"The City"

"The calmest place in the world right now is New York City.

Everyone in the City is moving at the same pace. Everyone has his game face on. The streets are crowded.

It's a big city. What you see burning on the southern tip of Manhattan is, literally, just one square out of a thousand.

But to be here and see the two towers go down was ghastly and numbing. I could see, from the very first, that the fire buring inside the first tower that was hit would consume the building. There was no way that it could ever be extinguished that high up. And then it became clear that the fire was just burning right through the steel and that the floors above would come down.

Yet the second building hit came down first. No shock. I could have watched the first building hit come down but it was a foregone conclusion that it would so I left the roof of my building not wanting to see it, only to then see it live on TV.

Living here you tend to forget that this is a tough town, with tough people. The hospitals are turning away blood donors. If they put out a call for anything, they'll have more of it than they need in an hour.

The buses and subways are running. The grocery stores are open. And the memory of people jumping from 80 stories will be with us until and after the last terrorist is dead."

(Martin McPhillips, September 11, 2001, 6:12pm)

On Strategic Bombing

>However as anyone will tell you bombing
> is not a good strategic plan in general,
> especially when a country is being
> supplied from an external source (China,
> Russia).

That is one of the best conditions for a "strategic plan" for the use of air power, and it's also precisely the aspect in which "Rolling Thunder" was handicapped throughout its three-year campaign against North Vietnam. For one obvious thing right off the bat, the intelligence problem of target selection in a case like that is almost childishly simple in solution. The case of Japan in WW II is illuminating here in that they had a comprehensive industrial-base against which strategic air could be brought to bear, as well as widely distributed production of component products in myriad home-shops, and this meant that strategic attack was a very complex affair bearing on tactics only after equally complex economic analysis -- including the furthest reaches of "The Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" -- and even a lot of guesswork. North Vietnam had no such industrial base to speak of, and the problem of strategic attack was easily reducible to strikes against a relatively small number of precisely identifiable targets.

In mid 1964, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had worked out a list of ninety-four targets in the North, and it's instructive to note that industrial and power plants were in the small minority. The list was comprised mostly of bridges, rail, military materiel storage areas, POL ("petroleum, oil, & lubricants) storage, and airfields. The campaign against this list was projected at two to three weeks, and there is simply no question that this was achievable by US air power at that stage of the war. Consider that the first appearance of organized NVA units in the South didn't occur until August of 1964, and the importance of such a campaign starts becoming apparent. The projected JCS campaign was perfectly tailored to inhibit that sort of action: the NVA would not have been able to get involved in the South as they did because they simply would not have had the tools to do so, and no way to assemble them. There is an old adage that "amateurs study tactics, while professionals study logistics," and it's true. Logistics is where the action is, and that's a lot of the whole point of strategic bombing.

Within a context stipulating to the probity of the war -- which is certainly arguable -- the first problem is that Johnson didn't have the nerve to prosecute the war with air power. "Rolling Thunder" dragged out with "protective reaction strikes" and "graduated response", and it's simply nonsensical to call this stuff "pull[ing] out all the stops". In a very good history of that campaign, John T. Smith writes a telling sentence about the November 1964 White House policy review: "The reality was that the Government of the North was prepared to sustain any level of bombing that the Americans were politically prepared to carry out." ("Rolling Thunder", 1994, p. 42, emphasis added -- ed.)

From the perspective of nearly forty years' history, there could be all kinds of arguments about the reasons for this fact, but it's a fact, nonetheless, that Rolling Thunder is a study in the worst consequences of compromise. The United States took all the international public relations gas associated with bombing North Vietnam, and didn't achieve any of the military results. The fact is that the initiative passed to North Vietnam: they could actually control the pace and intensity of the bombing with diplomatic hints at negotiations, while they studied campaign tactics and applied the lessons to their air defence, with the help of the USSR. This last point circles back to the original aim of the JCS target list: a proper strategic campaign would have precluded Soviet aid. This fact became evident with the mining of Haiphong in 1972, after which virtually no Soviet aid reached the North.

It was "Linebacker II" in November of 1972 that "pulled out the stops", as far as they were ever pulled in the whole war. That campaign yet labored under a heritage of political meddling in military operations (the notorious "route package" system of operations-division between Air Force and Navy airpower being perhaps the most obvious). However, the original 1964 JCS target list was updated to meet the new tactical and strategic realities, the completely appalling Rules of Engagement for air operations were ditched, and it was the very first time in the war that North Vietnam understood what serious air power was all about. It's not for nothin' that Le Duc Tho decided to return to Paris negotiations after only eleven days of this sort of thing.

There are good reasons why assertions of strategic airpower as decisive remain controversial in purely military terms. World War II Japan is perhaps the best argument in favor of the thesis -- even without the matter of nuclear weapons -- but there's still a lot of room for dispute. However, it won't do at all to disparage it as "not a good strategic plan in general", because that does not account for the particular context of any given application. I, for one, have never agreed with the objection that strategic air cannot accomplish what actual infantry occupation of enemy ground can, because that does not account for the prospect of enemy surrender, or even complete destruction, under strategic attack when that can be accomplished, and the historical paucity of such episodes does not negate the possibility. But it all depends on the situation, and -- again: within context of stipulating to the war, itself -- the case of North Vietnam in 1964-65 was an excellent candidate.

~~~~~

(excerpt from Usenet post, found today while trolling 9/11 history -- written September 10)