Fifty years ago this week, during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, a US Army major famously remarked to a journalist, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Pilloried for its callousness, one fellow officer who claimed to have been present even said it went “down in history as an example of some of the insanity that was Vietnam.”
Myself an Army major, I know how crazy it sounds to most people. And, yet, while I am on the record as strongly opposed to empty platitudes like “the purpose of the military is to kill people and break things” (the military’s purpose is to protect and defend), I also know this infamous quotation from fifty years ago reflects one of the harsh, paradoxical realities of war: sometimes, unfortunately, militaries must destroy in order to save.
While some will scoff at that formulation, they should know that battlefields impose a different set of values than those of the civilian world. War has always been ruled by a logic of paradox—as Edward Luttwak has pointed out, the presence of an aggressor makes conflict a counterintuitive endeavor where a good road is a bad road because it is a good road (and thus the enemy will likely attack there). The ancient aphorism, “if you want peace, prepare for war,” follows the same sense.
And, unlike most other contests, at war there are few rules and no guarantees an enemy will abide by them. Sometimes that enemy gets to choose where the fight will go.
The worst choose cities. Arguably, the most extreme test of military forces is against a dug-in opponent in an urban area. This enemy uses civilians as a shield, and to metastasize, much the way some cancer cells “coerce neighboring healthy tissue into helping the disease’s growth and spread.” During the recent siege in Mosul, we’ve learned ISIS took and placed a newborn baby in a street to lure Iraqi soldiers into sniper range; three that came to rescue the baby boy were killed; finally, a tank got to him, but before the boy was saved, a dog dragged him off so violently the now seven-month-old’s arm had to be amputated.
When destructive forces become so deeply embedded within an otherwise well entity, the only option is often a severe measure like chemotherapy or surgery. In The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee described the early stages of the “war on cancer”—which emerged, coincidentally, during the Vietnam era—featuring oncologists waging a tragic struggle in which the chemotherapy ward (“a sanitized version of hell”) often became an “iconic battleground.”
Cancer surgery may have been even worse than chemo, particularly the radical mastectomy: “an extraordinarily morbid, disfiguring procedure in which surgeons removed the breast, the pectoral muscles, the axillary nodes, the chest wall and occasionally the ribs, parts of the sternum, the clavicle and the lymph nodes inside the chest.” With death near, oncologists often had nothing else to offer patients than these brutal options, rendering the doctors “queasy” and “pivoting between defeatism and hope.”
Like doctors, while military officers didn’t invent the disease, we still do our best to understand, treat, and preserve a shot at full recovery for patients holding an otherwise certain death sentence.
Yet, as with oncologists, sometimes military officers are left to attack the problem with what’s available. Gen. (later President) Ulysses S. Grant once said the aim in such military operations is “always the idea to do it with the least suffering, on the same principle as the performance of a severe and necessary surgical operation.”
Philosophers have long chewed on this problem of close proximity between enemy forces and civilians. Brian Orend has described a doctrine in which officers facing this moral dilemma can still conduct war justly, provided they only intend to “destroy the military target,” that they are not using “civilian casualties as a means” to impact a military target, and that the military target is “worth the collateral dead.” Michael Walzer has also written that military forces must demonstrate “due care,” which is for soldiers to accept additional personal risk, like the Iraqi soldiers that went to rescue the baby in Mosul, to ensure civilian harm is minimized to whatever extent possible.
This moral compass is important because, increasingly, well-armed, nihilistic groups have set their sights on the world’s cities, purposely hurting and killing civilians. As President Ashraf Ghani recently said, Afghanistan is “changing from a war against armies to a war against people”—words that became even more prescient days after he spoke them when ISIS attacked global charity Save the Children’s headquarters’ in Jalalabad, killing five and wounding dozens. Ghani has also described Kabul as “under siege.”
The siege doesn’t stop there. Mosul. Aleppo. Marawi. Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. One million people in eastern Ukraine live in a concrete hell. Kim Jong Un holds hostage two of the world’s great megacities, Seoul and Tokyo. It’s no wonder a colleague at the Modern War Institute calls cities “the battlefield of the future.” And this trend—this cancer on civilization—will only intensify as humanity continues to leave the countryside for the cityscape.
To roll back this monstrous threat, military forces will need to use destructive means and must take “morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization,” as Reinhold Niebuhr wrote.
When the Tet Offensive in Vietnam ended, and Life magazine covered the battle in the old imperial capital at Hue, the feature story included a caption that called the result a “paradox of war: the only way Hue could be won was by destroying it.”
Military officers, in particular, must hold onto these seemingly incongruent ideas—like Gen. Grant, whose last doctor described him as a “paradoxical” figure, noting his “sensitive abhorrence to the infliction of pain or injury to others,” with an equal recognition that the very same man had designed and executed the most ruthlessly effective campaigns of the American Civil War.
A phrase like “destroy to save” is similarly paradoxical—yet, we must permit its core truth. If we don’t, we risk losing civilians and cities with no end. Nobody should like it, but we shouldn’t dodge or duck this necessary military duty.
Image credit: manhhai
And maybe sometimes it's necessary to kill people to save their lives, too? Call it paradox or sophistry, I don't believe it.
After US and Iraqi forces had surrounded Mosul and Raqqa and effectively established a starvation siege, with no way out for the besieged population or ISIS fighters, there was no necessity to continue indiscriminate bombing or street fighting which killed many innocent civilians, except that the military wanted to claim a swift victory over the Islamic State. The US/Iraqi coalition could have negotiated the evacuation of civilians, instead of shooting at them or bombing them when they tried to escape. And however brutalized dehumanized and debased those ISIS fighters were/are—and there's no doubt that they were/are–they were/are not subhuman things, diseases, or vermin, they were/are human beings, just as were/are those civilians who were held hostage by them. They are human beings, not human shields, and can't be chalked up to collateral damage or called diseases or vermin.
Every time US forces or US bombs kill innocent human beings, you can be sure there will be more subhuman things ('terrorists') to kill in the next counter-terrorist operation, since terrorism breeds terror, just as liberating cities by destroying them only breeds more terrorists. The Islamic State was bred by the US Iraq War, started on the false pretext of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that never were found, and spawned in the US/Iraqi prisons where Iraqi fighters were further brutalized and taught to hate the United States as a foreign occupying power that destroyed their cities and killed their families and children. A whole generation of Iraqis have now been schooled in terrorism by the US invasions which have demonstrably failed to stop terrorism, or, at best, replaced Sunni Islamist terrorists with Iranian-backed Shiite militias with equally terrorist tendencies. And the only result of all that can only be more terrorism, and more war.
And speaking of ancient sources, Aristotle also said that the only possible purpose of war is to stop war. But after fifteen (twenty-five?) years, the US war on terror has only resulted in a self-perpetuating cycle of escalating terrorism, which now appears it might just go on forever, since nobody knows how to stop it. Certainly it cannot be stopped by killing more innocent people or bombing more cities into rubble. I don't believe the Sieges of Mosul and Raqqa will result in the elimination of the Islamic State, since the Sunni population of Western Iraq and Anbar or Eastern Syria will still not submit to being ruled by an Iranian-backed Shiite government and its Shiite militias, or by a US-backed puppet government. But even following the cynical belief that US objectives could be accomplished by simply exterminating human beings like disease or vermin, the only accomplishment of the Iraq War has been to turn over Iraq to Iran—exactly what the US was trying to prevent since the 1979 Iranian Revolution— and to vastly increase Russian influence in the Middle East— exactly what US foreign policy has opposed since the end of WW II. So even by those criteria, the Iraq War(s) have been counter-productive, and cannot be said to justify killing innocent people on those grounds.
Maybe there are times when innocent civilian casualties can be written off as 'collateral damage' in a 'just war,' although I don't believe it But was/is the Iraq War a just war? Or was/is it just war? Michael Walzer has also argued that the Iraq War and anti-ISIS campaigns cannot be considered 'just wars' by the criteria of Christian just war theory, since they cannot possibly succeed if they have no strategy to negotiate a truce or declare the war over. And therefore the only possible goal that can justify them on moral grounds is to stop them, along with the killing of innocent civilians by both sides, since nobody can possibly be liberated by killing them. Just as no city can be liberated by being destroyed. Just ask the citizens of Mosul and Raqqa who risked their lives to courageously oppose ISIS, only to be bombed to death by the US/Iraqi coalition, in its stampede to 'liberate' them….
As usual it is great to see articles that challenge the reader to think. Thank you for that.
IMHO one may say correctly that it was necessary destroy the city to save the nation, or to destroy the city to eliminate the enemy. The key is the "to" part should be a goal of the military force. What makes the comment paradoxical was not the need to destroy the city, but the rationalization the goal was to save the city. It was not. The goal was the kill VCs, or one may argue, to win the battle. And for that goal, the final state of the city was secondary.
A wise warrior once told me that soldiers fight against something, while warriors fight for something. I think this mindset is essential to decide what is important. If one goals is to defeat an adversary (fight against something, soldier mindset) then it becomes more acceptable to have losses among civilians (outgroup) to defeat that adversary, as long as fellow soldiers (ingroup) are not hurt. But if one goals is to fight for something (i.e. the locals, an ideal) then suddenly priority changes and the focus now is to protect what is valuable (a particular ideal, a group of people, etc.) against the threats. This mindset suddenly makes those being protected part of the ingroup, together with the fellow warriors. The very concept of victory changes accordingly.
Sometimes we must take the casualty of the Moral High Road.
~ First Captain Romonov ~
Feels suspiciously convenient to just compare the enemy with a cancer. Cancer is mindless, has no goal, is just the bad that destroys the good. You can't reason with cancer, you can't negotiate, it doesn't want anything! It appears from nowhere. It just needs to be killed, no matter the cost and the gruesome procedure (by the way, pay close attention at how gruesome it is!), and hopefully it won't reappear. Everybody hates cancer! Right? Let's kill it!
If the cancer wins, everything is lost. Won't anyone think of the poor victim of the mastectomy?
And so, the enemy is "nihilistic", but "like doctors, military officers didn’t invent the disease". Poor virtuous us, who didn't start the evil cancer!
It's the ultimate dehumanization and easiest justification. Too easy, in fact. Scarily self-serving.
Understanding and making an effort to stop the problem before it becomes a war is important.