wing, that unit alone had dropped more than "five hundred thousand tons of ordnance" ... of course, this raises additional questions ... one, how many other units are dropping bombs on Iraq and how many bombs did they drop?? and two, if we know the tonnage of ordnance dropped, how can we convert that to the number of bombs??
well, i'll leave the answer to the first question to other researchers ...
as for converting bomb tonnage into a bomb count, i found that one of the more popular types of bombs is a GPS guided bomb called a JDAM ... these bombs weigh just about one ton each ... to be conservative, i've used this to make my calculations ... i noted that there are also many bombs that weigh much less at around 500 pounds each ...
so, just for the 3RD Marine Aircraft Wing alone, the 500,000 TONS of ordnance they said they've dropped on Iraq would convert to 500,000 one TON bombs ... again, it is likely that other units have also dropped bombs on Iraq and the average bomb weight may be lower than the weight i used ... using the 500 pound bomb weight, this one unit may have dropped as many as 2 million bombs on Iraq ...
what this means is that, with its population of around 26 million people, the US has dropped a one TON bomb for every 52 Iraqi citizens ... that equates to roughly 40 pounds of explosives for each and every Iraqi citizen ... seems like we should have been able to kill off pretty much all Iraqis by now ...
source:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1128-04.htm<skip> A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.
“We’re not planning to diminish the war,” Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. Clawson’s views often mirror the thinking of the men and women around Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting—Iraqi infantry with American support and greater use of airpower. <skip>
The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: "I said to the President, 'We’re not winning the war.' And he asked, 'Are we losing?' I said, 'Not yet.'" "The President", he said, "appeared displeased" with that answer. "I tried to tell him," the former senior official said. "And he couldn’t hear it." <skip>
One person with whom the Pentagon’s top commanders have shared their private views for decades is Representative John Murtha, of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The President and his key aides were enraged when, on November 17th, Murtha gave a speech in the House calling for a withdrawal of troops within six months. The speech was filled with devastating information. For example, Murtha reported that the number of attacks in Iraq has increased from a hundred and fifty a week to more than seven hundred a week in the past year. He said that an estimated fifty thousand American soldiers will suffer “from what I call battle fatigue” in the war, and he said that the Americans were seen as “the common enemy” in Iraq. He also took issue with one of the White House’s claims—that foreign fighters were playing the major role in the insurgency. Murtha said that American soldiers “haven’t captured any in this latest activity”—the continuing battle in western Anbar province, near the border with Syria. “So this idea that they’re coming in from outside, we still think there’s only seven per cent.”
Murtha’s call for a speedy American pullout only seemed to strengthen the White House’s resolve. Administration officials “are beyond angry at him, because he is a serious threat to their policy—both on substance and politically,” the former defense official said. <skip>
The American air war inside Iraq today is perhaps the most significant—and underreported—aspect of the fight against the insurgency. The military authorities in Baghdad and Washington do not provide the press with a daily accounting of missions that Air Force, Navy, and Marine units fly or of the tonnage they drop, as was routinely done during the Vietnam War. One insight into the scope of the bombing in Iraq was supplied by the Marine Corps during the height of the siege of Falluja in the fall of 2004. “With a massive Marine air and ground offensive under way,” a Marine press release said, "Marine close air support continues to put high-tech steel on target. . . . Flying missions day and night for weeks, the fixed wing aircraft of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing are ensuring battlefield success on the front line."
Since the beginning of the war, the press release said, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped more than five hundred thousand tons of ordnance. "This number is likely to be much higher by the end of operations," Major Mike Sexton said. In the battle for the city, more than seven hundred Americans were killed or wounded; U.S. officials did not release estimates of civilian dead, but press reports at the time told of women and children killed in the bombardments.
In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased. Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border. As yet, neither Congress nor the public has engaged in a significant discussion or debate about the air war. <skip>
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