CNN Carpet Bombs its Credibility
The network's take on the Gaza War is...none too precise
Prominent among the false narratives being promoted by the Hamas-hugging Western Left is the charge that Israel is committing war crimes and genocide in Gaza by engaging in “indiscriminate bombardment” and “carpet bombing.” And of course, much of the media is pleased to repeat and enlarge on such charges. A particularly egregious example of this fabulism appeared in the New York Times on November 26 under the headline: “Big Bombs in Urban Areas Raise Civilian Death Toll in Gaza” (print version) and “Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace” (online version).
Over at The Cosmopolitan Globalist, Claire Berlinski has ably debunked this ridiculous story, leaving me with nothing to add. But then came CNN with a story intended to buttress the “indiscriminate bombardment” charges against Israel: “Exclusive: Nearly half of the Israeli munitions dropped on Gaza are imprecise ‘dumb bombs,’ US intelligence assessment finds.”
Oh, the humanity!
Now you may be wondering what is meant by “dumb bombs.” There’s nothing complicated about it, really: A dumb bomb (or iron bomb) is simply an air-deliverable munition that has no built-in guidance system. Once released, a dumb bomb is on its own.
CNN tries hard to get readers to believe that dumb bombs are dangerously imprecise weapons, but this is not true. Modern combat aircraft are equipped with advanced navigation and targeting systems that make it possible to deliver iron bombs with precision. The ballistic characteristics of such a bomb constitute a known quantity and nowadays it’s possible to calculate the speed and altitude at which it should be released to strike the desired target. In short, iron bombs are imprecise if the method of delivery is imprecise, otherwise not.
No more than the NYT does CNN attempt to substantiate its claims about a high civilian death toll in Gaza. That civilians are being killed is inarguable of course, and unsurprising given the tactics employed by Hamas—using civilians as human shields and civilian infrastructure for military purposes, etc.—which are war crimes. And it gets worse. After many paragraphs of heavy breathing about the dangers of dumb bombs, readers are belatedly informed that:
A US official told CNN that the US believes that the Israeli military is using the dumb bombs in conjunction with a tactic called “dive bombing,” or dropping a bomb while diving steeply in a fighter jet, which the official said makes the bombs more precise because it gets it closer to its target. The official said the US believes that an unguided munition dropped via dive-bombing is similarly precise to a guided munition.
For anyone with a little knowledge of military history, the placement of the term dive bombing inside quotation marks adds a comedic touch. For there is nothing odd or unusual about this method of putting steel on target. Indeed, it goes back to the dawn of military aviation.
First, let’s define some terms. To put it simply, airpower is either strategic or tactical. If the former, the targets are fixed installations deep in the rear of the fighting fronts: factories, fuel refineries and storage facilities, the power grid and so forth. The objective of strategic air attack is to cripple a nation’s warmaking capacity at its source. The Allied strategic air offensives against the Axis powers during World War Two were of this character. Tactical air attack, however, is the air component of combined-arms warfighting. Its objective is to support and enhance the action of ground or surface naval forces by gaining and maintaining air superiority and striking specific military targets: troop concentrations, artillery and missile positions, airfields, supply dumps, headquarters elements, ships at sea or in port, etc. It is, in effect, flying artillery.
Military aviation came of age during World War One (1914-18), during which the fundamentals of tactical air attack were worked out. It was found, however, that attacks on ground targets had to be delivered at low altitude to achieve a reasonable standard of accuracy. This and the relatively low speeds of the aircraft then in service resulted in high losses from ground fire. The obvious remedy was a steep diving attack, which offered a much smaller target for antiaircraft guns while assuring significantly better bombing accuracy. Unfortunately, the aircraft of the day were limited in their ability to conduct such an attack.
But by the time World War Two came around, the dive bomber had been perfected. The most celebrated of those in service at the beginning of the war was the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka (short for Sturzkampfflieger, i.e. dive bomber). The Stuka could deliver its bombs with high accuracy in a near-vertical dive and during the first year of the war, it was perhaps Germany’s most feared weapon. In Poland and France the Stuka, operating in close support of ground troops, demoralized the enemy with the destructive precision of its attacks—enhanced by a wing-mounted siren that emitted a earsplitting shriek when the aircraft went into a dive. But during the Battle of Britain the Stuka’s limitations—relatively low speed and poor maneuverability—were exposed in action against the Spitfire and Hurricane fighters of the Royal Air Force.
The dive bomber was also an important component of naval airpower in the Pacific. Warships at sea, taking evasive action and putting up antiaircraft fire, were extremely difficult to hit with bombs dropped by planes in level flight. But as Pearl Harbor, the Coral Sea and Midway demonstrated, dive bombers were deadly against ships, particularly aircraft carriers with their large flight decks. At the Battle of Midway, the Imperial Japanese Navy lost four carriers, all to dive bomber attack.
What the IDF is doing over Gaza is nothing new, though its dive-bombing attacks are probably more accurate than those of the World War Two era, thanks to advanced technology.
As for “carpet bombing,” that term is correctly applied to the tactical employment of heavy bombers during World War Two. In one notorious case, on 15 February 1944 229 heavy and medium bombers of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces dropped over 1,000 tons of bombs on the Abbey of Monte Cassino (Italy) in an attempt to suppress German defenses in the area. During the Battle of Normandy (June-August 1944), heavy bombers of the US Eighth Air Force and RAF Bomber Command conducted saturation bombing attacks on German defenses ahead of ground operations. Given the technology of the day, such bombing attacks were less than precise; in Normandy, for instance, stray bombs caused many Allied casualties. Similar, strategic, attacks against urban targets in German and Japan are better categorized as “area bombing.”
No evidence exists to show that the IDF is conducting carpet bombing or area bombing attacks in Gaza.
In fact, if you read the CNN story all the way through, you’ll find that it takes back almost all of the scary things it claimed or intimated earlier about the imprecision of “dumb bombs.” And I suppose that says a little something in the network’s favor: CNN couldn’t quite bring itself to drive the lie home. Still, there were probably quite a few people who read no more than the headline and the first couple of paragraphs—enough, that is, to validate their anti-Israel priors about the Gaza War.
Thank you so much for walking us through just ‘why’ this article is so problematic. Other than family veteran experiences, I’m very ignorant about the military, in general, and certainly, aerial bombardment in particular. I have a much better understanding. Also, because I’m a metalhead, I had to play Iron Maiden’s ’Aces High’ at an elevated volume 🤘
The push for Israel to finish this war quickly would require carpet bombing and indiscriminate bombing which Israel does not do.
As I know from officers in the field, buildings are only bombed when there is a known terrorist threat coming from it. The real problem is that we call these "civilian installations" with terrorists in them. What they are in fact - are military installations with civilians in them. While not all of the doctors and nurses are terrorists, the heads of the hospital and much of the staff are Hamas operatives. and are literally covers for ammunition depots. Same with the UNRWA schools. Same with nearly all the buildings destroyed. As Israel's Defense Minister has stated - Gaza is the largest terrorist base in the world.
If the bombing was indiscriminate, the war would have been over weeks ago.