Collapsing Empire: The Delusion of US Air Power

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Ever since March 15th, Washington has barraged Sanaa from the sky, killing and injuring countless innocent civilians while destroying vital infrastructure. For example, on April 2nd, US jets targeted a reservoir in western Yemen, cutting off access to water for over 50,000 people. Three days later, Donald Trump gloatingly posted a horrific video on social media of a tribal gathering being incinerated in a US airstrike - the President falsely claimed the individuals were in fact “Houthis gathered for instructions on an attack.”

In a chilling coincidence, the bloodcurdling clip was published on the 15th anniversary of the release of “Collateral Murder” by WikiLeaks, gut-wrenching footage filmed three years earlier of US Apache helicopter pilots firing indiscriminately at a group of Iraqi civilians and Reuters journalists, while sickly cackling at the carnage they were inflicting. While that disclosure caused international outcry and scandal, and put WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange firmly en route to being a wanted man, openly advertising unconscionable war crimes is now apparently formal US government policy.

US officials have pledged that renewed hostilities against Yemen will continue “indefinitely”, while Trump has bragged how “relentless strikes” have “decimated” AnsarAllah. Yet, on April 4th, the New York Times reported Pentagon officials are “privately” briefing that while the current bombing campaign “is consistently heavier than strikes conducted by the Biden administration”, the effort has achieved “only limited success in destroying the Houthis’ vast, largely underground arsenal of missiles, drones and launchers.” AnsarAllah’s anti-genocide Red Sea blockade thus endures untrammelled.

Moreover, “in just three weeks, the Pentagon has used $200 million worth of munitions, in addition to the immense operational and personnel costs to deploy two aircraft carriers, additional B-2 bombers and fighter jets, as well as Patriot and THAAD air defenses to the Middle East.” The operation’s total cost to date could exceed “well over $1 billion by next week.” This not only means “supplemental funds” for the operation need to be sought from Congress, but there are grave internal anxieties about ammunition availability:

“So many precision munitions are being used, especially advanced long-range ones, that some Pentagon contingency planners are growing concerned about overall Navy stocks and implications for any situation in which the United States would have to ward off an attempted invasion of Taiwan by China.”

The New York Times also observed the White House hasn’t indicated “why it thinks its campaign against the group will succeed”, after the Biden administration’s long-running Operation Prosperity Guardian embarrassingly failed to break the Red Sea’s blockade. The answer is simple - for three decades, the Empire has been consumed by a dangerously self-deluded belief in the primacy of air power, over all other forms of warfare. Ergo, the Trump administration believes that if only Yemen’s bombardment is intensified, AnsarAllah will finally crumble.

A Yemeni stands in the ruins of a US bombing attack, March 20th

‘Significantly Damaged’

In April 1996, then-USAF Chief of Staff Ronald R Fogleman boldly declared that a “new American way of war” was emerging. While traditionally the Empire had “relied on large forces employing mass, concentration, and firepower to attrit enemy forces and defeat them,” now technological advances and “unique military advantages” - specifically in the field of air power - could be used “to compel an adversary to do our will at the least cost to the US in lives and resources.” 

At this time, the Empire was riding high on the perceived triumph of NATO’s Operation Deliberate Force, an 11-day saturation bombing of Bosnia conducted the previous August/September. Multiple US officials enthusiastically attributed the campaign to ending the three-year-long civil war in the former Yugoslav republic, by precipitating a negotiated settlement. They omitted to mention the airstrikes’ predominant military utility was allowing US-armed, trained, and directed Bosniak and Croat proxy forces to seize Bosnian Serb territory and displace locals without significant opposition, or Washington’s brazen sabotage of prior peace deals.

How TIME Magazine reported Operation Deliberate Force

Nonetheless, the narrative that wars can be won via airpower alone, and the US and its allies should invest in and structure their military machines accordingly, palpably percolated thereafter. The illegal March - June 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia provided the Empire with an opportunity to put this theory to the test. For 78 straight days, NATO relentlessly blitzed civilian, government, and industrial infrastructure throughout the country, killing untold innocent people - including children - and disrupting daily life for millions.

The purported purpose of this onslaught was to prevent a planned genocide of Kosovo’s Albanian population by Yugoslav forces. As a May 2000 British parliamentary committee concluded however, it was only after the bombing began that Belgrade began assaulting the province. Moreover, this effort was explicitly concerned with neutralising the CIA and MI6-backed Kosovo Liberation Army, an Al Qaeda-linked extremist group, not attacking Albanian citizens. Meanwhile, in September 2001, a UN court determined Yugoslavia’s actions in Kosovo were not genocidal in nature, or intent.

On June 3rd 1999, Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic folded under Russian pressure, agreeing to withdraw Belgrade’s forces from Kosovo. While Western officials celebrated a resounding victory for NATO, and airpower more generally, the mainstream media - at least initially - told a very different story. The LA Times observed how the Yugoslav army “still has 80% to 90% of its tanks, 75% of its most sophisticated surface-to-air missiles and 60% of its MIG fighter planes.” Meanwhile, its key barracks and ammunition depots weren’t impaired one iota.

The New York Times reported that post-war Kosovo was bereft “of the scorched carcasses of tanks or other military equipment NATO officials had expected to find.” While Pentagon apparatchiks “[claimed] to have significantly damaged” Yugoslav forces, the outlet observed Belgrade’s units withdrawing from Kosovo “seemed spirited and defiant rather than beaten.” They took with them hundreds of tanks, personnel carriers, artillery batteries, vehicles and “military equipment loaded on trucks” completely unscathed by the bombing campaign. 

‘Campaign Analysis’

Contemporary declassified British Ministry of Defence files amply underline the catastrophic failure of the Empire’s blitzkrieg of Yugoslavia. Once Milosevic finally capitulated and NATO and UN ‘peacekeepers’ were granted unimpeded access to Kosovo, they struggled to find a single “burnt out tank”, or other indications of vehicle or equipment losses on the ground. A June 7th “campaign analysis” lamented, “NATO took a lot longer, required a lot more effort and damaged less than perhaps we believed we could achieve at the start of the air campaign.”

It added that Yugoslav “war-fighting doctrine” placed “great emphasis on dispersal, the use of camouflage, dummy targets, concealment and bunkers” to avoid detection, and “early assessments indicate that they appear to have applied this doctrine very successfully.” Adverse weather conditions were also routinely exploited as cover for anti-KLA operations. The memo further recorded “there was no evidence…of disintegration of Serb forces in Kosovo,” with Yugoslav military operations continuing apace until Milosevic agreed to withdraw from the province, “and beyond”.

A Yugoslav dummy tank that fooled NATO, in Kosovo

Yet, these damning observations remained secret. At a June 11th 1999 press conference, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Henry Shelton proudly displayed a variety of graphic charts, boasting how hundreds of Yugoslav tanks, personnel carriers and artillery pieces had been decimated by NATO, without the alliance suffering a single casualty. His crooked accounting of the bombing remained universal mainstream gospel, until a May 2000 Newsweek investigation exposed the wide-ranging “coverup” via which the Pentagon had spun the “ineffective” assault as a resounding victory.

When NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark, who oversaw the bombing, learned of the pronounced lack of damage to the Yugoslav military in Kosovo, he dispatched a dedicated team of USAF investigators to the province. They “spent weeks combing Kosovo by helicopter and by foot,” and turned up evidence of just 14 destroyed tanks. Meanwhile, of the 744 successful strikes on Yugoslav military equipment and installations claimed by Pentagon officials, just 58 were confirmed.

By contrast, USAF identified ample evidence of the Yugoslav military’s extraordinary skill at deception. They found a key bridge had been protected from NATO bombers “by constructing, 300 yards upstream, a fake bridge made of polyethylene sheeting stretched over the river”. NATO “destroyed” the “phony bridge” many times. Additionally, “artillery pieces were faked out of long black logs stuck on old truck wheels,” and “an anti-aircraft missile launcher was fabricated from the metal-lined paper used to make European milk cartons.”

Flummoxed, “Clark insisted that the Serbs had hidden their damaged equipment and that the team hadn’t looked hard enough.” So a USAF report was fabricated wholecloth, validating the fiction NATO’s destruction of Yugoslav forces had been extensive. Newsweek noted its findings were “so devoid of hard data that Pentagon officials jokingly called it ‘fiber-free’.” An official Department of Defense “After-Action Report to Congress” on the bombing campaign cited the report’s figures, although stressed no supporting evidence was forthcoming. With eerie prescience, Newsweek concluded:

“[This] distortion could badly mislead future policymakers…After the November 2000 presidential election, the Pentagon will go through one of its quadrennial reviews, assigning spending priorities. The Air Force will claim the lion’s share…The risk is policymakers and politicians will become even more wedded to myths like ‘surgical strikes’. The lesson of Kosovo is civilian bombing works, though it raises moral qualms…Against military targets, high-altitude bombing is overrated. Any commander in chief who does not face up to those hard realities will be fooling himself.”

‘Incredibly Different’

The “distortion” that NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia was a military triumph has endured ever since. Not only has it served as justification for multiple subsequent calamitous Western “interventions”, such as the 2011 destruction of Libya, but USAF continues to claim “the lion’s share” of US defence spending. According to 2024 figures, over a quarter of the Pentagon’s total budget - $216.1 billion - is earmarked for the Air Force. Additionally, $202.6 billion is spent on the Navy, which typically operates in close tandem with USAF.

Intimidatingly large these figures may appear on paper, but they do not translate into serious war-fighting capability, as Operation Prosperity Guardian amply underscored. A little-noticed July 2024 Associated Press report on the return home of US fighter pilots after nine months of failing to thwart AnsarAllah’s Red Sea blockade noted that battling an enemy capable of fighting back “in the most intense running sea battle the Navy has faced since World War II” had been deeply psychologically ravaging for all concerned.

USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and other warships head to the Red Sea, Novemeber 2023

As a result, Pentagon officials were investigating how to assist thousands of pilots and sailors adversely affected by their involvement in the bruising effort, “including counseling and treatment for possible post-traumatic stress.” One pilot told Associated Press, “most of [us]…weren’t used to being fired on given the nation’s previous military engagements in recent decades.” He described the experience of AnsarAllah’s retaliation as “incredibly different” and “traumatizing”, as getting shot at is “something that we don’t think about a lot.”

A new experience it may be - but it’s one to which Washington urgently must adapt. A July 2024 RAND Corporation report found the US military was woefully ill-equipped to sustain a major conflict with “peer-level competitors” such as China for any length of time, while facing significant threats from “relatively unsophisticated actors” including AnsarAllah, which have been “able to obtain and use modern technology (e.g., drones) to strategic effect.”

Since then, Axios has reported Pentagon weapons procurer Bill LaPlante - a journeyman engineer and physicist - is awed by AnsarAllah’s use of “increasingly sophisticated weapons,” including missiles that “can do things that are just amazing.” He claims the Resistance group’s capabilities are “getting scary”. Once the US has exhausted itself yet again failing to crush AnsarAllah, we could see more of its arsenal in play - and in turn, another historic defeat of the Empire, as Yemen inflicted over the course of Operation Prosperity Guardian.