Air power

Larry Johnson and Pat Lang have been looking at the issue of the effectiveness of air power to achieve Israel's goals in southern Lebanon:  Here We Go Again by Larry Johnson, No Quarter blog 07/18/06; "Peace for Galilee" 2 by Pat Lang, Sic Semper Tyrannis blog 07/18/06

Ever since the airplane was invented, if not before, there have been military strategists and air power enthusiasts who saw air power as a super weapon that could work magic.  The "revolution in military affairs" (RMA) that Rummy has embraced (but predated his term as Defense Secretary) and "military transformation" are based on heavy reliance on air power.

Johnson writes:

Israel and its most stalwart U.S. allies are still spouting the bullshit that they can get things under control with simple use of airplanes, drones, and bombs.  Oh yeah.  Let's make a list of wars that have been [won] exclusively through the use of airpower.  (CRICKETS CHIRPING)  That's right.  NONE.  ZERO.  ZIP.  Israel has every right to insist that it not serve as the drop zone for Hezbollah missiles.  But, they will not be able to bomb their way out of this problem.  That can only be done with troops on the ground.  I'm betting they won't be able to resist the temptation.  If Israel takes Iran's bait, then Israel will find itself battling an Iraq-style insurgency and Tehran can sit back and enjoy the spectacle of watching the United States try to salvage a democracy in Lebanon while supporting Israel, who is destroying its democratic neighbor to the north, and rally a distracted international community to punish Iran who is busy consolidating its control over the militia, police, and intelligence service in Iraq.  Got it?  (my emphasis)

Lang writes:

My sources indicate to me that preparations have begun for entry of a large Israeli ground force into southern Lebanon.  This is probably a contingency option as yet, but as the IDF "discovers" that Olmert's list of desirables are unattainable with AIR POWER (sound of trumpets) and artillery plus the odd commando raid, then the contingency option will become the plan.

The reliance on air power is a factor that's much discussed among military strategists but is not so much a focus of popular discussions.  And yet the topic is a critical element of the American way of war.  And the heavy reliance on air power is a huge factor in foreign perceptions of the United States, because it inevitably inflicts many civilian deaths and injuries.

Jeffrey Record has looked at some of the lessons of the Kosovo War (Operation Allied Force) relating to the relative importance of air power and ground troops in the kinds of wars that the US is likely to be engaged in during the coming years.  I should say, "if at all", but obviously we're bogged down already in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In the Kosovo War, the NATO forces did not invade Serbian territory, including Kosovo, and did not place any significant reliance on the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a very motley crew that included everything from hardlines Stalinists to family clan groups to jihadists.

Here are excerpts from two of Record's articles:

Operation Allied Force: Yet Another Wake-Up Call for the Army? by Jeffrey Record Parameters (US Army War College) Winter 1999-2000:

America's political leadership has become hyper-averse to incurring American casualties, even among all-volunteer professionals.  This is especially true in circumstances not involving clear and present dangers to vital strategic interests.  That leadership has accordingly embraced air power more and more, not as a "joint" complement to surface forces, but rather as a substitute for ground power.  Thus the emerging predilection for cruise missiles over manned aircraft, and manned aircraft over anything on the ground.  Thus President Bill Clinton's reassurances to the American people (and to Slobodan Milosevic) during Operation Allied Force that no US ground combat option to stop Serbia's ethnic cleansing of Kosovo was in the cards.

To be sure, future Presidents might not repeat this great mistake of Operation Allied Force.  Moreover, it is becoming increasingly clear that factors other than air power - most notably Russia's diplomatic defection from Serbia and NATO's backtracking on war settlement terms - played major roles in encouraging Milosevic to call it quits.  Allied Force will nonetheless stand as a powerful and alluring use-of-force precedent.

Even when Iraq challenged concrete US strategic interests in the Persian Gulf a decade ago, Operation Desert Storm was crafted and conducted with American casualty minimization as the first order of business.  Massive air power was employed for almost six weeks before US ground forces were exposed to combat against what by then was an already beaten Iraqi army in Kuwait.  The result: only 146 American military dead out of over 500,000 committed.

Preparatory bombardment is of course hardly a new concept, and the very presence of massive US ground forces compelled Saddam Hussein to deploy his ground forces in a manner that made them good targets from the air.  It is also true that Desert Storm left Saddam Hussein in power and much of his Republican Guard intact, that Allied Force actually encouraged Belgrade to accelerate its ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, and that NATO air power barely touched Serbia's fielded forces.

These facts should matter, but to some politicians and air power devotees they do not.  Those contemplating the future of the Army need to understand that air power, decisive or not, is an ever more politically appealing instrument of diplomatic coercion and even of war itself than ground forces, which are regarded as especially casualty-prone.  Minimizing risk - force protection - has become more important than military effectiveness.  The Vietnam syndrome thrives, and Allied Force's spectacular 78-day run without a single American or allied airman killed in action will stand as a beacon to future Presidents who wish to use force without apparent risk.

The idea of "risk protection" taking priority over "military effectiveness" means, in more direct terms, that using ground troops in many cases would be more effective in achieving the goals of the war than air power, but more American soldiers would be likely to die compared to the use of air power.

But that framing of the trade-off, which is a very common one, it seems, among both political leaders and the officer corps, is potentially very misleading.  In a situation like the Iraq War, where  air power and heavy artillery are used to combat guerrilla forces in urban areas, the use of the heavy weapons makes the political task of winning support or at least neutralityamong the civilian population much more difficult.  And that can and has, in the case of Iraq, extended the war and made it much more brutal and deadly for American forces.

Put another way, over-reliance on air power can create a false impression among the side using it about how easy or relatively painless war can be.  I have no doubt that the experiences of the Gulf War, the Bosnian intervention and the Kosovo War gave a lot of Americans, from generals and politicians to pundits and ordinary voters, a wrong impression in that regard.  Our soldiers are paying for it now.

Record also notes that the Army was not at the time of this article showing much intention to move away from its conventional-war focus, still preparing to stop the Soviet Red Army sweeping through the Fulda Gap in Germany:

To be sure, the Army is fiddling around with its heavy divisions, making them modestly lighter by shedding a dozen or so tanks and infantry fighting vehicles per battalion. It is also talking the talk of creating a new rapidly deployable strike force. But the Army plans no fundamental reorganization, such as discarding divisions in favor of smaller, more strategically mobile combat groups. Nor does the Army plan any fundamental restructuring, such as perhaps reversing the present ratio of heavy to light forces and creating units specifically trained and equipped for peace operations. (The same case that was made for dedicated special operations forces can be made for dedicated peace operations forces.) Indeed, the Army's stated main priorities for the future are to achieve "information dominance" via digitization and to maintain its present level of "combat overmatch" vis-à-vis potential enemies by acquiring such new systems as the Comanche reconnaissance and light attack helicopter, the Crusader howitzer, and the Theater High Altitude Area Defense anti-ballistic missile system. Its vision of the future is a digitized battlefield for the "Army After Next," complete with each soldier having computer-displayed information of the battlefield in real time.  (my emphasis)

Collapsed Countries, Casualty Dread, and the New American Way of War by Jeffrey Record Parameters (US Army War College), Summer 2002:

Less problematic was Operation Allied Force, a much larger and longer (78 days) aircampaign than Deliberate Force.  Though the KLA was active on the ground, it was never more than a hit-and-run guerrilla force; unlike the much larger and better-equipped Croatian and Bosniac forces of August 1995, it was incapable of taking and holding much territory.  Airpower thus dominated military operations against Serbia in 1999.  Ground forces were deliberately withheld from combat, although toward the end of Allied Force there were indications that NATO was moving toward creation of a ground-force option.

There is virtually universal agreement that it was bombing and the implicit threat of expanded bombing that set in train the sequence of events that produced Milosevic’s decision to accept NATO’s, or more precisely the G-8 countries’, war-termination conditions.  There is broad agreement that the bombing’s decisive strategic effects were produced by attacks on Yugoslavia’s dual-use infrastructure targets rather than attacks on fielded forces.  The objective of Allied Force was not the destruction of the Milosevic regime, but the coercion of the regime to cease its brutal behavior in Kosovo - specifically, cessation of ethnic cleansing, withdrawal of Serb security forces from Kosovo, acceptance of a NATO force presence in Kosovo, return of refugees, and acceptance of substantial political autonomy for Kosovo. Coercion worked.

To be sure, Allied Force was hardly an airman’s ideal air campaign; political micromanagement was exceptionally intrusive, and the campaign began on the misassumption that a few days of token bombing would bring Milosevic to his senses.  Allied Force also sparked an acceleration of the very ethnic cleansing of Kosovo that it was designed to halt, revealing a casualty-phobia-driven disconnect between military means and political ends. (Ethnic cleansing could be stopped only on the ground, but the Clinton Administration had publicly excluded a ground combat option, thus encouraging Milosevic to drive the remaining Kosovar Albanians out of Kosovo and thereby confront NATO with a fait accompli.)  Moreover, the G-8 countries softened NATO’s original war-termination demands.

Allied Force was nonetheless a clear strategic win under exceptionally difficult political conditions, and airpower is the starting and ending point for any discussion of why Milosevic quit. (my emphasis)

Record is pointing out a critical factor about the Kosovo War, which is that it was not a war for the total conquest of the enemy regime.  It was a war with limited, geographically defined goals.

He doesn't emphasize it in the excerpts I've quoted.  But Milosevic could also see that NATO was massing forces for a ground invasion, and had every reason to expect that one would occur.  Without the credible threat of the ground invasion, it's questionable whether he would have been willing to capitulate when he did.