Libya is proof that air war has come of age, but it wasn't all about precision, writes CHRIS STEPHEN
NATO’S INTERVENTION in Libya, which formally closed down last night, will go down as one of the most successful military operations ever launched – thanks to a giant slice of help from the late Muammar Gadafy.
It’s all there in the statistics: 26,323 missions flown; 9,658 targets destroyed; one dictator removed; zero pilots lost.
Yet it was Gadafy himself who made it easy for the alliance; future dictators may not be so agreeable. It began in March when he all but forced the alliance’s hand: when the cities of Benghazi and Misurata rebelled against his rule, he very publicly promised to wipe out the rebel “rats”, leaving the UN fearing the worst.
Whatever their considerations, and oil loomed large, leaders in London, Paris and Washington feared that Gadafy intended to unleash carnage on an epic scale and that they, who had the power to stop it, would be blamed for turning a blind eye as Western powers did during Rwanda’s genocide in 1994.
The UN also feared that the attack on Benghazi, Libya’s second city, would trigger a tide of refugees who would descend on the Egyptian border and which the UN would be obliged to house and feed, perhaps for years to come.
Had Gadafy modified his threats, or been less bloodthirsty in his oppression, Nato may never have taken to the skies.
Once in those skies, Gadafy forgot the lesson espoused by philosopher Carl Von Clausewitz in the 19th century – that war is politics by other means.
As late as mid-summer, with the rebel front lines stuck, he had the opportunity to convene peace talks and call a unilateral ceasefire. Nato’s bombing was by then a source of complaints from Russia, China and some member states. London and Paris claimed the air strikes were necessary to protect civilians.
However had Gadafy silenced his guns, or limited them to firing only at rebel front lines rather than the civilians cowering behind, Nato would have found it hard to justify continuing air strikes.
Perhaps the ceasefire option never occurred to Gadafy, or perhaps he was unwilling to accept a stalemate, leaving the rebels in control of half the country, but the chance was handed to him when South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma flew into Tripoli with an olive branch.
Had Gadafy taken it, Nato would have run out of targets within its mandate and the rebels, shorn of air support, would have lacked the firepower to advance unaided.
Yet if Gadafy was part-architect of his own downfall, Nato’s precision bombing also showed, for better or worse, that air war has finally come of age. Nato jets were able to stay out of range of anti-aircraft weapons and destroy those 9,658 targets with minimal collateral damage.
In the 1991 war against Iraq, some precision weapons wandered off target to cause catastrophic damage. Twenty years on, almost all hit their targets.
“At last you can see that bombing has reached its potential,” says historian Kevin Wilson, author of Journey’s End, which chronicles Britain’s bombing of Germany in the second World War. “Military planners will look at how successful the campaign was and will perhaps see a greater need to use fighter bombers.”
But if Libya is proof that modern air forces can win some wars all by themselves, Afghanistan and Iraq are evidence that it only works in some circumstances. For Nato to hope to repeat its success of Libya in any future war, its greatest asset will be to find an adversary as obliging as the late Col Gadafy.