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In 1938 this book was published, The Chosen Instrument by Captain Norman MacMillan
and in it, you’ll find a curious sentence: Navies and armies seek their opposite numbers,
but the aeroplane is an enemy of the organized existence of the people.
What does this have to do with Desert Storm you might ask. Let me explain.
Since the first World War, air power theorists argued that air power would dislodge
the centuries old tradition of clashing armies. Whether it was Mitchell, Trenchard, Lapchinsky,
Douhet, it does not matter, they all went against conventional wisdom. For this we need to return to
the famous, and overcited Clausewitzian saying, ‘Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung
der Politik mit anderen Mitteln’. By employing army against army, war
across the centuries was one of sea-and decisive land battles, all with the purpose to enforce upon
the enemy your will from the outside, in – to apply an awkward translation from Clausewitz,
chip away until the enemy is thrown down and ultimately incapable of resisting.
Airpower theorists saw in the aeroplane the means to turn this tradition on its head. The aeroplane,
unchained from the two-dimensional battles of old, could bypass armies, put an end to action-reaction
cycles, eliminate the fog-of-war, and shorten the time of a conflict. Think back to the statement
of the time – the bomber will always get through – and what it implies. Taking the five rings model,
this means that instead of acting against the enemy’s army, this air minded approach would act
from the inside out, taking away the ability of the enemy to wage war in the first place,
by destruction of its civil-military leadership and means of production.
Hence, the aeroplane as the enemy of the organized existence of the people.
By shifting the center of gravity to disrupt this organization in its representation from
production to the leadership, airpower would be victorious, without having to battle an army.
From the very beginning, airpower thinkers believed that […] airpower had unique
capabilities. It also operated in a unique, separate, and unobstructed realm. […] It
would free civilian and military leaders from a no-choice reliance on land warfare […]. But to
do this, the „aeromaniacs“ cautioned, the air weapon had to be used strategically,
independently, and directly. And while some theorists like
Slessor, Mecozzi and Tukhachevskii saw air as army support, the rational of using air not to win
battles but to win wars became deeply entrenched. The problem is, air power never won a war. We
like to think it did, because Airpower theorists and Air Forces in World War 2 told us that was the
case. But careful inspection of cause-and-effect of strategic bombing over Germany in World
War 2 [video], airpower in Korea and Vietnam clearly shows that airpower never won or lost a
war. Where it could it helped facilitate victory, but victory was down to the boots on the ground.
There is the case of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that ignores the
fact that it was the nuclear weapon, rather than airplane itself, that forced Japan to surrender.
The belief that air power would win wars was not just a theory,
it became a creed born out of the belief that the airplane epitomized technological superiority, and
as carrier of nuclear bombs would bring about a swift victory in the clash with the Soviet Union,
and that this alone required an independent Air Force.
As historian Tami Davis Biddle in her book Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare states:
‘The USAAF’s position as the nations only nuclear-capable arm reinforced this propensity
to […] pronounce on the unlimited power of bombers. But atomic bombs were, in some sense,
a parallel to the RAF’s morale effect: […] they made it easier to avoid thinking through
the still poorly understood relationship between bombing and enemy capitulation. [USAAF] postulated
a scenario that was attractive for purposes of deterrence (and cost cutting) but unrealistic
in terms of the way states actually enter into and fight wars. These problems made themselves
felt […] when American airmen found themselves fighting limited wars in Asia, where the theories
underpinning Anglo-American strategic bombing had little relevance to the circumstances at hand.’
The Korean war, although seeing an US led bomber offensive, was in fact a slog that reminded not of
the Battle over the Reich, but rather it resembled the Eastern Front, or the hedgerows of Normandy.
Well, take away the hedges and replace them by hills, mountains, and valleys.
USAF, having placed nuclear deterrence as its raison d’etre, took few lessons from
this. As Melvin Deaile writes in Always at War: ‘Despite the different nature of the Korean War,
the SAC [Strategic Air Command] mentality remained unchanged. The Korean War became
a limited war […] and soon became an air superiority fight. […] As interdiction
of supplies to North Korean troops and close air support of US troops emerged as another priority,
the fighter-bomber took on a dominant role.’ To find out more about the USAF nuclear mentality,
check out this previous video I made. But while in Korea air power had ultimately forced
North Korea into an armistice the belief that air alone would win a war finally came to an end
with Vietnam. While much can be said about the micro-managing of air assets by the
relevant governmental administrations, and the reluctance to fight a ground war, the Air Force
had to change. The bomber, and bombing, had failed and the air weapon had not brought down Vietnam.
As Richard Hallion puts it in his essay America as a Military Aerospace Nation:
‘Vietnam revealed that the military services desperately needed institutional and cultural
reform […] [and] exposed critical weaknesses in command and control,
from the national command authority down through theater-level and further down to the operational/
tactical level of war. “Vietnam had one good result” on Army officer remarked after the war,
“It’s made us question the way things are done.”’ As always, I like to give reading recommendations
with my videos, all sources per usual in the description below. For todays video,
I recommend Airpower Reborn, an edited volume by Colonel John Olsen, this book is the one that got
me thinking about this topic. I also know many of you are interested in the AAF during WW2,
and since it really touches onto the way the doctrine developed, I also recommend Craig
Morris’ The Origins of American Strategic Bombing Theory, and Raymond O‘Mara’s Rise of the War
Machines. Not only are they on my official reading list at the Naval Institute Press,
today’s sponsor – yes, many YTers get mobile games, or some food subscription service, BUT with
me you get books and at 25% off using my exclusive code. More information at the end of the video.
Through Korea, Bay of Pigs, and Vietnam deficiencies in tactical air power
had become obvious and the move to the diminished the role of the bomber, but the deployments in
Asia had also resulted in another, fundamental shift. The Air Force had become a global force,
one that needed an expeditionary mindset, able to deploy rapidly, with in-theatre command and
control, supported by flexible logistics, airlift capabilities and in-air refueling.
And at the same time, other conflicts like the Six-Day War in 1967 showed a totally different
use of airpower, one that achieved results. The result? An Air Force that had to reexamine
the doctrinal underpinnings that it had held so dear since the 1930s.
What emerged was a changed force. Instead of the bomber, the multi-role fighter aircraft
spearheaded not just a change in technology, but also the application of the air weapon.
Electronic warfare systems and improved anti-radiation missiles
started to counter the growing radar and SAM threat, advances in radar and missile
technology pushed towards control of the sky, as precision guided and longer-range
standoff weapons extended the destructive reach of aircraft,
while the new F-14, F-15, F-16 and F-18 provided flexible platforms to deliver these. Meanwhile,
stealth platforms like the F-117 and B-2 were to brave the missions no one else could fly.
America moved from trusting in aviation firepower alone, to embracing sudden,
coordinated, and overwhelming surgical strikes, tied into a mobile air, air lift and naval force
supported by intelligence, in-flight refueling, rapid decision-making, and prepared with high
fidelity training. Ironically this, and not the bomber, would finally bring about the ability
to act against the inside, and be effective. While bombers required clear and inflexible
targets with proper planning and continuous attacks, the flexible force America now possessed
was able to surgically and coordinately chip away at an adversary’s leadership, production,
infrastructure and military forces. And no example shows this more clearly, than Desert Storm.
Desert Storm is sometimes referred to as the ‘revolution in aerospace affairs’.
And while pictures like destroyed tanks, blown up vehicles columns, and stealth bombers might give
reason for such judgements, they are nothing but the result of the actual revolution.
By utilizing technical advancements in ammunitions including the eventual deployment of PGMs, with a
mixed force (include B-52), employing clear target lists, dedicated kill boxes,
a tanker bridge, and aerial controls systems such as AWACS and JSTARS, coalition forces
not just disrupted the Iraqi military, but its support infrastructure, its command & control,
morale, while reducing the fog-of-war painting a picture of the battlefield through intelligence
and surveillance. This, paired with overwhelming numerical air superiority,
allowed the coalition air forces to move from a more static preparatory air offensive to the
mobile support during the ground offensive. As always, not everything went to plan
but in sum, the opening air campaign, followed by a coordinated ground offensive,
allowed Coalition forces to be victorious. As the final Gulf War Air Power Survey states
‘Air power dominated the military outcome of Operation Desert Storm. With the onset of the
air campaign, Coalition air forces embarked on their great effort to “prepare the battlefield”.
By hampering Iraqi forces in the KTO from the beginning of the war, Coalition air power
destroyed whatever willingness most might have had to fight the ground battle […]. It was the
effectiveness of the air campaign in breaking apart the organizational structure and cohesion
of enemy military forces and in reaching the ‘mind’ of the Iraqi solider that counted.’
While subsequent operations over Bosnia and Kosovo have led some to claim that air power
had finally achieved the goal of ending wars, the outcomes of these conflicts are largely
tied to the context of air operations as a military extension of political pressure.
Air theory had matured, over the years it proved that it could extend the reach of the
old outside-in approach by targeting critical centers and eroding resistance
from the inside-out. But while doing so, it had to make the sober realization that it was
AirLand battles that brough victory and that the old claim of the aeroplane bringing down
the organized resistance of a people was an overambition in both major and limited wars.
While recently the withdrawal from Afghanistan has not been a high point for the West, it is
noteworthy when looking at operations over Syria, and comparing these to the present use of airpower
over Ukraine by Russia, how different US, and by extension, Western airpower is. Noteworthy too,
is how little remains of the erstwhile truths that were held self-evident in the 1930s as we move
into so-called 5th generation platforms. As Alan Stephens in Fifth-Generation Strategy describes:
‘Fifth-generation strategic writing routinely uses such terms as tempo, the decision-making contest,
knowledge dominance, strategic paralysis, the strategic raid, checkmate by operational maneuver,
fleeting footprint, effect-based operations, the no-fly zone, and the rapid halt, none of which has
any currency in first generation concepts.’ Just begs the question, while the air
weapon appears to have matured, what will happen now that we have unlocked space?
Ok, so space is still a long way off – but do you know what isn’t? Knowledge! Yes,
knowledge is in your grasp, you just have to take it – and that’s why I am happy to have partnered
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via the link in the description – browsing never hurt anyone, am I right – and if you want specific
recommendations, check out my official reading list for some tailored choices. Again, 25% off if
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what you thought about this episode in the description below, and see you in the sky.