I was asked to give a cursory glance at a Medium post called “War by Subscription“. I was afraid I would have to subscribe to read it, given Medium’s usual gating mechanism, but apparently this one’s for free.

Immediately I thought something was suspicious. Look at the Afghan War framing. It reads all wrong to me.

The Soviet adventure in Afghanistan was destroyed not by the mountains but by thousands of sealed coffins flowing into small provincial towns. This worked as a natural thermoregulator: when the price in blood became unbearable, the people forced the state to put out the fire.

But Soviet casualty information from Afghanistan was suppressed, and with considerable success. Cargo 200 arrived at night. Families were misled with “suicide” reports, denied open caskets, prohibited from public funerals, and told not to mention Afghanistan on the headstone. Svetlana Alexievich’s Boys in Zinc documents the silence. No meaningful anti-war movement existed in the USSR until perestroika opened the press in 1987 and 1988, which is to say after the withdrawal decision had already been taken. Gorbachev pulled out for strategic and economic reasons rooted in his reform program, not because provincial mothers forced his hand. The writer is running causation backwards.

And then I see the same error in the Vietnam example.

The fate of Vietnam was not decided on the battlefields but in the living rooms of provincial America.

Vietnam decided in living rooms? Nobody sitting in their living room is in the street protesting. The phrase falls apart on its own. The war ended in Paris in 1973 after Linebacker II bombed Hanoi back to the table, and finished in 1975 when Congress cut off the money to Saigon. Nixon won 1968 by torpedoing Johnson’s peace talks to send more Americans home in body bags as an election tactic, then won 1972 by widening the war into Cambodia and Laos while saying he was ending it. The coffins had been coming home for years before anything changed in Washington. What really moved Washington was Tet in 1968, when the official story stopped holding, and failure could no longer be denied in the field of operations. Cronkite called it that February, and that was one part of the establishment telling the other it was time to fold. Kansas living room couch potatoes were not in the room. And that’s besides the fact that the silent majority in the living room is who Nixon appealed to, while dramatically increasing the death-rate of American soldiers. If any thermostat had existed and worked, Cambodia escalation in 1970 (following the November 1969 middle-finger to protesters) would never have happened. The writer has again made cause and effect exactly backwards. Strike two.

Perhaps if we’re looking for a third example, a missing one is worth a try. The Korean War saw 36,000 American dead, three years of meat-grinder fighting, no significant anti-war movement, and a dud ending of armistice negotiations. The thermostat? Nothing. Is that why the writer skipped it? Seems to disprove his hypothesis. Ok, three strikes. Are we done yet?

I don’t want to nit-pick but he brings up one of the most famous human crew ground-coordinated targeting errors in history, and calls it a drone strike.

… officially outside any declared theater of war, without congressional authorization… In one notorious episode in Yemen in 2013, a drone struck a wedding convoy, killing twelve guests. In Kunduz in 2015, it struck a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital.

Nope.

The Kunduz MSF hospital tragedy of 2015 is well known as a US Air Force AC-130 gunship with American aircrew on-board, called in by a US Special Forces ground controller, in support of Afghan partner forces fighting in the city.

Starting at 2:08am on Saturday 3 October, a United States AC-130 gunship fired 211 shells on the main hospital building where patients were sleeping in their beds or being operated on in the operating theatre.

At least 42 people were killed, including 24 patients, 14 staff and 4 caretakers. Thirty-seven people were injured.

Our patients burned in their beds, our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building.

The attack from the air lasted for around one hour. The main hospital building came under precise and repeated airstrikes, while the surrounding buildings were left mostly untouched.

Throughout the airstrikes our teams desperately called military authorities to stop the attack.

That’s the Médecins Sans Frontières report. Not a drone.

Speaking of which, WWII bomber crews suffered some of the highest psychological casualty rates of any combat arm in the war, which is why “flak happy” entered the language. The moral insulation the author wants to attribute to distance never actually showed up in the record. Gunpowder warfare stayed brutal for four centuries: pike-and-shot, Napoleonic bayonet charges, trench assaults at the Somme. Anyone who has ever remotely watched someone pick up a telephoto lens, a shovel, or a rifle… knows how every millisecond during identification presses down like a ton of bricks. Distance is not the clean variable the writer wants to claim.

But even when describing a drone, notice how the writer says there was no congressional authorization?

That’s just flat wrong.

I could understand if he called the political process abused and over-broad, but it’s plain false to say drones under the 2001 AUMF didn’t have the authorization at all. They did.

The essay is riddled with errors and omissions. I guess I’m glad I didn’t have to subscribe.