As a rule, people should restrain themselves from commenting about things on which they are entirely unfamiliar. Someone who knows nothing of sports should not talk about the latest outfielders for the Toronto Rough Riders or the Philadelphia Avalanche. Someone who ignores celebrity gossip ought not to discuss the latest doings of Britney Lopez and Courtney Lohan.
Would that this restraint was more common; but ignorance is no bar to having strongly held opinions. Instead, it seems almost to be a requirement.
In 1981, Canada’s government gave the Americans permission to test their new generation of cruise missiles over our territory. The Americans thought that Canada’s vast spaces and terrain closely resembled that of the Soviet Union, the most likely target of their new weapons. For what it is worth, hundreds of US cruise missiles have been successfully used on real targets since 1981 — always with conventional warheads. The decision to test the missiles over Canada did ignite a storm of controversy, with much protest from the usual suspects.
Spurred by a truculent curiosity, the author attempted to debate one Canadian peacenik as he trudged about with his placard in 1982. The dialogue went something like this:
“So, why are you against the cruise missile?”
“’Cuz the cruise missile sucks, man!”
“That’s an informed opinion… do you really know anything about them?”
At this point he took on a look like some priest of the Ape People from out of one of Robert Howard’s Conan novels, chanting some prehistoric ritual whose purpose was never understood.
“It-is-a-first-strike-weapon-and-is-non-verifiable.”
“That’s not true; do you know what those terms really mean?”
“F—k off.”
Political discourse at its vibrant best…
It is almost axiomatic nowadays that when a military is fighting a guerrilla force, a chorus of critics will start rubbing their hands and bewailing the fact that the military is using cluster bombs and white phosphorus. The rest of us are expected to be properly horrified and immediately join in the general vilification by signing petitions and beseeching our governments to intervene.
Yes, war is a bad thing. Everybody knows that. Shakespeare put it right when he observed in his play about a Warrior-King, Henry V that “there are few die well that die in a battle…” Violent untimely death is seldom graceful or composed– or painless. Setting aside some deeply held traditional cultural and social aversions to poisoning enemies, it is hard to imagine how one weapon can be that much worse than another when both use similar means to achieve the same ends. Being stabbed, shot, hammered by a pressure wave from an explosion or ripped apart by shrapnel, are any of these deaths preferable?
Yet when we decide to employ violence deliberately, then we must use the tools of violence. Fortunately – and this speaks very well of the fundamental decency of our society – few of us have any familiarity with violence and the tools necessary for it. This doesn’t stop many of us from being critical.
For example, people who are unfamiliar with weaponry have some pretty strange ideas that are not shared by those trained in their use. For example, leaving aside teenaged head-cases conditioned by Hamas in the Gaza Strip or some helter-skelter militia in a failed African State, soldiers do not fondle their weapons. For that matter, civilian hunters and target shooters don’t either. They don’t pose with them in front of mirrors or obsess about what they can do with them. A young recruit might do this once, until derided by trained soldiers for whom weapons are tools that are burdensome and heavy, need frequent maintenance, and deserve wary caution.
Likewise, people who are unfamiliar with violence imagine that those who are trained in it fantasize about the harm they will inflict with their weapons. This might be true of people suffering from various pathologies; but soldiers and police don’t do this. If anything, they don’t want to think about such things because, unlike the terrorist or the sociopath, they voluntarily assume risk and know full well that what one inflicts may – sooner or later – be what one receives. Again, to people trained in violence, weapons are tools and one might as well fantasize about a 3/8” socket wrench or a piece of sandpaper.
As a young soldier in peacetime service, this writer enjoyed the noise, thunder and lights of artillery, machineguns, and anti-tank rockets in much the same way that he always enjoyed fireworks and thunderstorms. But fantasizing about their use and potential effects on people? It never occurred. In retrospect, it would also have been certain that even voicing such a thought would have brought derision from peers and – worse – extra duties from NCOs.
Yet contemporary critics of weapons such as depleted uranium ammunition, cluster munitions and white phosphorus often believe that imagining the effect of weapons is something that soldiers often do. It is imagined that soldiers plan and gloat over what their weapons will do to an enemy… a supposition that says much about those who make it.
When the Israelis went into Gaza there was a chorus of shrieking about the use of white phosphorus (WP) – almost all of it ignorant. Reports from the BBC, Christian Science Monitor and Human Rights Watch all decried the Israeli use of WP. It was clear from reading their reports that few of them (perhaps barring some of Human Rights Watch’s advisors) knew very much about the substance. Much of their work might have been based on earlier criticisms from peace activists – often a source of much misinformation.
Notwithstanding the Hamas penchant for distortion and staged propaganda, there was footage of unarmed Palestinians running away from a shower of white phosphorus fragments raining down from air burst detonations. Of course, if the footage had instead shown Palestinians underneath air burst explosions of conventional explosives, it would have shown them being ripped apart by hundreds of razor sharp shell fragments. There is a vast difference between what might harm you and what certainly will.
WP munitions have been around since the First World War. When ignited, WP burns very fiercely, but produces an aerosolized cloud of hot smoke (at a ratio of 3.2 kgs of particles per kilo of white phosphorus) by quickly binding with any water vapor in the air. As a result, even a small grenade can produce a thick cloud of smoke in mere seconds – which explains the main attraction of the substance. There are other smoke-generating munitions, but none of them are nearly as efficient or as quick.
Clouds of smoke from WP form almost instantly, which is exactly what soldiers need when under fire. Infantry who must rush across a street which is the beaten zone for a machinegun will pitch a WP grenade into it before sprinting across. Most armoured vehicles have smoke grenade dischargers that instantly fire a wide arc of WP grenades out about 50 to 100 metres in front of them; it is their immediate action when suddenly fired upon by other tanks or anti-tank missiles. Moreover, unlike other smoke-causing munitions, WP smoke is hot and masks the heat signature of soldiers and vehicles from infrared or thermal imaging sights.
WP has secondary effects for which it is sometimes useful. When the charge bursts, some of the fragments are burning shards of phosphorus. They burn fiercely and won’t be extinguished by immersion in water, and yes, they do cause painful burns which are difficult to treat. However, a soldier who is fighting from house to house will inevitably choose to use a conventional grenade – it is far more likely to inflict casualties as it will fragment into hundreds of sharp segments all moving at supersonic speeds. A WP grenade would release dozens of fragments at subsonic speeds and using them to cause casualties is like using a spaghetti strainer as a boat bailer: It works, but not well.
Chunks of burning phosphorus can set things on fire. It doesn’t happen quickly as a rule and there are more efficient incendiary munitions around, but WP rounds because of their enormous utility in generating smoke are more common in standard ammunition loads. For example, if artillery is being used to shell a number of vehicles, high explosive rounds might be followed by some WP to ignite spilled fuel and set canvas on fire. The main damage is done by the high explosive munitions and WP is just a way of finishing the job off.
Among the more hysterical arguments about WP munitions are that they are chemical weapons. Fair enough, white phosphorus is a chemical, but so is TNT or gunpowder for that matter. The smoke that WP emits is slightly toxic in the same way that thick smoke from any combusting source (such as wood smoke) can be. But no soldier thinks of WP as a bargain basement alternative to lethal chemical weapons like Phosgene gas. However, the smoke might be used to flush hiding opponents out of a cellar or bunker. But allegations that WP smoke is deliberately used as a sort of poison gas are ignorant.
WP munitions do release an iridescent puffy cloud of white vapor but so do a number of other common battlefield munitions. The engines in 2.75”/70mm rockets which are often fired from Western helicopter gunships give off an exhaust trail which looks much like WP. The Israeli use of such rockets in the 2008/9 Gaza strip fighting and the American use of these in Afghanistan and Iraq have generated complaints that these militaries were using WP munitions.
The ‘evidence’ for this was photos of the thick cloud of multiple plumes of rocket exhaust around these helicopters. It didn’t occur to the critics that a helicopter, which is so much more fragile than a heavily armoured main battle tank, is extremely unlikely to detonate white phosphorus munitions around itself. Most pilots, sitting in thinly armoured cockpits surrounded jet fuel and munitions, think that rocking their machines with lots of explosions is the enemy’s job and not their own.
The proliferation of man-portable surface to air missiles (SAM) has also meant that aircraft and helicopters engaged in low-level missions need to use automatic flare dispensers at potentially vulnerable points. These are ejected from the aircraft and burn quite fiercely in order to generate a more attractive heat signature to a possible incoming SAM. The launching of the flares, and their descent while burning also gives off smoke that looks much like WP. Flares might be still burning when they hit the ground and may cause fires.
These flares have been described as incendiary weapons. This implies that the flares are somehow aimed by pilots, instead of being automatically ejected sideways as part of an automated counter-measures program. Flares can set things on fire – although even parachute and trip flares also make for very clumsy weapons (the author once hit the broad side of a barn with one, quite accidentally). Flares from countermeasure pods on aircraft are even more inaccurate. These allegations are nothing more than an additional display of ignorance.
Opinions about depleted uranium, cluster munitions and a variety of other military weapons systems can be just as baseless. Perhaps the nadir of ignorance was once expressed by members of a Canadian peace group that denounced sonabuoys (dropped from maritime patrol aircraft to detect submarines) as “first strike” nuclear weapons. Oh well, perhaps the Vancouver Dodgers might take the America’s Cup this year…
