USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20010928.1306 (On Screen): How ruthless do you feel? During World War II in the Pacific, the Japanese built tunnels -- lots of tunnels. One of the worst places for that was Iwo Jima, a flyspeck of an island worth nothing whatever except because of its location. It was almost exactly half way between and directly in line between Saipan and the Japanese home islands. In Japanese hands, an air field on Iwo would permit Japanese fighters to attack American B-29 bombers twice on each mission to Japan, while in American hands it could be used to base long range fighter escorts and to provide an emergency landing field for damaged bombers, plus supporting scout planes to cover a large area of the Pacific, and to provide air cover for naval movement. So when the Japanese started building an airfield there, the US decided to take the island. But no-one expected the price to be as high as it was. It was one of the bloodiest fights per square mile of the entire war. Iwo is a rock seven miles long and about three miles wide. Every square inch of it was within range of naval gunfire, and the Japanese-held sections of it were shelled ceaselessly during the entire campaign. It was subjected to six weeks of air bombardment and three full days of naval gunfire before the landing. Naval gunfire could be called in by the Marines as they needed it, and numerous American carriers provided bombers to make targeted attacks during the fighting. Communication between the Marines and the Navy was excellent. And yet it took seven weeks to take some 8 square miles at a cost of over 24,000 American casualties (including 6821 killed). The defending force of about 21,000 men was nearly all killed (as had been the norm in Japanese defensive operations throughout the war; few prisoners were ever taken).

The Japanese had fortified the island extensively with concrete pillboxes for machine guns and mortars and artillery pieces, and also with an extremely elaborate tunnel system. These tunnels would permit Japanese units to pop up behind the Marines and attack them from rear. Ultimately, one way of dealing with this turned out to be to deal with tunnel entrances whenever they were found by pouring flamethrower fire into their mouths, followed by the use of satchel charges to collapse and seal them. The flamethrowers would ruin the air inside, and sealing the mouth would then trap any survivors or at least make that exit useless.

If it turns out to be necessary for the US to send in a substantial ground force to Afghanistan, we're probably going to have to do the same thing with the tunnels there, only maybe even more so. While there is not (cannot be!) anything like the kind of density of tunnels as there were on Iwo, the ones they do have will be a substantial problem. One possible tactic on finding any tunnel mouth will be to toss in gas grenades, and then to seal the mouth. Tunnels have many virtues but ventilation is not among them; and if there is a substantial release of gas at a sealed entrance, it will eventually pervade the entire tunnel complex and force abandonment for a considerable period of time. That, of course, then leads to the question of lethal versus non-lethal gas. How ruthless do you feel?

We could use tear gas (CS), for instance, but the complex would become useful again in a few days at most. On the other hand, such a tunnel could be rendered permanently useless with mustard gas, which settles on surfaces, is a contact poison (gas masks are not a sufficient defense against it; you need full body coverage), and doesn't degrade if it isn't exposed to weather, which it wouldn't be underground. Upon discovery of any tunnel entrance, a hundred pound canister of mustard gas with a time-delay mechanism on it could be moved 20 yards inside, and then the mouth sealed with explosives. Then a couple of minutes later the cannister would release many thousands of cubic feet of gas over a period of a couple of minutes. That would be enough to render an extremely large tunnel system (one extending several miles) useless pretty much indefinitely. Mustard gas is 85 year old technology; I have no doubt whatever that we have more modern poison gases capable of even better effect. But this would also violate the Geneva Convention and could potentially lose us our position of moral superiority in the war. (It's arguable also that it is cruel, but is it really any more cruel than any other kind of killing in a war?) On the other hand, I really don't know of any other way to deal with extensive tunnels; we can't afford to pay the kind of price we paid at Iwo per square mile of Afghani territory cleared, and to eliminate a tunnel complex without gas you have to find and destroy every single entrance. For big ones that's not practical. The advantage of using gas is that you can eliminate a complex by finding only one entrance; you no longer care where the others are. Once you've driven your enemy to the surface, then he is much easier to defeat.

The "humane" way is to used non-lethal colored smoke. Then you use air recon to try to find other entrances as the smoke emerges from them, calling in either bombing missions or moving ground forces in to seal those. That's not very effective, though; too much chance of missing a few.

An alternative, which would so far as I know be completely legal under the Geneva Convention, would be to release explosive gas instead of poison