 An exquisite irony unravels before us, one that is sadly lost upon the madding crowd. Most think the Iraq War is about oil, Israel, religion, or some cloudy soup de jour called “neo-conservatism.” While these issues are of course perennially part of Anglo-American Middle Eastern policy, they ain't “the-date-what-brung-us” to this war. This war was mongered by a faction within the American military industrial complex—namely, the “missile-industrial complex.” Their point man in Washington, and this war's propellant, is Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Second-generation Navy man, Rumsfeld arrived in Washington DC 47 years ago as an assistant to a Republican Illinois congressman—a job he held for three years before becoming a congressman himself.
In 1969, Nixon hoisted the young legislator up to the cabinet posting of Director of Economic Opportunity, a position Rumsfeld held for two years before being appointed Director of Economic Stabilization and soon after, US Ambassador to NATO.
In 1974 “Rummy” was summoned from Brussels to head the transition team for new president Gerald Ford who promptly named Rumsfeld Defence Secretary (the youngest ever). Rumsfeld garnered a reputation as a right-wing war hawk and ardent advocate of increased weapons procurement. One of his pet projects was the Navy's precision-guided Tomahawk cruise missile. Rummy lost his job when Carter got elected. However, Carter did award Rumsfeld the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award.
Rumsfeld never left the DC beltway. He soon deployed his Washington-insider, master-bureaucrat skills to navigate the sugar substitute Aspartame through the FDA approval process and became rich. Over the next two decades, he combined executive work in pharmaceutical and electronics corporations with high-level US federal government assignments.
Not all assignments were defence-related. For instance, he was Special Presidential Envoy on the Law of the Sea and a member of the US Joint Advisory on US-Japan Relations, the National Commission on Public Service, and the National Economic Commission. These postings were not as important as his Defence-related jobs, such as being on the Board of Visitors of the National Defence University, Senior Advisor to the President's Panel of Strategic Systems, and Special Presidential Envoy to the Middle East. (This latter posting involved twice trekking to Baghdad, where he first delivered a letter from Reagan to Hussein, then proceeded to facilitate weapons and intelligence transfers to Iraq and normalize US-Iraq relations by de-listing Iraq as a terrorist state, whilst Iraq was using American equipment to launch daily chemical attacks on Iran.)
Most importantly, Rumsfeld chaired both the 1998 bipartisan US Ballistic Missile Threat Commission and the 2000 US Commission to Assess National Security Space Management and Organization.
These latter two Chairmanships were a lobbying campaign by the crisis-wracked high-tech sector within the US military-industrial complex. Military spending had been curtailed substantially after the Cold War down to levels not seen since the post-WWII de-mobilization.
This was causing unemployment in the Gunbelt, career uncertainty in the Pentagon, and most painfully, the de-funding of numerous weapons programs (space-based weaponry, hypersonic jet engines, missile interceptors etc).
Without the Soviets as a foil, neither the US taxpayer nor the foreign policy community saw much benefit in these programs. Rumsfeld and his defence company constituency argued that certain emerging states constituted a sufficient threat to continue these programs regardless of cost or diplomatic fallout.
Rumsfeld went on to become a national security advisor to Bush Jr during the 2000 campaign. Bush's election rap about emerging threats in North Korea and Iraq, of the need to “skip a generation of weapons,” and the desirability of robust missile defence, was pure Rumsfeld. Before the final verdict on the 2000 election was in, Bush appointed Rumsfeld Defence Secretary (the oldest ever), and Rummy hit ‘tha-deck-a-runnin,' conjuring a war with the most defeatable and demonized of the emerging threats: Iraq.
The “Rumsfeld Doctrine” is two-fold. First, it calls for the smashing of several upstart military-industrial complexes belonging to states historically at odds with the US. The targets are primarily the “axis of evil” states (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea), and secondarily Syria, Libya, Cuba and Sudan.
Secondly, the “doctrine” requires this smashing be done with advanced precision-guided weaponry, electronic warfare, and experimental aircraft and ordnance. Two birds are killed with one smart projectile. Several annoying little states are nipped, and vast research and development is done on state-of-the-art weaponry. Hence, through the process of destroying the upstarts, Anglo-America will achieve an insurmountable military-technological lead over Russia, China, and the EU.
Eisenhower warned Americans of an internal threat from militarist officers and greedy weapons contractors who were seeking to control US foreign policy. The military-industrial complex believes they are doing America a favour not just by eliminating threats but also by stimulating economic activity.
In the present instance, the “missile industrial complex” argues that by developing the best weaponry, they open up lucrative export markets for their combat-proven wares. They also point to lucrative civilian spin-off industries from their research and development.
These are powerful people. The missile manufacturers are giant outfits like Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics, which collectively have hundreds of thousands of employees and shareholders. (Rumsfeld owns millions of dollars worth of defence company stock.)
These missile manufacturers are leading humanity through an historic change. The Tomahawk cruise, merely the size of a canoe, can carry a 2,000 lb warhead from leagues beneath the sea up past the surface, down a zigzag pattern skimming the surface of the ground, then through uprights of a football field 1,500 kilometres from launch. X-43A scramjet missiles can fly 5 times the speed of sound, and the companies are confident they will soon break mach 12.
The first American precision-guided missile used in combat was an anti-armour TOW fired late in the Vietnam War. They fired 1,900 faster, more accurate TOWs in the first months of the recent Iraq War. In the first Gulf War, 7% of air dropped bombs were “smart,” the rest being free-fall “dumb” bombs. In the most recent bombardment, utilizing satellite-guided JDAMs, 100% of Air Force munitions were “smart.” The world's militaries are awestruck.
But what's wrong with this “doctrine”? For starters it's an absolutely criminal motive for causing a war. For another, the insurgency has its own mini missile-industrial complex that may give the Americans an embarrassing set back. Iraq had been manufacturing several kinds of ballistic missile, but most were large affairs, the length of semi-trailers, which the Americans have already destroyed.
However, there is another family of multiple rocket launching systems (MLRS) which, being smaller and more numerous, remain in the theatre to give the Americans problems. These systems vary in size from 30mm to 122mm (the diameter of the rocket), which the Iraqis either manufactured from scratch or purchased in quantity from Egypt or China.
The most formidable is the Iraqi-built 107mm consisting of a rectangular honey-combed 12 tube launcher capable of firing 19-kilogram rockets a distance of 8 kilometres. These are unguided weapons, and given the weight of the system (over 600 kilos), they constitute less of a threat than do mortars. However, numerous rocket attacks have occurred, including the famous “donkey attack” on the Green Zone, wherein donkeys were used to carry the launchers—some actually hitting their targets.
Whereas the MLRSs may not prove a major problem for the Americans, the same cannot be said of the rocket propelled grenade. The original anti-armour rocket propelled grenade was the German Panzerfaust, of which one million were wheel-barrowed to the frontline during the climactic Battle of Berlin. The Soviets learned the hard way the effectiveness of these little missiles and soon began making knock-offs, the most popular being the RPG-7. Iraqi State Arsenals mass produced the RPG-7 under the name “al-Nassira.”
The RPG-7 consists of a portable, reusable tubular launcher with a gripstock, standard trigger, and optical sight. The grenade is a football-shaped device (75-85mm) weighing a few kilos with a tubular rocket motor sticking out the back and which fits into the front of the launcher. The trigger detonates a pre-loaded percussion cap which both blasts the projectile out the front of the launcher and ignites the rocket.
To stabilize flight, spring-loaded fins on the projectile pop out after the device is fired. When the rocket hits its maximum thrust, the grenade is traveling at 300 metres per second, giving it the ability to penetrate a foot of steel. The grenade is impact-fused and carries either an incendiary or shrapnel bomb. More advanced grenades carry a convex-shaped high explosive charge with a copper plug in the front which, upon impact, is converted into a forward-thrusting molten jet of even greater penetrative capacity.
The training required to operate an RPG is no more than would be required to operate a rifle. However, an amateur would be lucky to take out a target a 100 metres away. But a veteran can be effective at 500 metres. It can be reloaded and re-fired in 15 seconds. The RPG can also be used as a bombarding weapon ranging up to 950 metres, at which distance the grenade automatically explodes.
Around 10% of the 850 killed and 10,000 injured US personnel in Iraq were RPG victims. There have been thousands of RPG attacks. The heavier US vehicles, the M1A Tanks and the Bradley Fighting Vehicles, are designed to be resistant to RPG fire, but there are accounts of these vehicles not just being disabled by RPGs, but their occupants being killed. Moreover, these heavy vehicles are a small fraction of the Coalition's fleet and the delivery trucks and funky Humvees have proven death-traps when hit with incendiary-loaded RPG fire.
Hundreds of US troops are state-side being treated for severe burns. Typically, a US patrol or convoy is struck by an improvised explosive device, and then is ambushed by AK-47 and multiple RPG fire. On a single day recently, three US servicemen were killed in three separate RPG ambushes in Baghdad alone. Americans have also died as a result of RPGs being fired through the concrete walls of the buildings they were in. In April in Najaf, Americans described the building they were occupying as coming under “cascading” RPG fire. RPGs have also downed helicopters, but are usually only effective against choppers when the aircraft is hovering near the ground.
The dark horse missile in the insurgent's arsenal is the Strela-3. These are shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles developed by the Soviets in the 1970s. The Strela-3 consists of a 70mm missile and tubular launcher, both 1.4 metres long. It is an optically-sighted weapon, but also contains a heat-seeking homing device.
The 10-kilogram missile has a two-stage solid fuel rocket motor giving it a cruising speed of 600 metres per second. This weapon can destroy aircraft on the ground at a distance of 4.5 kilometres or in full flight to an altitude of three kilometres. The missile carries a one-kilogram fragmentation-high-explosive warhead detonating upon impact (flush or graze). It can be reloaded and re-fired in 35 seconds.
Although the Pentagon was reluctant to admit it, they have already lost helicopters in full flight to Strelas. Fixed wing aircraft taking off from Baghdad Airport have also been hit. Former Iraqi intelligence officers may be sitting on caches of several hundred Strelas. Moreover, both Egypt and Pakistan manufacture Strelas, and the region's militaries possess copious amounts. Strelas would be easy to smuggle into Iraq. The Coalition only has 450 aircraft in the theatre.
This war is an utter fiasco for the Americans. It has undermined even its original strategic goal of stemming high-tech weapons proliferation. Everywhere, countries are building up their militaries and modernizing their weapons. They are seeking to defend themselves from America with the sorts of weapons currently giving the Americans grief in Iraq.
This war was fomented by the “rocket boosters” within the US military-industrial complex, and to see their dreams exploded at the nose-cones of rocket-weapons is fitting. Live by the rocket... **** |
