Imaging and U.S. Air Superiority in Vietnam

Graphical-Logistical Data was Essential for American Air Offensive

Feb 22, 2009

In the Vietnam conflict, the U.S. discovered that the appropriation of land through air superiority relied on imaging technology to maintain a psychological offensive.

In “The A to Z of lethal SEAD”, Zachary Lum discusses the connections between technology and strategic air superiority: “behind each . . . attack route are weeks, perhaps months, of intelligence gathering by satellite and airborne reconnaissance systems, data that is processed and massaged into pinpoint targeting information.”

The significance of accurate data reaches back to the post-WWI era, when theorists first “asserted that ‘strategic’ bombing . . . could destroy not only the capability of an enemy to wage war but also the enemy’s will to fight,” according to Mark Clodfelter in The Limits of Air Power. This amounted to psycho-social devestation every bit as useful as the elimination of military targets.

U.S. Suppression of Enemy Air Defences (SEAD) in Vietnam

Such was Nixon’s understanding in December of 1972 when he instituted Linebacker II, a B-52 bombing campaign that Clodfelter claims was designed for “a maximum psychological impact on the North Vietnamese.” From altitudes over 30,000 feet, a B-52 bomber was invisible and inaudible, a very real possibility of sudden death without warning.

Acquisition of graphical-logistical data from the air is necessary in order to provide information accurate enough to formulate pinpoint targeting data. The United States discovered that the appropriation of land through air superiority relied as much on technological conceptualizations of space as raw firepower to maintain a psychological as well as physical offensive.

Aerial Intelligence Connected to Psychological Impact of Bombing

Eliot Cohen, in his widely known 1994 Foreign Affairs article, “The Mystique of U.S. Air Power,” concludes that accurate target data and “skillful manipulation of . . . transmitted information” was therefore instrumental to US forces attempting to establish the geographical and logistical data necessary to dominate the North Vietnamese.

Viet Cong Minister of Justice, Truong Nhu Tang recalls, in A Viet Cong Memoir, being on the ground during such an air strike: “The first few times I experienced a B-52 attack it seemed, as I strained to press myself into the bunker floor, that I had been caught in the Apocalypse. The terror was complete. One lost control of bodily functions as the mind screamed incomprehensible orders to get out.”

Tang’s ground experience dovetails with Paul Virilio’s characterization of modern aerial intelligence in his introduction to the English edition of War and Cinema, entitled “The Sight Machine”: “A war of pictures and sounds is replacing the war of objects (projectiles and missiles). In a technician’s version of an all-seeing Divinity, ever ruling out accident and surprise, the drive is on for a general system of illumination that will allow everything to be seen and known.”

Reliance on Imaging Technology for Visual Advantage

The primacy of the transmitted image, of the gaze, separates ground war and air war and makes them possible as two distinct, interlocking worlds. Nevertheless, air power only works, according to David Spurr in The Rhetoric of Empire,if the “analytic arrangement of space from a position of visual advantage” is precise and available. Otherwise, “the relations of power inherent in the larger system of order” are subverted.

Cohen, Eliot. “The Mystique of U.S. Air Power.” Foreign Affairs 73 (1994): 109-125.

Lum, Zachary. “The A to Z of Lethal SEAD.” Journal of Electronic Defense 21 (1998): 35-43.

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