Military superiority; moral inferiority

NY Times, December 24, 2001

THE AIR CAMPAIGN
Use of Pinpoint Air Power Comes of Age in New War
By ERIC SCHMITT and JAMES DAO
 
WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 — At a pivotal moment in the siege of Kunduz late 
last month, a Northern Alliance commander urgently requested American 
airstrikes against several hundred Taliban soldiers and tanks massing 
on a ridge more than a mile from the city. He pleaded that the attack 
be launched within 24 hours.

A Special Operations ground spotter immediately radioed an American 
command center in Saudi Arabia, which ordered a nearby B-52 to rain 
16 cluster bombs on the enemy forces. Flying at 30,000 feet, the 
bomber never saw its prey. But the spotter used a laser pointer to 
guide the bombs, which carried new devices that kept them on course 
through buffeting winds, enabling them to spew antiarmor bomblets 
with deadly precision.

The Taliban force was hit not in 24 hours, but in 19 minutes. 

"That really was another turning point," said a senior Air Force 
official deeply involved in the air campaign in Afghanistan. "All 
these things gave confidence to the Northern Alliance, and it really 
was a shock to the Taliban."

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/24/international/24WEAP.html

===

Sven Lindqvist, "Exterminate All the Brutes" (The New Press, 1996):

At the battle of Omdurman, the entire Sudanese army was annihilated 
without once having got their enemy within gunshot.

The art of killing from a distance became a European specialty very 
early on. The arms race between coastal states of Europe in the 
seventeenth century created fleets that were capable of achieving 
strategic goals far away from the home country. Their cannons could 
shatter hitherto impregnable fortresses and were even more effective 
against defenseless villages.

Preindustrial Europe had little that was in demand in the rest of the 
world. Our most important export was force. All over the rest of the 
world, we were regarded at the time as nomadic warriors in the style 
of the Mongols and the Tartars. They reigned supreme from the backs 
of horses, we from the decks of ships.

Our cannons met little resistance among the peoples who were more 
advanced than we were. The Moguls in India had no ships able to 
withstand artillery fire or carry heavy guns. Instead of building up 
a fleet, the Moguls chose to purchase defense services from European 
states, which thus were soon in a position to take over the part of 
rulers in India.

The Chinese had discovered gunpowder in the tenth century and had 
cast the first cannon in the middle of the thirteenth. But they felt 
so safe in their part of the world that, from the middle of the 
sixteenth century onward, they refrained from participating in the 
naval arms race.

Thus the backward and poorly resourced Europe of the sixteenth 
century acquired a monopoly on ocean-going ships with guns capable of 
spreading death and destruction across huge distances. Europeans 
became the gods of cannons that killed long before the weapons of 
their opponents could reach them.

Three hundred years later, those gods had conquered a third of the 
world. Ultimately, their realm rested on the power of their ships' 
guns.

But most of the inhabited world at the beginning of the nineteenth 
century lay out of reach of naval artillery.

So it was a discovery of great military significance when Robert 
Fulton got the first steam-driven boat to head up the Hudson River. 
Soon hundreds of steamers were to be found on the rivers of Europe. 
In the middle of the nineteenth century, steamers started carrying 
European cannons deep into the interior of Asia and Africa. With that 
a new epoch in the history of imperialism was introduced.

This became a new epoch in the history of racism. Too many Europeans 
interpreted military superiority as intellectual and even biological 
superiority.

Nemesis is the name of the Greek goddess of revenge, the punisher of 
pride and arrogance. With profound historical irony, that was the 
name of the first steamer in 1842 to tow British warships up the 
Yellow River and the Great Canal in the direction of Peking.

Soon steamers were no longer used as tugs of the fleet, but were 
equipped with artillery of their own. The "gunboat" became a symbol 
of imperialism on all the major African rivers-the Nile, the Niger, 
and the Congo-making it possible for Europeans to control huge, 
hitherto inaccessible areas by force of arms.

The steamer was portrayed as a bearer of light and righteousness. If 
the creator of the steam engine in his heaven is able to look down on 
the success of his discovery here on earth, wrote Macgre-gor Laird in 
Narrative of an Expedition into the Interior of Africa by the River 
Niger (1837), then hardly any application of it would give him 
greater satisfaction than to see hundreds of steamers "carrying the 
glad tidings of'peace and goodwill toward men' to the dark places of 
the earth which are now filled with cruelty."

That was the official rhetoric. At Omdurman it was demonstrated that 
the gunboat also had die ability to annihilate its opponents from a 
safe distance.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, small arms in the third 
world were able to measure up to those of Europe. The standard weapon 
was a muzzle-loaded, smooth-bored flintlock musket, which was also 
manufactured by village smiths in Africa.

The musket was a frightening weapon for those hearing it for the 
first time. But its range was only a hundred yards. It took at least 
a minute to load the gun between each shot. Even in dry weather, 
three shots out often failed, and in wet weather the muskets ceased 
functioning altogether.

A skilled archer still fired more quickly, more surely, and further. 
He was inferior only in his ability to shoot through armor.

So the colonial wars of the first half of the nineteenth century were 
lengthy and expensive. Although the French had an army of a hundred 
thousand men in Algeria, they advanced only very slowly, as the arms 
of the infantry on both sides were quite comparable.

But with the percussion cap came a musket that failed only five shots 
in a thousand, and then accuracy improved with grooved barrels.

In 1853, the British began replacing their old muskets with Enfield 
rifles, effective at a range of five hundred yards and firing more 
quickly because the bullet was enclosed in a paper cartridge. The 
French brought in a similar rifle. Both were used first in the 
colonies.

But these weapons were still slow and difficult to handle. They 
emitted puffs of smoke, which revealed where the marksman was, and 
the sensitive paper cartridges absorbed the damp. The soldier also 
had to stand up while reloading.

Prussia replaced its muzzle loaders with the breech-loaded Dreyse 
rifle. This was tested for the first time in 1866 in the 
Prusso-Austrian war over hegemony in Germany. During the battle of 
Sadowa, the Prussians lay on the ground and with their Dreyse rifles 
fired seven shots in the time it took the Austrians, standing up, to 
load and fire one shot. The outcome was obvious.

A race now began between European states to replace muskets with 
breech loaders. The British developed the paper cartridge into a 
brass cartridge, which protected the gunpowder during transport, kept 
in the smoke fumes when the shot was fired, and hurled the bullet 
three times as far as the Dreyse rifle did.

In 1869, the British abandoned the Enfield and went over to the 
Martini-Henry, the first really good weapon of the new generation: 
swift, accurate, insensitive to damp and jolts. The French came next 
with their Gras rifle, and the Prussians with the Mauser.

Thus Europeans were superior to every conceivable opponent from other 
continents. The gods of arms conquered another third of the world. 
The new arms made it possible even for a lone European traveler in 
Africa to practice almost unlimited brutality and go unpunished. The 
founder of the German East Africa colony, Carl Peters, describes in 
New Light on Dark Africa (1891) how he forced the Vagogo people into 
submission.

The chieftain's son came to Peters's camp and placed himself "quite 
unembarrassed" in the entrance of Peters's tent. "At my order to 
remove himself, he only replied with a wide grin and, quite 
untroubled, remained where he was."

Peters then has him flogged with the hippo whip. At his screams, the 
Vagogo warriors come racing in to try to free him. Peters fires "into 
the heap" and kills one of them.

Half an hour later, the Sultan sends a messenger requesting peace. 
Peters's reply: "The Sultan shall have peace, but eternal peace. I 
shall show the Vagogo what the Germans are! Plunder the villages, 
throw fire into the houses, and smash everything that will not burn."

The houses turned out to be difficult to burn and had to be destroyed 
with axes. Meanwhile the Vagogo gather and try to defend their homes. 
Peters says to his men:

"I shall show you what kind of mob we have here before us. Stay here, 
and alone I shall put the Vagogo to flight."

"With these words, I walked toward them shouting hurrah, and hundreds 
of them ran like a flock of sheep.

"I do not mention this in any way to make out our own circumstances 
as anything heroic, but only to show what kind of people these 
Africans in general are and what exaggerated ideas people in Europe 
have of their fighting abilities and the means required for their 
suppression.

"At about three, I marched further south toward the other villages. 
The same spectacle everywhere! After brief resistance, the Vagogo 
took flight, torches were thrown into the houses, and axes worked to 
destroy all that the fire did not achieve. So by half past four 
twelve villages had been burned down. . . . My gun had become so hot 
from so much firing I could hardly hold it."

Before Peters leaves the villages, he has the Vagogo told that I now 
they know him a little better. He intends to stay as long as any one 
of them is still alive, any village is still standing, and any ox 
remains to be taken away.

The Sultan then asks to hear the conditions for peace. "Tell the 
Sultan I do not wish for any peace with him. The I Vagogo are liars 
and must be eliminated from the earth. But if the Sultan wishes to be 
slave to the Germans, then he and his people | may possibly be 
allowed to live."

At dawn, the Sultan sends thirty-six oxen and other gifts. "I then 
persuaded myself to grant him a treaty in which he was placed I under 
German supremacy."

With the aid of these new weapons, colonial conquests became I 
unprecedentedly cost-effective. In many cases, expenses were largely 
limited to the cartridges needed for the killings.

Carl Peters was appointed German commissioner over the I areas he had 
conquered. In the spring of 1897, he was brought to court in Berlin. 
His trial caused a scandal and received a great deal of attention 
even in the British press. He was found guilty of the murder of a 
black mistress. What was actually being condemned was not the murder 
but the sexual relationship. The innumerable murders Peters had 
committed during the conquest of the German East Africa colony were 
considered quite natural and went unpunished.

-- 
Louis Proyect, lnp3@panix.com on 12/24/2001

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