----- Original Message -----
From: Rolf Martens
Newsgroups:
alt.politics.radical-left,alt.activism,soc.culture.yugoslavia,soc.culture.slovenia
Sent: Thursday, May 13, 1999 8:10 PM
Subject: UNITE! Info #98en: A US writer on bomb
"economics"
[Posted: 13.05.99]
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INTRO NOTE:
Below is reproduced an article by James K. Galbraith on the
"efficiency", as seen from the standpoint of the US establish-
ment, of bombing campaigns such as the present, criminal, one
directed against Yugoslavia. Needless to say, the political
views stated do not coincide with mine, and for the correct-
ness of various detail assessments made I cannot vouch, but
the article in my opinion contributes towards showing the des-
peration and the utterly reactionary character of those go-
vernments, not only the US one, which continue to perpetrate
this crime. The article was posted on 10.05 to the Activist
Mailing List (at <http://get.to/activist> - to subscribe, write
to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>).
Date: 10 May 1999 13:21:08 -0000
From: Activist Mailing List
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: The Dis-Economics of Bombing
The Dis-Economics of Bombing
http://epn.org/galb/jg990427.html
Copyright © 1999 by James K. Galbraith.
________________________________________________________________
The Dis-Economics of Bombing
James K. Galbraith
After one month, the bombs over Serbia have not won the war. But
before we decide that the remedy is another month, and then
another, let's ask: can bombing work at all? And let's not ask
the generals, for a change. Some simple concepts from economics,
and some deep lessons from history, can help us answer this
question for ourselves.
Let's go back to World War Two. In October, 1945, the United
States Strategic Bombing Survey, which my father [the well-known
economist J. Kenneth Galbraith, I presume - RM] directed, filed
its report. The Survey found that our huge air assault on Germa-
ny had not worked well. Nazi aircraft and munitions production
rose prodigiously in 1943 and 1944, under the bombs. They fell
only as Germany collapsed, in the final months of the war.
'Substitution' is what defeated our Flying Fortresses and Libe-
rators. We hit the railroad marshalling yards, but the military
trains only needed a little bit of the capacity that was there;
they switched to undamaged track and got through. We hit ball-
bearing factories, but the Germans used stockpiles and rede-
signed their engines. We hit the nitrate factories, and they
switched from fertilizers to explosives. German farm output
might have fallen, the Survey found, if the war had continued
into 1946.
Years earlier, German bombing had also failed. The Blitz famous-
ly strengthened British morale. And while the V-bombs rained on
London late in the war, Churchill announced, or so I once read
in Thomas Pynchon's novel "V", that it would take until 1960 for
the city to be half destroyed. After that, more than half the
rockets would hit rubble, and the pace of destruction would
slow. "Diminishing returns."
In Vietnam, years later, diminishing returns undermined our air
war. Pre-industrial North Vietnam just didn't have enough tar-
gets; after a while, the B-52s could only make their own craters
bounce. And the Ho Chi Minh trail pitted a $4,000 truck, easily
replaced, against an F-4 Phantom costing 1,000 times as much.
In the Persian Gulf, we exaggerated the effects of bombing, as
later studies showed. At the time, bombs were said to have kil-
led 100,000 Iraqi troops in Kuwait alone. But in fact the whole
Iraqi garrison was smaller than that; most of the soldiers we
admitted killing never existed at all. In Bosnia, also, NATO's
bombing of the Pale Serbs was mainly for show. What decided that
war was the Bosnian-Croat force that retook Hercegovina on the
ground.
And so today over Serbia, hard lessons need relearning. U.S. Ge-
neral Wesley Clark announced that in less than a month Nato cut
Yugoslav oil stocks in half. And how much gas does the Serb mi-
litary now have? As much as it needs - at civilian expense.
Meanwhile the other half of the oil will be harder to find. The
other real targets are also elusive. After a month, the New York
Times reported that we had destroyed just 16 of 80 Yugoslav air-
craft, just 30 per cent of their older SAM missiles, and just
15 per cent of the newer ones. Today's B-52 is the B-2 bomber
-- with its payload of 8 F-15s at only 40 times the cost.
Then there are increasing costs of a grimmer kind. So long as we
targeted air defenses and fuel depots, civilian casualties were
few. But as we moved to rail bridges and trucks, they mounted.
Passenger trains pass over railroad bridges; refugees use the
roads. And as we now add 300 more planes, as we seek out more
marginal targets for them, as we drop more cluster bombs because
the inventory of smart weapons runs down or we add aircraft not
equipped to use them, the random aerial murder of innocents will
grow. Night crews at Serb TV are easy to kill. But the Kosovars
cannot be saved by planes that cannot distinguish half-tracks
from tractors at fifteen thousand feet.
This is not the place to argue the hard question: invasion and
ground war, or cease-fire and mediation, which I favor. But
either way the bombing should stop. No agreement can ever be
reached while bombing continues, and stopping it would have no
material effect on an eventual ground campaign.
We need to relearn the economic lesson: bombing doesn't work.
From Guernica to Nagasaki, bombing has always been mainly a ter-
ror weapon, used mostly against economic targets, leaving mostly
civilian dead. As we so use it, we hand propaganda victories to
Milosevic, we stain our own hands with blood.
James K. Galbraith teaches at the LBJ School of Public Affairs
at the University of Texas at Austin.
________________________________________________________________
Copyright © 1999 by James K. Galbraith. Readers may redistribute
this article to other individuals for noncommercial use, pro-
vided that the text and this notice remain intact. This article
may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation
of any kind without prior written permission from the author. If
you have any questions about permissions, please contact The
Electronic Policy Network at [EMAIL PROTECTED].
________________________________________________________________
[So far the reproduced article]
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