Dans le m\u00eame article de Hersch<\/a> mentionn\u00e9 pr\u00e9c\u00e9demment<\/a>, le corps du sujet est un changement suppos\u00e9 de tactique, avec l’accent quasi-exclusif passant \u00e0 l’intervention a\u00e9rienne, avec cessation des op\u00e9rations terrestres pour les Am\u00e9ricains. Les militaires am\u00e9ricains sont absolument terroris\u00e9s par cette id\u00e9e.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tRarement, on vit aussi clairement combien les Am\u00e9ricains sont prisonniers de leur technologie de pr\u00e9cision, de leur choix totalement r\u00e9duit \u00e0 cette sorte de guerre hyper-moderne. L’intervention par les airs, cela signifie que la t\u00e2che d’identifier et d’\u00e9clairer les objectifs serait confi\u00e9 aux forces irakiennes. Le pilote US, lui, ne voit rien, n’identifie rien, il tape, suivant aveugl\u00e9ment son \u00e9claireur type-postmoderne, avec d\u00e9signateur laser ou autre. Mais qui sont ces Irakiens ? Qu’est-ce que c’est que l’arm\u00e9e irakienne infest\u00e9e de toutes les factions du pays, d’insurg\u00e9s blanchis ou toujours actifs, de complices d’Al Qa\u00efda, etc.? D’o\u00f9 les hypoth\u00e8ses \u00e9voqu\u00e9es avec horreur par les g\u00e9n\u00e9raux d’attaques a\u00e9riennes guid\u00e9es par des agents d’Al Qa\u00efda infiltr\u00e9s dans l’arm\u00e9e irakienne et choisissant les objectifs qui les arrangent, pourquoi pas, un de ces jours, une base US en Irak ?…<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tQuelques extraits du texte de Hersch \u00ab Within the military, the prospect of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great unease. For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target selection. Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame someone else? another senior military planner now on assignment in the Pentagon asked. Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bb It’s a serious business, retired Air Force General Charles Horner, who was in charge of allied bombing during the 1991 Gulf War, said. The Air Force has always had concerns about people ordering air strikes who are not Air Force forward air controllers. We need people on active duty to think it out, and they will. There has to be training to be sure that somebody is not trying to get even with somebody else. (Asked for a comment, the Pentagon spokesman said there were plans in place for such training. He also noted that Iraq had no offensive airpower of its own, and thus would have to rely on the United States for some time.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t(…)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bb In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased. Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border. As yet, neither Congress nor the public has engaged in a significant discussion or debate about the air war.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bb The insurgency operates mainly in crowded urban areas, and Air Force warplanes rely on sophisticated, laser-guided bombs to avoid civilian casualties. These bombs home in on targets that must be painted, or illuminated, by laser beams directed by ground units. The pilot doesn’t identify the target as seen in the pre-briefthe instructions provided before takeoffa former high-level intelligence official told me. The guy with the laser is the targeteer. Not the pilot. Often you get a hot-read’ from a military unit on the groundand you drop your bombs with no communication with the guys on the ground. You don’t want to break radio silence. The people on the ground are calling in targets that the pilots can’t verify. He added, And we’re going to turn this process over to the Iraqis?<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bb The second senior military planner told me that there are essentially two types of targeting now being used in Iraq: a deliberate site-selection process that works out of air-operations centers in the region, and adaptive targetingsupportive bombing by prepositioned or loitering warplanes that are suddenly alerted to firefights or targets of opportunity by military units on the ground. The bulk of what we do today is adaptive, the officer said, and it’s divorced from any operational air planning. Airpower can be used as a tool of internal political coercion, and my attitude is that I can’t imagine that we will give that power to the Iraqis.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bb This military planner added that even today, with Americans doing the targeting, there is no sense of an air campaign, or a strategic vision. We are just whacking targetsit’s a reversion to the Stone Age. There’s no operational art. That’s what happens when you give targeting to the Armythey hit what the local commander wants to hit.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t(…)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bb Robert Pape, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago, who has written widely on American airpower, and who taught for three years at the Air Force’s School of Advanced Airpower Studies, in Alabama, predicted that the air war will get very ugly if targeting is turned over to the Iraqis. This would be especially true, he said, if the Iraqis continued to operate as the U.S. Army and Marines have doneplowing through Sunni strongholds on search-and-destroy missions. If we encourage the Iraqis to clear and hold their own areas, and use airpower to stop the insurgents from penetrating the cleared areas, it could be useful, Pape said. The risk is that we will encourage the Iraqis to do search-and-destroy, and they would be less judicious about using airpowerand the violence would go up. More civilians will be killed, which means more insurgents will be created.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bb Even American bombing on behalf of an improved, well-trained Iraqi Army would not necessarily be any more successful against the insurgency. It’s not going to work, said Andrew Brookes, the former director of airpower studies at the Royal Air Force’s advanced staff college, who is now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London. Can you put a lid on the insurgency with bombing? Brookes said. No. You can concentrate in one area, but the guys will spring up in another town. The inevitable reliance on Iraqi ground troops’ targeting would also create conflicts. I don’t see your guys dancing to the tune of someone else, Brookes said. He added that he and many other experts don’t believe that airpower is a solution to the problems inside Iraq at all. Replacing boots on the ground with airpower didn’t work in Vietnam, did it?<\/em> \u00bb <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \tMis en ligne le 30 novembre 2005 \u00e0 14H02<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dans le m\u00eame article de Hersch mentionn\u00e9 pr\u00e9c\u00e9demment, le corps du sujet est un changement suppos\u00e9 de tactique, avec l’accent quasi-exclusif passant \u00e0 l’intervention a\u00e9rienne, avec cessation des op\u00e9rations terrestres pour les Am\u00e9ricains. Les militaires am\u00e9ricains sont absolument terroris\u00e9s par cette id\u00e9e. Rarement, on vit aussi clairement combien les Am\u00e9ricains sont prisonniers de leur technologie… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3143,4869,4128],"class_list":["post-67063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloc-notes","tag-air","tag-hersch","tag-war"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67063\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}