Collapsed Countries, Casualty Dread, and the New American Way of War

Abstract

The combination of failed states, elite casualty phobia, and unfolding aerial precision strike and associated technologies is profoundly altering the locus and style of future US military interventions overseas. The United States is beginning to practice a new way of warfare in parts of the world peripheral to traditional American security interests. The Gulf War was a turning point. It was both an end and a beginning. It was perhaps the last large American full-spectrum conventional war waged against another well-armed state and the first in which airpower did the bulk of the heavy lifting against not only strategic targets but also enemy fielded forces. The Gulf War was also the first war in which casualty minimization became from the start an independent operational objective; both the formulation of war aims and the conduct of military operations were governed by dread among the political and especially military leadership that too many American lives lost would implode public and congressional support for the war.