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Fire When Ready Why we should consider using flamethrowers in Afghanistan.

By Scott Shuger
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2001, at 1:49 PM ET

There aren’t any news cameras trained on the caves of Afghanistan, but you can still watch U.S. soldiers battle an enemy hiding in underground tunnels and bunkers: Go rent Sands of Iwo Jima. The 1949 John Wayne classic incorporates actual combat footage of Marines attacking Japanese forces ensconced, à la the Taliban, in caves and other fortified underground positions, many of them linked by tunnels. On the Pacific island of Iwo Jima, the central command post was 75 feet below the island’s volcanic rock. On nearby Okinawa, the Japanese fought from several belts of caves and bunkers as well as from thousands of ancestral tombs. What was the weapon that enabled the Marines to take the fight in and down to an enemy this entrenched? As you can see in the movie, it was the flamethrower, which shoots a column of splattering fire that can penetrate viewing slits and air ducts and even kill around corners.

Recent news reports have said that Osama Bin Laden has access to caves that are electrified, multistoried, and steel-fortified. So we’re prepared to use flamethrowers to clear them out, right? On several occasions, President Bush has said of the terrorists, “We’re going to smoke them out of their holes.” But why settle for smoke when there’s fire?

Well, there’s a little problem. That John Wayne movie is about the only place you can see flamethrowers these days because the U.S. military doesn’t have them anymore. Though flamethrowers were in use as recently as the Vietnam War, none of our service branches has any in their inventory now. (None of the experts and old Army hands interviewed for this story knew exactly when they were eliminated.) The field manual used by the Army and Marines states that “flame is a valuable close combat weapon” that can be “used to demoralize troops and reduce positions that have resisted other forms of attack,” but the manual dropped detailed descriptions of flamethrower tactics in the early 1990s. A 66 mm man-portable rocket launcher that fires an incendiary round is still on the books, but most experienced U.S. military folks contacted this past week weren’t familiar with it. (One retired Army officer did remember that “years ago” the rocket was used at a U.S. base in a demonstration for visitors. He says such a fire rocket would be “dandy” for caves.) As the Afghan war bogs down against opponents willing to literally go underground, one very promising U.S. weapon for going after them is missing in action.

Why? Primarily because, among civilians, fire weapons are considered inhumane. The fuel for flamethrowers is basically napalm, and napalm has never recovered from its Vietnam reputation for awfulness. (Indeed, in 1978 the Defense Department unilaterally decided to stop using it.) Because flamethrowers spew jellied fuel that sticks to skin and clothes, the fire they produce is extremely difficult to put out. As a result, they often inflict second- and third-degree burns all over the body. Even if your skin isn’t burned to a crisp, you may well suffocate (the fire sucks oxygen from the air), or inhale fire and poisonous gases, or die from shock. Nevertheless, the United States has never officially sworn off flamethrowers. And there’s no good reason that it should.

They are not banned by the generally accepted rules of warfare. The Army’s Judge Advocate General School—which speaks for the legal branch of the Army—has concluded that fire weapons, including flamethrowers, are not illegal per se or by treaty, and the Army and Marine Corps field manuals flatly state that “their use is not a violation of international law.” Law professor Robert K. Goldman of American University, whose expertise includes the rules of war, agrees: “You can’t directly use them against civilians or use them indiscriminately in a way that’s likely to create civilian casualties, but they are not banned as such.”

That a weapon inflicts horrible deaths and injuries shouldn’t by itself rule out its use. It would be foolish to deny that the effects of flamethrowers and other fire weapons are gruesome. But such ghastliness can also be attributed to cluster bombs (which can leave thousands of limb- and torso-destroying bomblets lying about dormant for years, and which the United States has already used in Afghanistan) and land mines (which the United States has refused to foreswear), not to mention artillery, mortars, or machine guns, which are used by every military force in the world. The test of whether a weapon should be used (at all or in a given circumstance) isn’t its horribleness—they’re all horrible—it’s how well it can help attain a military objective while not producing political or human-rights problems. So for instance, tactical nuclear weapons might be the ideal military solution to the al-Qaida cave problem, but they should be ruled out because they would also run the risk of killing and injuring too many noncombatants and stimulating further uses of nuclear weapons. Flamethrowers would, by contrast, target only the terrorists in the caves. In addition, the Marine and Army field manuals note that often, when flamethrowers are seen being deployed, “defending personnel will leave well-prepared positions and risk exposure to other weapons or capture.” In other words, flamethrowers might even save some terrorists’ lives because they would rather give up than be burned alive. (And some of those we grab may in fact end up telling us where Bin Laden is.)

That a weapon has an image problem shouldn’t by itself be dispositive either. Most U.S. soldiers think napalm is militarily viable, but most also think the United States abandoned it because it was associated in the popular mind with inflicting tremendous suffering on the civilian population of Vietnam—via such famous images as that wrenching picture of the young screaming girl running naked down the road. But although in Vietnam napalm was used irresponsibly on civilians, it is not inherently dangerous to them. There is a difference between a weapon’s essential properties and its possible right or wrong uses. To think otherwise, you’d have to conclude that pistols should be banned because one was used in that equally famous Vietnam photo of the South Vietnamese officer shooting a Vietcong prisoner in the head.

Flamethrowers are no more objectionable than other weapons the United States stocks and is probably prepared to use in Afghanistan. During the Gulf War, the U.S. military employed fuel-air explosives, which work by suspending a fine mist of fuel over a large area and then blowing it up. Typically these are dropped from planes, and like other fire weapons, if the flame itself doesn’t kill you, the lack of oxygen will.

Now, I’m not claiming to know that the flamethrower is the key missing piece of the United States’ tactical puzzle in Afghanistan. But let’s just be sure that it’s not ruled out for the wrong reasons. In fighting this new war, we have to rethink our choices so thoroughly that we are even open to using old-fashioned weapons.

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Notes From The Fray Editor:

Rchkia suggests a different weapon: opium. Sam Iam thought of pigs, and Tiger is worried about hungry children in the USA. Many readers made similar points to EJK: “Flamethrowers were not discontinued because they were inhumane. They were discontinued because they were ineffective.”


Comments:


Humane Weapons are obviously a bit of an oxymoron, and there are numerous examples of efficient warlike items being outlawed. My personal favorite example is hollow-point bullets, which are considered too cruel and have been outlawed for decades for use by military forces. Police and civilian weapons can lawfully contain such rounds, but military weapons cannot…

Maybe instead of non-proliferation of nukes, we should have handed them out to everyone as a replacement to more conventional weapons--a kind of global MAD theory. You can't get more serious than that.

As for the "blowtorch & corkscrew" tactics of WWII vs the Japanese, they may indeed come back in vogue--but that presumes a large presence on the ground in Afghanistan, something nobody seems in any hurry to achieve.

--Scott Lucado

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

The men who carried the flame throwers into battle hated and feared them worse than the enemy. They frequently broke down or exploded. When they broke down, they were liable to create back fires that threatened the advancing troops. You can imagine the damage when they exploded, and the men who manned the flamethrowers were sitting ducks for enemy fire, because it took both hands and all their strength to manhandle the massive units that propelled the fuel. But they were men in a war where other men sat in machine gun emplacements and continued to fire against the enemy while they held their own intestines in place with their free hand...the stories from Iwo Jima and other Pacific islands leave nothing to the imagination of the most sadistic or jaded fan of human misery.

This is the 21st century. To suggest we return to the inhumanity of past eras in pursuit of humanitarian goals is understandable, given the level of frustration that the average American feels. But it is a form of defeatism to think we must be reduced to brutes in order to defend ourselves from brutal adversaries. This has been a dilemma that has faced moral men for all time.

We need to think of adding the Afghans and Pakistani Islams to our sphere of benevolent civility, not excising them from it. To resort to brutality on the order of flamethrowers would be a mistake.

It would put the users of the flamethrowers at extreme risk. It would create maimed casualties that would require extremely expensive maintenance throughout the remainder of their miserable lives. The escalation of brutality would work against the American self image of noble and honorable defenders of individual rights...an image that needs to be sold more effectively to the inhabitants of the Middle East, Pakistan, Malaysia and other eastern regions. It would be costly, fraught with technical problems, create excessively dangerous storage and handling problems, and result in many maimed American casualties who would be far more visible in the public eye than their world war II counterparts.

I invite Scott Shugar to seriously reconsider this proposal before boneheads in the Pentagon seize on it as a good idea.

--Zeitguy

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

(11/1)

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