[R-G] (no subject)

[Anthony Fenton]

  - On the point, re: Israel and Cold Lake, some of the context is  
fleshed out here in a 2005 article by Jon Elmer.
AF

http://www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org/node/1589
Good night Battle of Britain, Good morning, Gaza
JON ELMER
Briarpatch Magazine, December 2005

[ed. a shorter version appears in This Magazine vol 39 no 12  
(September-October 2005): pp. 11; and an excerpted edition appears in  
the Journal of Palestine Studies vol xxxv no 139 (Spring 2006): pp.  
191-193.]

Maple Flag, the Israeli Air Force, and "the new type of battle we are  
being asked to fight"

Out of two hundred warplanes that took part in Exercise Maple Flag  
2005 in Cold Lake, Alberta in May, only ten were Israeli F-16s. It  
would be easy to miss their significance. Yet, when Canadian forces  
extended an invitation to the Israeli Air Force for the first time in  
thirty-eight meetings of the Maple Flag war games, it signalled,  
according to military planners, a marked shift in Canadian military  
and political policy in the twenty-first century: good night Battle of  
Britain, good morning Gaza.

Exercise Maple Flag is the code name for one of the world’s  
largest air force exercises, with over 5,000 crewmen from eleven  
countries conducting active training operations and testing new  
weapons at Alberta’s Cold Lake Air Weapons Range. Formerly know  
as the Primrose Lake Evaluation Range, the sprawling 11,630 square  
kilometre base is a symbol of Cold War preparedness, a state-of-the- 
art facility rapidly constructed between 1952 and 1954.

The range is a source of pride for the Canadian Forces and Department  
of National Defence (DND). In a glowing history posted on the DND  
website, the Airfield Engineers called the base “by far the  
biggest undertaking” of Canada in the Cold War, not least because  
it required “a 42-mile, sand and clay access road [be]  
constructed through dense bush and muskeg.”

The dense forest and running streams tamed by this feat of engineering  
were the prodigious trapping, hunting and fishing lands of the Dene  
Suline, now known under the federal government’s band council  
system as the Cold Lake First Nations. In 1952, the Dene were cut off  
from their traditional lands and the population ultimately expelled.  
The nearby Canoe Lake Cree Nation faired little better, losing seventy- 
five percent of their homelands to the weapons range.

Some fifty years after the land grab, the Canadian government settled  
claim with the Cold Lake First Nations, paying out a total of $2500 to  
each band member and $7000 to each elder, with an additional twenty  
million dollars put in a development trust fund. That settlement  
amounts to about nine dollars per acre (roughly $22 a hectare), and  
not more than $150 per person for each year of their displacement.  
Such is the stage for Exercise Maple Flag, a six-week set of war games  
designed to provide training in the context of hyper-realistic  
simulations of aerial combat operations abroad.

*

MAPLE FLAG IS Canada’s answer to the US Air Force’s Red  
Flag exercises, which began in 1975 as a response to Vietnam War  
statistics indicating that as many as ninety percent of aircraft  
losses occurred in the pilot’s first ten combat operations. Red  
Flag and Maple Flag are constructed to be highly realistic so as to  
provide a level of training tantamount to real combat hours. A further  
aim of the exercises is to draw lessons from recent operations. These  
lessons have been applied to high intensity war games on targets so  
realistic that the range is described by Canadian Forces as “the  
world’s largest Hollywood set.”

Canadian pilot Major Todd N. Balfe goes further: “A joke was that  
[flying a sortie over Serbia] was just like Maple Flag…. It  
actually was more simple, because the ‘bad guys’ here at  
Maple Flag are a lot more proficient than they were over there,”  
said the veteran of the Kosovo war and past-commanding officer of  
Maple Flag (Aviation Week & Space Technology). Hyperbole aside, it is  
for this reason that the Maple Flag XXXVIII is so instructive: it is  
based on existent operational realities. In the words of Colonel  
Charles S. “Duff” Sullivan, Wing Commander of 4 Wing Cold  
Lake: “We build the exercise around the new type of battle that  
we are being asked to fight” (National Post).

According to official statements, this year’s exercise focused  
on implementing the use of tactical air power to enforce directives  
that were once the domain of armoured units and ground troops. As  
Defence Minister Bill Graham recently articulated, the emerging  
military/political agenda for Canadian Forces is about “enforcing  
peace.” In order to accomplish such enforcement upon an entire  
population, Graham states that the population in question “must  
perceive the use of force in their neighbourhood, and the civilian  
casualties that are suffered, as being for their greater good and not  
just the repressive measures of a foreign occupying force” (DND).

While a population welcoming the use of deadly force in their  
neighbourhood – however great the good – is decidedly  
unlikely, tactical aerial bombing is surely less illustrative of  
occupation than are “boots on the ground,” and is therefore  
a preferable lever of control. Perhaps more importantly, the aerial  
approach saves lives of the enforcing army. This is one component of  
what Bill Graham calls “the human element.”

The concentrated aerial attacks on Iraq throughout the 1990s –  
Desert Storm (1991), Desert Strike (1996), and Desert Fox (1998) â 
€“ as well as the 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999  
and the attack on Afghanistan in 2001, foreshadow a type of  
asymmetrical aerial bombing which, according to defence planners, is  
the way of the future.

In defence-speak, this new counterinsurgency warfare is a development  
which denotes a “Revolution in Military Affairs”: a shift  
in military doctrine arising from developments in technology,  
operational concepts, or organizational methods that profoundly alters  
or replaces old practices (DND). A Revolution in Military Affairs is  
not a common occurrence; it is a landmark. Think gunpowder,  
Blitzkrieg, and the atom bomb.

The use of asymmetrical air power to enforce the national interest is  
one element of the Revolution in Military Affairs that has emerged  
over the past two decades. The other components of the new doctrine  
include hi-tech surveillance, mobile “light” armies built  
around Special Forces, and control of outer space. While clearly  
rooted in advanced technological capacities of the twenty-first  
century, a Revolution in Military Affairs is not defined by  
technological advance alone. What makes a revolution is the  
willingness to actually use the new paradigm in place of the old.

All indications point to such willingness. Canadian Armed Forces  
senior command has been recently staffed by generals with relatively  
strong assymetrical warfare credentials. General Rick Hillier,  
promoted to chief of defense staff, headed the multinational force in  
Kabul and said of his recent assignment relieving American troops in  
Kandahar that Canadians were there “to confront terrorism right  
at the face” (Economist). While Major-General Walter Natyncyzk â 
€“ who just returned from a year with American troops in Iraq â 
€“ has been tapped to carry out reforms in the Canadian forces  
modeled after the United States Northern Command, with the regional  
army, navy and air force units answering to one Canada Command.

The crux behind the reforms is the capacity to face asymmetrical  
challenges – what the army calls the ability to wage â 
€œthree-block war” in an urban setting. “Three-block  
war” is terminology lifted straight from the US Marine Corpsâ 
€™ bloody invasion of Fallujah in April 2004. Air power is the  
backbone of this type of warfare, and no nation on earth uses airpower  
to enforce occupation more effectively than Israel.

*

FOR THE PAST THREE DECADES, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) has been among  
the world’s most advanced and most active, yet the thirty-eighth  
running of the Maple Flag war-games was the first time Israel has been  
invited to participate at Cold Lake. Not only was the IAF invited, but  
Canada asked (and Israel obliged) the IAF to stay an additional two  
weeks in Cold Lake. The sudden rapprochement between the air forces of  
Canada and Israel is best understood in light of this developing  
Revolution in Military Affairs.

As Colonel Sullivan describes it, the era of the air wars (think  
Battle of Britain, he says) is over, and training international  
coalitions for World War III aerial dog-fighting (think Top Gun, this  
author says) is becoming obsolete. “What we’re seeing now  
is much more complex, much more of a counterinsurgency-type battle,  
fighting guerrilla warfare on the ground,” claims Sullivan  
(National Post).

The forward-looking edge of military doctrine is no longer facing  
advanced air forces (the Luftwaffe or the Red Army). Instead, it is  
enforcing control over populations in colonial or neo-colonial  
occupation regimes in essentially urban settings. “We’ve  
moved away from that large coalition air force designed to fight the  
Third World War,” said Sullivan (National Post).

Therefore, in order to simulate aerial operations that reflect the  
current reality in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, this year’s  
exercises focus on what sounds like a day in the Gaza Strip during the  
al-Aqsa intifada (which began in September 2000). Rather than  
targeting military installations or tank columns, the pilots will be  
given what Sullivan called moving, “time-sensitive targets,â 
€ which are described as targets that are legitimate for only a  
specific period of time – for example, a resistance leader  
traveling in a car or a gunman crouching in an alley.

This type of operation – namely, decreasing the time between  
identifying a target and striking it – is known in military  
slang as shortening the “kill chain,” and it is evidenced  
most dramatically by the Israeli Air Force. Between November 2000 â 
€“ when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak openly announced the  
policy of “targeted assassination” – and May 2005,  
more than 250 Palestinian political and military leaders and activists  
were assassinated by the IAF. Despite the fact that the Israelis have  
almost all their targets under surveillance, the air strikes  
invariably take place on crowded streets and involve the use of  
munitions such as the Hellfire, an antitank-armour missile, against  
civilian automobiles.

Avi Dichter, Israel’s internal security (Shin Bet) chief during  
the intifada, said of the assassination policy, “Its  
effectiveness is amazing. The State of Israel has brought preventative  
assassination to the level of a real art.”

Dichter added with pride: “When a Palestinian child draws a sky  
nowadays, he will not draw it without a helicopter.”

*

ACCORDING TO THE ISRAELI Defense Force, since mid-2004 more than  
ninety percent of Israeli attacks in Gaza – a densely populated  
strip characterized by crowded refugee camps – have been carried  
out by the Israeli Air Force (Defense News). Though no precise  
distinction can be made between IAF and IDF strikes, Palestine Red  
Crescent statistics show that during that same period, some 600  
Palestinians were killed and 5000 were injured, the overwhelming  
majority of whom were civilians.

Nevertheless, after five years of fighting the Palestinian intifada,  
Israel’s expertise in this type of warfare apparently does not  
go unnoticed. Veteran Ha’aretz reporter Ari Shavit asked  
outgoing IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon if Israel’s  
record in the intifada could be characterized as a “phenomenal  
military achievement,” and Ya’alon replied: “That is  
what foreign armies are saying” (Ha’aretz Magazine).  
Presumably, the Canadian Forces is among those armies. According to  
Canada’s Colonel Sullivan, “from 25,000 feet we can drop  
one bomb on a very precise target and that gets a lot of peopleâ 
€™s attention very quickly” (National Post).

Indeed, under Ya’alon and air force commander Dan Halutz, the  
IAF played a leading role in fighting the Palestinian uprising and  
enforcing Israel’s occupation regime in the West Bank and Gaza â 
€“ targeting not only militants, but also key civilian and state  
infrastructure. The most salient examples were the attacks on the  
refugee camps of Jenin (April 2002), Rafah (May 2004) and Jabalya/Beit  
Hanoun (October 2004), which were similarly characterized by the use  
of concentrated bombings by the IAF in tiny areas with dense  
populations. Consequences for Palestinians were severe, yet when  
viewed through a traditional military lens, the stalemate that emerged  
between Palestinians and Israelis is no victory for Israel.

The IDF is one of the world’s most powerful armies, with access  
to significant state resources, and it has fought a poorly armed  
national liberation movement to an undeclared ceasefire. Yet, in the  
new paradigm, absolute victory is not exclusively the product of  
military X’s and O’s, and such attacks are considered  
strategic successes. In the words of Ya’alon, the goal is to â 
€œsear [into] the Palestinians’ consciousness” that  
resistance is futile and victory impossible.

High-profile atrocities – like in August 2002 when Salah Shehade  
was assassinated along with his wife, teenage daughter and twelve  
others (including eight children) when the IAF dropped a one-ton bomb  
on the crowded apartment building where the senior Hamas commander  
lived, or in May 2004 when an IAF Apache Longbow attack helicopter  
launched missiles into a demonstration of mostly schoolchildren in  
Rafah, killing ten and injuring scores – did little to dim the  
ascendancy of air power in enforcing occupation throughout the al-Aqsa  
intifada. In fact, after the Shehade assassination Air Force head Dan  
Halutz, asked how it felt to deliver a bomb of this sort, replied that  
one feels only a “slight bump on the wing.” Despite the  
massive toll of young innocents, the attack passed Halutz’s â 
€œmoral test,” and he infamously told his pilots amid the  
subsequent outcry to “sleep well at night,” like he does  
(Ha’aretz Magazine).

Israel went further, promoting Halutz to chief of staff, a position he  
assumed in May. Halutz’s appointment marked the first time that  
an air force commander was named to the position of chief of staff.  
Halutz’s selection over an infantry general was widely seen as  
the cementing embrace of a doctrine of air power in the service of  
urban warfare (leaving aside the harbinger this appointment represents  
to Iran).

A leading military publication, Defense News, picked up on the  
significance of the development and ran a front page feature titled: â 
€œIn Israel, air power takes on ground jobs.” In the article,  
Halutz describes his doctrine of “environmental air controlâ 
€: “a combination of advanced technology, unique operational  
concepts and close coordination among intelligence branches enable air  
power to relieve some of the burden traditionally shouldered by ground  
forces, reducing the need for…the prolonged presence of ground  
troops, which is overwhelmingly viewed as illegitimate by  
international norms.”

The much-talked about “disengagement” from Gaza has seen  
Israel using Halutz’s “environmental air control” to  
police the Gaza Strip without the need for IDF boots on the ground.  
Viewed through Bill Graham’s articulation of Canadian policy,  
all of this force will be for the “greater good” of  
Palestinians. Is this not the ultimate logic of the contradictory  
concept of “peace enforcement?”

JON ELMER is a Canadian photojournalist who reported from the West  
Bank and Gaza Strip during the al-Aqsa intifada.