Scientific and Technical Communication: Theory, Practice and Policy | Challenging High-Tech War: Surgical Strike or Collateral Damage?

Introduction

In this essay, I discuss how the language of Cold War nuclear strategy and the language of the "hot war" in the Persian Gulf have together constructed a particular image of high-tech war. Military precision takes on a new meaning in the electronic battlefield. Now it is the amazing new weapons of war that carry out their tasks like clockwork. Missiles zero in on their targets successfully 'delivering' bombs. Things happen by remote control, taking out the messiness inherent in human combat, and rendering unassailable victories. I ask here how people who lack direct access to these events can make critical judgements regarding their media representations. For instance, when CNN tells us that what we just saw on our television screens was an U.S Patriot missile successfully destroying an Iraqi Scud, is it simply reporting a 'fact'?

The immediate problem appears to be that people lack the expertise to make such judgements. One might think that one would need to know a lot about missile technology - and that would be just the beginning. It is inconceivable that most of us could access, let alone understand, all the relevant technical information that goes into the planning and execution of today's wars. The point I am making here is that it is impossible even for the experts - who do have the information - to make foolproof evaluations. It is precisely because modern technological systems are so complex that no one person can grasp the intricate connections between people's actions and the performance of technical artifacts.

This is not an argument for ignorance. Rather, I will argue that the authoritative certainty of military pronouncements can and must be challenged, by looking for alternate interpretations of the same events. In the Gulf War, the morality of US policy depended on the image of a clean war. In the Cold War, the morality of conventional war depended on its image of moderation in comparison to the stark horror of nuclear war. Both cases depended also on a particular interpretation of modern technology as infallible. The aim here is to challenge that view by demonstrating the uncertainty of technical knowledge.

The Gulf War in the Media

Not long after the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, cracks began to show in the image of an overwhelming US triumph over Iraq. The prominent stories in the media were confined to whether the political goals were achieved. Should the US have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein? Was Iraq's military strength, particularly its nuclear capability, essentially untouched? As might be expected, these are contestable issues and it was not surprising to hear different positions expressed. However, the belief that the Gulf War was an extraordinarily successful exhibition of high-tech weaponry appeared to survive in the eyes of many military experts and peace researchers. Terms such as "smart bombs", "technowar", "surgical strikes" were routinely used by Pentagon officials, reporters and various political commentators to accompany the mesmerizing television pictures of electronic "explosions". The language conveyed the idea that this was a clean, bloodless war in which the precision of US technology took center stage, managing to pulverize the Iraqi military without significant harm to Iraqi civilians. The commentary appeared to independently support President George Bush's claim that "collateral damage" was being minimized.

The actual performance of US weapons in the war is highly controversial. Studies have since identified numerous contradictions in Pentagon information about US bombing attacks, and provided alternate judgements about the performance of the lavishly-praised Patriot and Tomahawk missiles. The national newspapers and television networks carried the occasional story on disputes to the high-tech success story, but the controversy remained on the sidelines, never attaining the status of a national issue. Certainly, it couldn't match the hoopla responsible for creating the success story in the first place. Where it was recognized that Iraqi civilian casualties were far greater than initially reported, and that there had been serious damage to the environment and civic infrastructure, the media seldom made a connection to the performance of US technology. The tale of a high-tech success continues to ensure the earmarking of federal funds for new "strategically superior" weapons programs, even as thousands of defense-related jobs are being cut. Technologies, not people, form the core of the new military. While people are dispensable, high technologies - apparently - are not.

Thus far, challenges to the high-tech success story appear to have only caused minimal "collateral damage" to the mainstream viewpoint. While sophisticated critical evaluations of government, society or culture are commonplace in the contemporary media, the same cannot be said of technology. The "gee-whiz" effect of high-tech displays and the jargon that accompanies their presentation can make it hard for reporters and the public to make their own judgements. The Pentagon's version of the high-tech war "stuck" not only because of the organization's own secrecy and tight control over information (which was truly extensive) , but also because of genuine difficulties with critically assessing news reports.

Critical reception is possible - it requires finding controversy where there appears to be none. Behind apparently consensual facts, there often are not only differences of opinion between experts, but also agreements on false grounds. One might argue that unearthing them after the fact - as I am doing here - does nothing to change the reality of what happened. However, such criticism can have a cumulative effect on future policy. Intepretations of the past shape policy debates in the present. A particular image of Vietnam - as a technical rather than a moral failure - came up time and again in Bush's Gulf War rhetoric ("kicking the Vietnam syndrome"). With the Gulf War standing as a technical - and therefore, moral - success , it will undoubtedly offer itself as a paradigm for future wars as well as for national technology policy . In the next section, I describe how the `hot' war in the Gulf was itself influenced by a particular construction of the previous `cold' war.

From Cold War to Hot War: The Attraction of Surgical Strikes

Although the war in the Gulf was "conventional" - that is, it was non-nuclear - it was shaped by Cold War thinking about nuclear strategy. Specifically, debates about the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons influenced public and expert responses to the war. At the outset, there appears to be nothing controversial about a distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons. Hiroshima is ensconced in public memory as heralding the dawn of a revolutionary nuclear age which then came to exemplify the Cold War. While nuclear policy disputes - that is, over what should be done with nuclear weapons - received a good deal of attention during the Cold War, the more esoteric arguments over the nature of nuclear weapons and the consequences of nuclear war are still obscure. Central to them is the question of how nuclear weapons differ from conventional weapons, a definition that has been shifting along with innovations in nuclear and non-nuclear military technologies.

The relevance of the nuclear-conventional distinction cannot be summed up by technical facts such as: "atomic and thermonuclear bombs work on the basis of nuclear fission and fusion respectively", or in their crudest form, "nuclear bombs yield some x times energy as conventional explosives like TNT" . Even statements which go beyond describing capabilities to describing effects - "nuclear bombs destroy life through radiation, blast, and fallout, while conventional bombs have more localized effects" - do not give the whole story. These technical descriptions do not provide the context within which the distinction is important.

First, nuclear and conventional bombs are part of weapon systems. Their performance depends on how the other components function, as well as on the performance of other weapon systems including those deployed by the enemy. Secondly, their effects depend on the strategies through which they are put to use, and in turn, on the way in which the technical plans are themselves implemented. Some nuclear strategists distinguished between nuclear and conventional weapons in terms of what they simply called "usability". Proponents of a Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) policy in the 1960s considered nuclear weapons too powerful to be usable. The principle of deterrence drew on Bernard Brodie's much-quoted assertion that nuclear weapons could only be "used" to avert wars and not to win them.

Based on estimates of explosive power or yield, and the predicted effects of heat, radiation, and blast, these experts concluded that nuclear weapons were unusable. Quite simply, they would cause too much damage for either side to be able to impose its will on the other. If wars are "the continuation of policy by other means" , nuclear war would be the ultimate non-war. Instead, it would bring complete annihilation and whatever purpose it was fought for be rendered meaningless. In the early 80s, climate scientists put forth the theory of "nuclear winter" which predicted that a large-scale nuclear war would not only kill millions of people but also make the earth uninhabitable. This again reinforced the message that nuclear weapons can serve no rational purpose in combat.

What are the problems with this interpretation of nuclear war? First, the horrific images did not strengthen calls for nuclear disarmament as one might have thought. Instead, they were used to bolster the case for keeping nuclear weapons - and in fact, building bigger and `dirtier' bombs - under the rubric of deterrence. Briefly, this oft-repeated argument went as follows: both sides know that even a conventional attack is likely to escalate into nuclear conflict; they also know that all-out nuclear warfare would destroy the world as we know it; since neither side would be irrational enough to take the risk, nuclear weapons paradoxically end up `keeping the peace' between the superpowers. Dissent from this received view was vociferous, but even here there was a nagging problem. The emphasis on the irrationality of nuclear strategy clearly suggests that conventional war can be rational. In contrast to the antiwar movement of the 60s, mainstream peace protest in the 80s was preoccupied with nuclear annihilation, setting an extreme yardstick against which destruction in "lesser" wars was implicitly judged. Some critics suggest that this fixation left the peace movement unprepared for the "conventional" war in the Persian Gulf that eventually took place.

A second debate in the 80s, spurred by further technological developments, is also relevant to the Gulf case. Some strategists, pointing to recent innovations, argued that nuclear weapons were now rationally usable. They argued that the nuclear-conventional distinction was rapidly becoming blurred with the possibility of using nuclear weapons in surgical strikes. In other words, nuclear weapons could be more precisely directed toward military targets. Thse claims were made on the basis of supposedly revolutionary advancements in missile accuracy. Others, however, argued that it was the new-found precision of missiles that made nuclear weapons special. Nuclear weapons, in this case, were distinguished from conventional weapons not in terms of their explosive power, but in terms of their speed and precision in method of delivery.

War has always involved damage to civilian infrastructure and population. Even when wars were officially bounded within a space called the battlefield or "combat zone" as we now call it, violence typically spilled into civilian spaces. However, the brutal experiences of the twentieth century has simultaneously led to widespread awareness and condemnation of war, especially in the liberal democracies. Public opinion does not take kindly to large numbers of civilian war casualties. (Some scholars attribute this to television's ability to make vivid the horrors of war, while others argue that the style of reportage creates a grand spectacle out of suffering and leaves the public without active strategies of opposition). In this context, the concept of a surgical strike is attractive since - according to one meaning - it promises to restrict damage to purely military spaces and spare civilian ones. This was the sense in which the term was used in the Gulf War. However, as described below, the term has other meanings which suggest quite different policies.

In the early days of airpower and into the first fifteen years of the nuclear age, the dominant attack strategy was all-out war - the very opposite of a surgical strike. Giulo Douhet, Italian theorist of air power, is credited with the argument that a nation could achieve victory simply through the psychological devastation wreaked by aerial bombing attacks on the opponent's territory - rather than having to take on and defeat the armed forces of the enemy. This is known as strategic bombing. Until the coming of the atomic bomb in the 1940s, the costs of such a campaign appeared to outweigh the benefits. Promising `more bang for the buck', atomic power appeared to be a relatively cheap way of achieving this capability. The argument for strategic bombing seemed further strengthened with the development of the hydrogen bomb and the intercontinental missile in the 1950s. This meant that war (at least in the game-like models of nuclear strategists) would involve not only armed forces, but entire civilian populations. In these scenarios, the explicit targeting of the enemy's civilians ("city-busting" as it was called) common in the two world wars, became central to military strategy.

The notion of surgical strikes became popular during the efforts in the mid-60s to "tame" nuclear weapons. With missiles apparently becoming highly accurate, the US began to build smaller nuclear weapons with less explosive yield but more precision . The yield of these so-called tactical weapons would be in the range of a few kilotons rather than megatons. Some strategists described the possibility of surgical strikes using these weapons to selectively target and destroy only the Soviet Union's military resources (for example, weapons in storage or being launched). The economic infrastructure and civilian population would largely be spared. For others, however, surgical strikes simply meant more "limited" strikes - for instance, one that would kill "only" a few million people rather than a whole population. Given the knowledge that nuclear attacks have side-effects and would destroy areas around the target through fallout, this was probably more realistic.

The flexibility of the term enabled military officials to justify civilian casualties and still represent the war as a "surgery". During the Gulf War, military spokesmen adopted both positions - one, that the war was "clean", and two, responding that civilian deaths were only to be expected, when confronted with such evidence. Simply demonstrating the falsity of the original claim for a surgical strike was not sufficient to destroy its credibility - not so long as its meaning could be shifted. Public critics must therefore realize that technical terms are conceptually slippery.

In fact, I want to argue here that the relevant distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons is fundamentally linguistic. This is not to ignore the physical differences in the structure of the two weapon-types. Neither, does it take away from the fact that nuclear war will be devastating in the extent and depth of destruction. Rather, the point is to focus on the consequences of drawing a distinction. We have seen the shifts in the grounds by which the nuclear is said to differ from the conventional - from "raw destructive power" or "explosive yield" to "method of delivery" or missile accuracy - until the distinction itself begins to blur. If accuracy is ultimately more important than yield, then conventional weapons become more like nuclear weapons and vice versa. The following two propositions describe the way in which military strategists have invoked this argument to strengthen their case for a new form of high-tech, surgical war.

1.) If conventional warheads can also be carried on many types of ultra-precise missiles, innovation in accuracy constitutes a revolution in conventional weapons. This amounts to a "nuclearization" of conventional weapons. PGMs (precision-guided munitions) or "smart missiles" as they were called in the Gulf War, represent the premier example of this "other" revolution in weaponry.

2.) If nuclear weapons are both smaller and more precise due to the highly accurate missiles, they are virtually no different from conventional weapons and can be rationally used in a war. This is the "conventionalization" of nuclear weapons.

Came the Gulf War and a third way in which the nuclear and conventional worlds collided - this time, not in terms of mere weapon capability, but in terms of their use. Some uranium was used in US tanks, a fact that was revealed after the war but never gained much attention. In using the fundamental material of nuclear bombs in a conventional guise, this represented a clear case of the blurring of the two worlds. The US also attacked an Iraqi nuclear facility, an act prohibited by the Geneva Protocols. Since it was an attack with a non-nuclear missile, it would not normally be classified as a nuclear strike. However, if one stops to think about it, there is a case to be made for broadening the definition because it does involve blowing up nuclear material (which is why it is banned in the first place).

Challenging Accuracy

Assumptions about missile accuracy were central not only to debates on the nuclear-conventional distinction in the '80s, but also in media reports on the Gulf War. Nuclear hawks arguing that nuclear war could be rational, implicitly accepted the untested claims of accuracy. Likewise, during the Gulf War, reporters and many defense analysts assumed that the "real world" or battlefield test of accuracy was in fact successful. In both these contexts, the assumption of accuracy was challenged from the margins.

Even before many high-tech weapons of the Cold War were "tested" in the Gulf War, some scholars had questioned the belief in their accuracy. Donald MacKenzie's Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance is the premier example of such a scholarly challenge. Among other things, he pointed out the problems of a.) deciding what counts as a successful test of accuracy and b.) extrapolating from test conditions to the conditions of war. Even the most technical aspects of these judgements always involved political choices and constraints. Hence, he argued, they could not be treated as simple technical facts.

With the coming of the Gulf War, it seemed that such skepticism was misplaced. "Smart bombs" - first used in the Vietnam War, but much refined since - appeared to be a tremendous success. This view has been challenged in at least two ways. One group of experts argue that there is no natural consensus on what counts as success. A missile's accuracy cannot be readily identified especially under the chaotic conditions of war.

A second approach maintains that accuracy is itself not important. With respect to nuclear strategy, intelligence analyst Angelo Codevilla argued that simple quantitative analysis - performing headcounts of missile warheads or missile capabilities - is useless if unrelated to a sense of the specific job to be done. According to him, "in the 1980s as missiles moved out of silos, nuclear yield and accuracy became less important than real-time intelligence on the location of mobile missiles, and on-line targeting of offensive warheads." (p.421). He argued that the worth of any weapon lies in the context of its use, which means that the analyst must take into account the interplay between offense and defense, between shooting at a real target and a synthetic ghost. In other words, information is more important than either yield or accuracy.

In his commentary on Desert Storm, Codevilla claimed that it was "magnificient" and "technically flawless" (obviously assuming that the weapons were as successful as the Pentagon reported) but that it did not constitute a "real" war. Following the 19th century strategist Carl von Clausewitz, he pointed out that a "real" war requires the careful mapping of political objectives, and the application of means proportionate to the ends. Like some other military theorists who already recognized this before the Gulf War , Codevilla emphasized that an impressive high-tech display does not itself make a war. Thus, it seems that the irrationality of nuclear war (discussed above) applies also to modern "conventional" wars, further blurring the distinction between the conventional and the nuclear.

Amidst all this talk about rational war - i.e., the ability of the victorious nation to impose its will on the opponent - we must remember that "non-wars" or irrational wars are capable of producing the kind of destruction and damage associated with "real" wars. The synthetic target that Codevilla dismisses need not be a harmless one. In the Gulf War, the targets were not "ghosts", but often, civilians and the infrastructural sources of their livelihood. Hence we now turn to the studies that strip off the clean, surgical image of the Gulf war.

War on Techno-War

Why should we pay attention to the controversy over the technowar in the Gulf? There are at least two reasons. One, the perceived success of these weapons created and reinforced the idea of the war as "clean". For instance, a Newsweek cover story was entitled "The New Science of War: How Many Lives Can It Save?" [February 18, 1991]. The other is that the image of success is used to justify the continuation of expensive, high-tech programs. Patriot and Tomahawk manufacturers requested more federal contracts on the basis of the supposed success of their weapons. Far from stopping with military policy, the shadow of the Gulf War (and of the Cold War) also extends to technology and industrial policy more generally. High-technology has acquired a special prominence in post-Cold war policy with numerous business and policy experts claiming that the US must keep its lead in the area to be economically `competitive'. Research programs for `smart' technologies are justified without serious debate on whether they serve human needs.

The public image of Desert Storm was of "smart" bombs, stealth fighter aircraft and other high-precision weapons. Soon after the end of the war, Air Force Chief Merrill McPeak revealed that the US used far more "low-tech" or "dumb" bombs in its air attack. In fact, the number of precision bombs was only seven percent of the total tonnage dropped! McPeak also said that on the whole US bombs missed their targets about 70 percent of the time. He managed to stem damage to the image of a high-tech success by claiming that the precision bombs alone had a 90 percent success rate. According to his report, the poor overall success rate was primarily due to the failure of crude, "low-tech" (that is, unguided) bombs which hit their targets only about 25 percent of the time. Thus, while it punctured the image of a clean war somewhat, it did not detract from the idea that high-tech is synonymous with precision.

However, the US Department of Defense's final report on the war had much more mixed reviews. One of its findings was that the intelligence agencies could not handle the mammoth amounts of information that was part of the air campaign against Iraq. The report claimed that target restrictions could be conveyed to the air forces on time, with the result that damage to Iraqi civilian infrastructure was far more than intended. More interestingly, it noted that the agencies involved had been caught in extended disputes about how the war had been conducted, and how the outcomes were to be interpreted. As we said before, even experts - those people mostly closely involved in the planning and execution of technical plans - rarely ever agree on an understanding of what are highly complex actions. Comprehending the outcomes of high-tech operations cannot be done on the basis of straightforward technical rules; they have to be constructed through language which means that one ends up with multiple meanings of the `same' event. The key point to remember here is that the different meanings do not all have the same status. Some are clearly more privileged than others, which leaves us with the challenge of unmasking their power.

So, for instance, even during the war, some people expressed doubts about the apparent success of the air raids. These tended to get buried under the blitz of rave reviews. Defense analyst Pierre Sprey pointed out that the Pentagon was being forced to retarget several areas where it had hurriedly claimed success . In a postwar hearing of the Armed Services Committe, Sprey charged the Pentagon with outright massaging of the data. According to his calculations, the US forces in the first few weeks of the war spent an average of 24 smart bombs for each successful targeting of an Iraqi bridge. Television pictures of the air strikes did not lie - they were merely restricted to those cases of successful hits. What the public did not see on their television screens revealed far more about the accuracy of the smart bombs than what what they did see.

Sprey and other former Pentagon officials also presented evidence showing that crude, "low-tech" aircraft and missiles were far more effective than their hyped high-tech counterparts. Journalist Gregg Easterbrook observed that since a thousand-dollar low tech weapon was working just as well as a million-dollar high tech one, there was no substance to the claim that only expensive hardware could keep the nation secure . Besides, he said, by zeroing in on things and skirting people, these smart bombs were not producing the kind of casualties that could potentially shock Iraq into surrender. For Easterbrook, there wasn't enough collateral damage, which was the problem. For him, the level of sophistication achieved by expensive high-tech weaponry came at the expense of the ability to force defeat on the enemy - one that could only result from extensive civilian damage as suggested by the original theorists of strategic bombing.

Quite apart from the morally reprehensible character of a policy that relies on civilian massacre, it has become increasingly clear that even extensive damage of that sort need not necessarily lead to surrender. Saddam Hussein has managed to hold on to power despite an economy and infrastructure wrecked by the war. Some studies suggest that the so-called war was indeed not a war at all, it was effectively a massacre whose nature was obscured by the televised high-tech spectacle. William Merrin, reflecting on the now infamous - but, misinterpreted - claim by a French theorist that "the Gulf war never happened" , points out that war involves reciprocity, playing by certain rules. In this case, there was no real engagement between the two sides to merit its label as a `war'.

What is Meant by Success?

A number of figures on success rates were tossed around by spokesmen during and after the war. One obvious problem with these is the verification of the exact numbers. The Pentagon tended to favor inflated success rate figures, some of which the discriminating judge might discount. More interesting than disputes over the exact figures is the uncertainty over what the figures meant. Pentagon sources and analysts were using different definitions of success. Further, some were applying a specific sense of success to numbers derived from another sense. For instance, General Norman Schwarzkopf would cite 80 percent success rates, giving the impression that the ordnances hit their intended targets this often. It turned out that in Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell's account, 80 percent success rates simply stood for those bombs that were successfully delivered, irrespective of whether they hit their targets. Note also that even hitting a target need not guarantee success in the sense of completely destroying it.

In the case of US defense missiles (such as the Patriot) it was not clear whether they were successful even when they struck the Iraqi missile. Reporters hailed the magnificent pictures on our television screens as the successful interception of Iraqi Scud missiles by US Patriots. However, the Patriot's goal is to destroy the Scud before the latter's bomb causes any damage. Military expert and MIT Professor Theodore Postol conducted a detailed analysis arguing that the Patriot was unsuccessful in this respect. He argued that the Patriots typically struck the Scuds only after their warheads had already exploded. A second issue, harder to determine, is to ask whether the Patriot missile which has intercepted a Scud was actually responsible for the Scud's failure to deliver its "warhead". In this latter case, a particular Scud's poor design could make the Patriot appear successful. A similar criticism has been made in the case of the supposed success of the Tomahawk missile.

Lessons from the Study of Techno-War

Media reports do not pay attention to the nuances of meaning in the effort to bring us "the news". It is important for citizens to note what they do not say as much as what they do. The problem is illustrated in the case of television networks showing the successful working of a smart bomb, but failing to show the numerous occasions of failure. Even where a newspaper or a television story seems to present opposing sides of an issue, it is important to remember that there might be other perspectives unrepresented in the debate.

I have suggested in this essay that the evaluation of technologies is essentially linguistic. Since technical facts shift in meaning, the dogged analyst of technology-based issues must try to uncover the shifts underlying an apparent consensus. This is not an idle exercise. It does not mean that technical claims are simply `cooked up', nor that they have no real consequences. On the contrary, different meanings attached to the "same" fact have different political implications for both policy-makers and public group activists. For instance, a sharp distinction between nuclear and conventional war may have kept large sections of the peace movement focusing its energies on the former and neglecting the importance of the latter. On the other hand, some military strategists used the same `fact' to argue for a defense policy that relied on the nuclear deterrent. In blurring the distinction, military hawks argued that nuclear war could be rational. However, peace activists could use the same principle to argue that conventional war is itself irrational.

All of this may suggest that the critical consumer of mainstream policy stories has to spend a great deal of time digging around and excavating alternate interpretations of the technical facts. Only a few people will have the time and resources to embark on this kind of response to the numerous technically complex issues that confront us. However, there are more general lessons to be drawn from this for students and citizens. For one, when confronted with claims such as statistical data on success (or failure) rates, we might ask ourselves - well, how could the person actually acquire this information? What are the circumstances under which such an observation could be done? If it is a messy situation, as in a war, there are bound to problems of assessment simply because of difficulties in gathering accurate data and interpreting them.

But more importantly, we might also challenge the notion all policy debates have to rely on technical consensus. For instance, in the Gulf case, it makes no difference whether we know exactly how many deaths resulted from the US campaign or the dollar figure of damages to Iraq's infrastructure. The morality of the war should not rest on experts coming to agree on these figures and then deciding if they were too high or low enough. As we have seen, expert consensus is unlikely on these matters, and should not presume to colonize all debate on the topic. Personal experiences and observations also make a vivid case and should be allowed to be included as such. After all, the experts are themselves influenced by their personal and collective biases in interpreting the `facts' for our consumption.

Notes

For example, Anatol Rapoport in his Peace: An Idea whose Time has Come, 1992, University of Michigan Press, and Eugene Skolnikoff in his The Elusive Transformation: Science, Technology and the Evolution of International Politics, 1993, Princeton University Press.

On this aspect, see Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War, 1992, Boulder; Westview Press.

With its technical success - a clean war in which only military targets were destroyed - the war gives the US the moral high ground. While Iraq was the villain that infringed on the sovereignty of another nation-state, the US played by the rules and set Kuwait (and ostensibly, Iraqi civilians) free.

In the debate over Bosnia, politicians like Bob Dole who were calling for air-strikes against Serb strongholds invoked the Gulf experience in support of the possibility of surgical strikes. Later on, when cruise missiles were deployed, they did not have the kind of decisive impact that was hoped for.

Books on nuclear policy often open with such statements which imply (even if not intentionally) that the difference is that simple.

See Gregg Herken's Counsels of War, 1985, Alfred Knopf.

We must keep in mind that not all strategists agreed on this point. The argument that nuclear war was "unthinkable" prompted a famous rejoinder from Herman Kahn (Thinking about the Unthinkable, 1962, Horizon Press). He advocated in the 60s, a view which gained prominence in the Nuclear Utilizations Theories (NUTS) of the 80s - namely, that nuclear weapons were usable in the conventional sense.

This is the well-known definition of war proposed by the nineteenth-century Prussian general and strategist, Carl von Clausewitz in his treatise, On War. For example, Morton Halperin, 1987, The Nuclear Fallacy: Dispelling the Myth of Nuclear Strategy, Ballinger.

Michael Klare, 1991, "The Peace Movement's Next Steps", The Nation, vol. 252, no. 11, March 25, pp. 361-63. See also Editorial in The Nation, 1991, "Movement Gap", vol. 253, no. 15, November 4.

Martin van Creveld, 1989, Technology and War: from 2000 B.C to the present, New York: Free Press.

"This is a war after all. What do you expect?" being a common response.

This might partly explain the failure of former Attorney-General Ramsey Clark's campaign against the officials involved in the Gulf War. His monograph (War Crimes in the Gulf, edited by Ramsey Clark, 1992, Maisonneuve Press) documenting US crimes in the war caused barely a stir.

The "revolution" in conventional weapons has been discussed by Jorma Miettinen, 1977, "Can Conventional New Technologies and New Tactics replace Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Europe" in Arms Control and Technological Innovation (edited by D. Carlton and C. Schaerf, London: Croom Helm) and Philip Webber, New Defence Strategies for the 1990s, 1990 Reports after the war revealed that the US considered using such a `mini-nuke' against Iraq.

1990, MIT Press

Angelo Codevilla, 1992, Informing Statecraft, Free Press.

Angelo Codevilla, 1992, "Magnificent, but was it War?", Commentary, April, pp. 15-20.

For example, Evan Luard, 1988,The Blunted Sword: The Erosion of Military Power in Modern World Politics, I. B. Tauris Publishers.

U.S. Department of Defense, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War: Final Report. Washington, 1992. Cited in David Campbell, Politics without Principle: Sovereignty, ethics, and the narratives of the Gulf War, 1993, Lynne Riener Publishers.

See Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War

"High Tech" Isn't Everything. Newsweek, February 18, 1991, p. 49.

William Merrin, "Uncritical criticism: Norris, Baudrillard and the Gulf War", Economy and Society, v. 23, n. 4, November 1994, pp. 433-58.

See William Safire, 1991, "The Great Scud-Patriot Mystery", New York Times, March 7, p. A 25; Jeffrey Smith, 1991, "Patriot Missiles less effective in Israel", Washington Post, April 26, p. A41 as well as Kellner's The Persian Gulf TV War on the Patriot controversy.

Eric Arnett, "Awestruck Press does Tomahawk PR", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July 1991.

An excellent guide to news coverage by the corporate media is Martin Lee and Norman Solomon, 1992, Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media, Lyle Stuart Books.

Challenging High-Tech War:
Surgical Strike or Collateral Damage?

Sujatha Raman

Book Contents

Challenging High-Tech War