Empire of Destruction
Precision Warfare? Don't Make Me Laugh

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176310/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_bombing_the_rubble/
Date Written:  2017-07-20
Publisher:  TomDispatch.com
Year Published:  2017
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21054

A single word to summarize American war-making in this last decade and a half: rubble. It's been a painfully apt term since September 11, 2001. In addition, to catch the essence of such war in this century, two new words might be useful: rubblize and rubblization.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

In the 15-plus years since 9/11, parts of an expanding swathe of the planet -- from Pakistan's borderlands in South Asia to Libya in North Africa -- were catastrophically unsettled. Tiny groups of Islamic terrorists multiplied exponentially into both local and transnational organizations, spreading across the region with the help of American "precision" warfare and the anger it stirred among helpless civilian populations. States began to totter or fail. Countries essentially collapsed, loosing a tide of refugees on the world, as year after year, the U.S. military, its Special Operations forces, and the CIA were increasingly deployed in one fashion or another in one country after another.

Though in case after case the results were visibly disastrous, like so many addicts, the three post-9/11 administrations in Washington seemed incapable of drawing the obvious conclusions and instead continued to do more of the same (with modest adjustments of one sort of another). The results, unsurprisingly enough, were similarly disappointing or disastrous.

Despite the doubts about such a form of global warfare that candidate Trump raised during the 2016 election campaign, the process has only escalated in the first months of his presidency. Washington, it seems, just can't help itself in its drive to pursue this version of war in all its grim imprecision to its increasingly imprecise but predictably destructive conclusions. Worse yet, if the leading military and political figures in Washington have their way, none of this may end in our lifetime. (In recent years, for example, the Pentagon and those who channel its thoughts have begun speaking of a "generational approach" or a "generational struggle" in Afghanistan.)