Lessons from The Bomber Mafia
Morality and by inference ethics loom large in Gladwell's latest book
Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia was recommended to me over the past weekend, arrived yesterday, and took me less than six hours to devour.
While the book makes no claims to be a war story but, to use Gladwell’s words, is a ‘story set in war’ The Bomber Mafia attempts to tap into the morality of different approaches to the waging of war, using the Pacific air war of 1944 and 1945, specifically the bombing campaign on Japan as its backdrop.
I’ll leave others to judge the overall historical accuracy of the events but my initial take is that while Gladwell is exceptionally talented at spinning a good yarn, he left too many questions unanswered about a topic that has been mired in controversy for decades.
In essence, Gladwell attempts to trace the history of the largely unsuccessful precision bombing approach preferred by Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell through to the area bombing, euphemistically termed ‘moral bombing’ approach, by Major General Curtis LeMay. Gladwell focuses on the beliefs and personalities of the two commanders as a way of explaining how each justified their approach. LeMay is often portrayed as the person who beat Japan, although there are plenty who will say it took two atomic bombs to get Japan to surrender.
What cannot be denied is that LeMay’s approach may well have cost up to a million Japanese lives, many of whom would be otherwise classed as civilians, left 8.5 million homeless and destroyed over half of Japan’s cities in a ferocious firebombing campaign, that lasted from early March to the end of June 1945. What made LeMay’s approach so devastatingly effective was that he dropped large clusters of napalm bombs on structures that were flammable.
LeMay was convinced that bombing over large areas would quickly force a country into submission. Hansell believed that high altitude precision bombing designed to wipe out a country’s ability to wage war through the destruction of power plants, military equipment factories, and the like would at least minimize the loss of civilian life and again, hasten the end of a war.
Hansell’s problem was that the bomb aiming technology upon which he relied was ineffective in real-world combat conditions. The theory was sound but the practice was largely useless at achieving the desired result.
Beyond the overarching question about the morality of war, each approach opens up moral and ethical questions of their own. Gladwell argues, and with some conviction, that modern developments in technology which today mean commanders can direct airstrikes with extreme precision serve to favor Hansell’s theory, albeit that has come 50 years too late for Hansell to appreciate. The counter view which Gladwell leaves irritatingly unanswered is that LeMay’s approach was a way to justify a means to an end, regardless of the harm it did. In that sense, it is not dissimilar to Bomber Harris’s indiscriminate firebombing campaign against major German cities in the European war of 1939-45. In Gladwell’s account, Hansell was an unsung hero but Gladwell never gets under the surface to either pose or probe for answers to the moral questions posed by LeMay’s efforts with any degree of conviction.
You can argue that Gladwell’s near-fictional style allows him to deftly avoids the trap of moral judgment but given the book was published earlier this year, I find that a grave omission. That’s because I’m not convinced that we have an adequate grasp of the moral and ethical questions that underpin the most advanced technologies of the 21st century. Here’s why.
Does anyone doubt that Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (FANG) dominate our lives? The question is whether their dominance is for the common good. There are enough regulatory rumbles around the world to suggest that their practices, both individually and (to a greater or lesser extent) in combination are little short of predatory. But as consumers, we are faced with a dilemma.
Facebook is our de facto lens on the world with all the toxic effects that accompany it. Facebook keeps us angry on whatever topic is pissing us off today rather than provides the answers we need in order to better understand the world and those around us. Who can live without Amazon as the provider of uber convenience shopping? To put this into perspective, I don’t expect it will be too long before Amazon is delivering just about anything on-demand and within a few hours. Its grip on the entire logistics industry is that strong. At what point do we start paying for that transfer of power to a single corporate entity? Netflix has all but destroyed the cinema business and by extension has crushed the film industry making the creation of world-class movies and documentaries something we are at the risk of losing. But then I find myself grumpy at having to wait a week or a day for a TV series when I know I can get my series fix via a streaming service. Google is our go-to place to answer any question we want but at the price of our entire lives being exposed and sold to whoever wants to pay the price. The Google mantra of ‘do no evil’ was jettisoned long ago when it became clear that the company could be (rightly) ridiculed for engaging in cynical hypocrisy. And all of this prefaces any discussion about the pernicious use of technologies grouped under the magical banner of artificial intelligence.
I don’t see any easy answers to these top-level questions, let alone a deep dive. As I said to one colleague, there has to be a firmer role for regulation but as I look out on the world I see weak governments everywhere, except in China. And in an ironic twist to this story, it is China that is proposing the most radical and progressive approach for recommendation algorithms. My correspondent asserts that we need global approaches to solving some of these difficult moral and ethical problems but he bemoans our ability to get there in a world fractured by nationalistic tendencies.
I’d go further. When company after company can be routinely hit with fines for allegedly defrauding shareholders but almost never admitting fault, then have we reached the point where getting caught undertaking illegal practices is now a line item on the profit and loss account? On the flipside, the protections afforded to whistleblowers continue to be eroded and those who seek to organize labor in an attempt to secure basic rights are branded ‘socialist’ as though that is some sort of deadly disease. Until these basic power imbalances are brought to some sort of equilibrium, we may as well abandon any hope that a corporate moral compass exists.
Lessons from The Bomber Mafia
No sure whether you are aware or not, but the Bomber Mafia also formed the basis of 3 episodes in Season 5 of Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast.