Conclusion
“All of a sudden, the Air House would be gone. Poof.”
When I was writing The Bomber Mafia, I spent an evening at the Air House, in Fort Myer, across the Potomac River from Washington, DC. It is the official residence of the chief of staff of the Air Force. I mentioned this night at the beginning of this book. The then Air Force chief of staff, General David Goldfein, invited me to sit and talk with a group of his fellow Air Force generals.
The Air House is on a street lined with gracious Victorian homes. The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff lives on that street. The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who joined us as well, lives next door. Across the street is the field where the Wright brothers gave their first aerial demonstration to the Army brass. Inside the house, on a wall of the dining room, are photographs, arranged in order, of everyone who has occupied the top post at the Air Force since it was established as a separate service, in 1947. I stood in front of those photographs for a long time, looking at all the names and faces I had been reading and hearing about. And in the top row, fifth from the left, was Curtis LeMay, scowling at the camera.i
It was a hot summer night. We sat outside in deck chairs—five of us. Planes roared overhead as they took off from nearby Reagan National Airport. A big air-conditioning unit hemmed and hawed. Mosquitoes buzzed about happily. And the generals talked about the wars they fought: Kosovo. Desert Storm. Afghanistan. Some of them had fathers who served in Vietnam and grandfathers who served in World War II—so they had a sense, a personal sense, of how things used to be and how things have changed.
One of the generals told a story about his time in western Afghanistan. He’d gotten a call from a group of soldiers. They’d been attacked.
I’ve got a guy on the ground talking to me on a radio, and you can hear the fifty-caliber machine guns going off all around him. He says, “I’m surrounded on three sides. I’m taking effective fire. I’ve got guys wounded in my compound. We’re going to get overrun.”
The troops on the ground needed air cover. But if the bomb missed by even ten yards, it would take out the US troops. He goes on: “So three different bombs [land] within twenty meters of this guy, taking out three different buildings, and the guy [survives] with his team. That’s how precise precision-guided bombs can be.”
Goldfein pointed to the long rows of homes on either side of the Air House. He said his father, who flew an F-4 fighter jet in Vietnam, could have dropped six bombs on that street and been reasonably sure that at least one or two would hit the Air House. By contrast, Goldfein said, “his son rolls into Desert Storm, and I can tell you…that with 89 percent confidence I’m going to have my bombs hit that building.”
But just a few years after the US invasion of Kuwait, General Goldfein was leading a squadron into Kosovo. And by that point, he said, he would have been confident that he could take out not simply the Air House but a specific wing of the Air House.
Okay, so now you roll forward from then to today. Today, the expectation is that a young pilot can hit just above the pinnacle at the base of the chimney. And…if he didn’t hit that, then that’s a miss. That level of precision. And…the reason I use that as an example is that the target is an individual who’s in that room. And I don’t want to destroy the floors below it. We do that all the time. That’s the level of precision we’ve achieved.
None of the generals that evening claimed that this precision-bombing revolution had perfected war, or solved war. It has its own set of drawbacks. If your target is a single man inside a room, then you have to have intelligence good enough to tell you that this is the man you want. And when you have a way of hitting a man inside a room, then it becomes awfully easy to decide to strike, doesn’t it? They all worried about that fact: the cleaner and more precise a bomber gets, the more tempting it is to use that bomber—even when you shouldn’t.
Still, think about this. In 1945, someone who wanted to take out that house Goldfein was pointing at might have come in with an armada of bombers, a few thousand tons of napalm, and burned everything to the ground for miles around—Washington, DC, across the river; Arlington, Virginia, on the other side of the base.
There is a set of moral problems that can be resolved only with the application of conscience and will. Those are the hardest kinds of problems. But there are other problems that can be resolved with the application of human ingenuity. The genius of the Bomber Mafia was to understand that distinction—and to say, We don’t have to slaughter the innocent, burn them beyond recognition, in pursuit of our military goals. We can do better. And they were right.ii