The Poor Man’s Air Force: IEDs & Suicide Terror
Charles W. King
The continuing prevalence of improvised explosive devices and suicide bombing attacks in the twenty-first century has prompted the public, pundits, and policy-makers to ask, ‘why?’. This is an important question, but it is so broad that it is problematic. When people ask about the ‘why?’ of terrorism, particularly suicide terrorism the answers typically focus on why an individual would commit an act of suicide terrorism, their psychology, and place in their society. Understanding who is vulnerable to recruiter’s messages can help to counter them. This is an incomplete answer to ‘why?’ Policy-makers need to ask not only why an individual commits an act of suicide terrorism, but why non-state actors continue to use these particularly heinous methods.
Suicide terrorism and IEDs have a strategic utility that is second only to the precision-guided munitions of the US Air Force and its NATO allies. Since their debut on the world stage in the first Gulf War in 1991 the US has relied upon precision-guided bombs and cruise missiles to be able to destroy specific targets without risk to American personnel and with minimal collateral damage. These weapons are not without controversy of their own, but they demonstrate the continued utility to air power. The deployment of long range precision-guided munitions from airplanes and ships remains one of the US’s preferred methods of intervention in the twenty-first century. Guided bombs and cruise missiles are dramatic, do not expose the US to significant risk of commitment, and are politically cheap.
IEDs, vehicle bombs, and suicide bombs provide this kind of strategic utility to non-state actors. Gillio Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers makes the analogy precisely. When confronted by a French journalist Ben M’Hidi of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale replies, “Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, sir, and you can have our baskets.” The ability to select targets, for the US Air Force or non-state actors, increases the political and strategic impact of the use of violence. Minimizing the risk of operations and maximizing their political impact is not a new principle, it is central to the theories of use of political violence espoused by Clausewitz and Machiavelli. Western policy-makers should not be surprised that non-state actors have internalized the importance of these principles and have found ways to achieve them without access to advanced technology and billions of defense spending.
Precision-guided munitions are smart, but not as smart as human beings. ‘Smart’ weapons minimize risk to the force using them in exchange for a high financial cost, $1.87 million per Tomahawk cruise missile in 2017. Suicide bombs represent the opposite end of the precision-guided munitions spectrum, a minimum of financial cost and an acceptance of not only of risk but sacrifice. Describing the use of IEDs, vehicle bombs, and suicide bombs as ‘barbaric’ or ‘irrational’ denies the strategic utility of these methods and fails to comprehend that the groups using them may be desperate but they are not irrational. They have political objectives and are using the most effective methods available to them. To describe them as anything less is a grave underestimation, and serious strategic failure.
Further Reading
Gillio Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers, (Algeria/Italy: 1966).
Mike Davis, Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, (New York, NY: Verso, 2007).
Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, (New York, NY: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006).