You can't make war harmless for the warfighters
A New York Times story from Syria offers a stark reminder.
One remarkable evolution of war in my lifetime — at least as far as the U.S. is concerned — has been the way my country has been involved in combat around the world and yet has managed to keep its own casualties relatively low. I was born at the tail end of the Vietnam War, in which 58,000 service members were killed. America’s war in Iraq was a war of similar length, and featured a great deal of brutality, but featured fewer than one-tenth the American dead.
This is partly the function of American hyperpower during this era, and partly the age-old math that it’s better to kill more of their guys than they kill of yours. But it’s also a political decision: Leaders know that American deaths constrain their ability to deploy American firepower around the world. So they design strategy and build weapons systems accordingly.
That’s what happened when the U.S. went to fight ISIS in Syria, according to a dispiriting New York Times story out today.
The United States had made a strategic decision to avoid sending large numbers of ground troops to fight the Islamic State, and instead relied on airstrikes and a handful of powerful artillery batteries to, as one retired general said at the time, “pound the bejesus out of them.” The strategy worked: Islamic State positions were all but eradicated, and hardly any American troops were killed.
But it meant that a small number of troops had to fire tens of thousands of high-explosive shells — far more rounds per crew member, experts say, than any American artillery battery had fired at least since the Vietnam War.
And the thing is: Firing artillery is bad for the people doing the firing. It creates a powerful shockwave “that hit the crews like a kick to the chest. Ears rang, bones shivered, vision blurred as eyeballs momentarily compressed, and a ripple shot through every neuron in the brain like a whipcrack.”
Now imagine what it’s like to endure that process hundreds and hundreds of times.
The result:
An investigation by The New York Times found that many of the troops sent to bombard the Islamic State in 2016 and 2017 returned to the United States plagued by nightmares, panic attacks, depression and, in a few cases, hallucinations. Once-reliable Marines turned unpredictable and strange. Some are now homeless. A striking number eventually died by suicide, or tried to.
As the story makes clear, we damaged these young men — and in many cases, tossed them aside as disposable tools once the job was done.
Damn us for that.
But the artillery story isn’t an isolated one. Maybe the prime example of remote control warfighting that keeps Americans safe while putatively killing our enemies is American drone warfare. That’s been a disaster too — both for the many innocent people killed by that war, but also for the drone pilots who in many cases were fighting the war from an entirely different continent.
Drones were billed as a better way to wage war — a tool that could kill with precision from thousands of miles away, keep American service members safe and often get them home in time for dinner. The drone program started in 2001 as a small, tightly controlled operation hunting high-level terrorist targets. But during the past decade, as the battle against the Islamic State intensified and the Afghanistan war dragged on, the fleet grew larger, the targets more numerous and more commonplace. Over time, the rules meant to protect civilians broke down, recent investigations by The New York Times have shown, and the number of innocent people killed in America’s air wars grew to be far larger than the Pentagon would publicly admit.
[Snip]
Drone crews have launched more missiles and killed more people than nearly anyone else in the military in the past decade, but the military did not count them as combat troops. Because they were not deployed, they seldom got the same recovery periods or mental-health screenings as other fighters. Instead they were treated as office workers, expected to show up for endless shifts in a forever war.
Under unrelenting stress, several former crew members said, people broke down. Drinking and divorce became common. Some left the operations floor in tears. Others attempted suicide. And the military failed to recognize the full impact.
During my adult life, the United States has almost always been aware with somebody around the world. Most of the time those wars — often small, and in remote locations — fail to dent the public consciousness to any large degree. That is, I suspect, by design.
We should care about that for its own sake. In our name, great violence is done around the world, and many innocent people often suffer as a result. So even if we could inflict that violence at no cost to our people, it is worth questioning whether the gains justify the deaths.
But we should also care that despite the efforts to make war relatively anodyne for American troops, it can’t actually be done. Their bodies and psyches are still damaged by the violence they inflict. They’re doing the job we asked them to do. And all too often, we leave them to suffer on their own.