Air power always wins (at least its zealous believers think so)

Col. Dave Belote seems to think that for the Air Force, the Iraq War has been a stunning success:  Counterinsurgency Airpower: Air-Ground Integration for the Long War (09/01/06) Air & Space Power Journal Fall 2006.  He writes, with plenty of acronyms:

General [Thomas] Metz is not alone in his enthusiasm for the current partnership between ground power and airpower.  At the Joint Fires and Effects Seminar at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 2005, a number of speakers emphasized the interdependent relationship between fire and maneuver.  The RAND memo to Secretary Rumsfeld highlighted the “increasing inter-dependence of air and ground forces,” noting in particular how “air operations reduced substantially the costs and risks of ground operations” in Iraq.  Recent events demonstrate that jointness has taken root even more deeply in current operations. Army and Air Force personnel in Baghdad cemented their partnership in MNC-I’s [Multinational Corps-Iraq] JFEC [fires and effects cell] and ASOC [air support operations center ]; the trust and closeness they developed grew to encompass all the players involved in focusing joint fires and effects within Iraq. The Marines’ DASC, Baghdad’s ASOC, and the CAOC [combined air operations center] in Qatar jointly managed an air war that facilitated success in Fallujah; the CAOC in turn led a process that worked through the JFEC and tactical-level FSEs to maximize airpower’s nonlethal influence on Iraqi elections.

Because many of these elements had never practiced together, they stumbled occasionally, and soldiers, sailors, marines, and Airmen should work together to correct those deficiencies. As RAND’s memo argued, “fixed wing aviation should be better integrated with ground forces by increasing the realism and frequency of joint training.”  At the same time, the services can work to create a more-effective joint lessons-learned process, develop innovative joint-assignment policies, and adjust newly developing fire-support doctrine - all to ensure that future commanders understand how maneuver and fire enable each other so they can start every joint game with top players in the lineup.  (my emphasis)

Rummy's notion of "military transformation" involves heavy reliance on the vision of warfare promoted by air power zealots.  When Rummy says that "air operations reduced substantially the costs and risks of ground operations”, he's expressing the eternal faith of air power enthusiasts that aerial warfare can win wars more quickly and reduce the cost in lives for Our Side.

There are many problems with this model, not least of which is the effect of the massive destruction and loss of civilian lives that even the most "surgical" air strikes impose on the enemy population.  The Israeli Air Force (IAF) succeeded in hitting the targets it aimed for in Lebanon during this summer's war.  But the enemy (Hizbullah) had adapted to the IAF's capabilities and to the heavily-air-power-reliance style of warfare on which Israel has come to depend.

And when the Marines fight a battle in a city like Fallujah with urban guerrillas and call in air power to blow up a house from which they know or believe an enemy guerrilla is operating, that may a sign that "that jointness has taken root even more deeply in current operations".  But the subsequent damage and loss of life to civilian noncombatants means that it's not always the most efficient counterinsurgency strategy.

The air power advocates ask, though, would you rather see more American soldiers killed than the "collateral damage" of civilians in the combat zone being killed?  Civilian deaths being invariably "collateral damage" or "terrorists" when the bodies are counted, if they are counted at all.

General Billy Mitchell, patron saint
of the air power zealots

But after three and a half years of successful "jointness" by air and ground forces and the "trust and closeness they developed grew to encompass all the players involved in focusing joint fires and effects within Iraq", the US now controls our own basis and the Green Zone compound in Baghdad where the government is housed, and that's about it, for all practical purposes.

The sophomore-philosophy-class speculation about the tradeoff of Arab civilian noncombatant lives versus good American lives may be intriguing.  But a more real-world question is, how can such a war be fought in a way that Our Side actually wins?

But in the battle for defense dollars, the Air Force and their industrial suppliers stand to be long-term winners in the Rummy-style "transformation".  That one they are winning.