Modern Air Power: The Nature of the Problem

Got this from the Tanknet forums. It was a presentation by a senior American analyst in Sydney.

28 May 2002
Modern Airpower: The Nature of the Problem
By William M. Arkin

Modern airpower is barely in its adolescence. Less than a dozen years ago, we got the first inkling of what precision and agility could do: Airpower could actually leapfrog over fielded military forces and indeed strike at the enemy’s core. The attacker was largely immune from the attacked. Precision was vindicated and stealth meant practical invisibility. Civilians were immune in a way they had never been in previous large-scale wars.

Since then, the world has experienced at least two more major modern air wars: in Yugoslavia and now Afghanistan. And it has seen the similar application of airpower in lesser conflicts, in Iraq, Bosnia, by Israel in Lebanon and against the Palestinians.

Still, the orthodoxy is that magnificent armies with stunning maneuvers won the Gulf War. Many remain convinced that airpower alone could not achieve NATO’s goals in Yugoslavia. The official line these days is that airpower facilitated the success of a combined special operations and proxy ground war in Afghanistan. As Gen. Franks said recently about Operation Anaconda, “The sure way to do work against the enemy is to put people on the ground.”

In short, airpower is just not ground power. Peoples and nations have been fighting wars -we don’t even need to say ground wars – as long as peoples and nations have existed. To most people, “real” war IS ground war, so much so that we don’t even use the term ground power. The “field” commander is automatically assumed to be a ground officer.

So the World Trade Center and Pentagon tragedies occur, and President Bush calls in the Chiefs of the services and tells them he needs immediate military options for dealing with Afghanistan. The Chief of Staff of the Air Force snaps to attention and says, “Sir, we’ll have a master attack plan, an air tasking order, target folders, and seven binders of annotated imagery on your desk by close of business today.”

The Air Force does have the reputation of being the most efficient and technologically competent of the services.

The Chief of Staff of the Army snaps to attention. They don’t have the reputation of being the smartest of the services. “Where’s Afghanistan?” he asks.

Then the President looks at the Chief of Naval Operations. The Navy, you know, has the reputation for being the most independent and obstreperous of the services. The Chief of Naval Operations thinks for a minute, and finally says: “No.”

As you well know, each service has a culture, and air forces in particular have a reputation.

Contrary to what most people think, nevertheless, airpower is neither victim of, nor is it condemned by, its own history. There is no empirical evidence that prior to World War II, the Air Corps leaned too heavily on strategic bombing at the cost on not supporting ground commanders. The facts seem to indicate that strategic bombing, once undertaken, had unique effects inside target countries, whether Germany, Japan, Vietnam, or Iraq. The notion that bombing merely stiffens civilian morale doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Civilian casualties from ground wars, or blockades and embargoes, dwarf those from aerial bombing, whether calculated throughout the 20th century or in the past dozen years. With the exception of a couple of outstanding and vocal airpower advocates, airmen have never really contended that they could win wars all alone.

Airpower may still be a “spoiled brat,” but the evidence and arguments used against it are very thin.

You may have heard the wisecrack: the difference between an F-16 and a fighter pilot is that when you turn off the engine of an F-16, it stops whining.

So now that I’ve softened you up a bit. Let me make my personal position clear: We misunderstand airpower at our peril. If we misapply it, it will have profound effects for our society, for our security, and the future.

The danger is that in not understanding airpower, both supporters and detractors will lead us down the path to failed military and political campaigns that consequently will result in a less just and less peaceful world. This will happen because both supporters and detractors will continue in their ignorant belief that airpower is arrogant and impervious to change, that it has failed and is in constant search of a “Douhetian” model emphasizing strategic bombing and waging war on innocent civilians.

For airpower supporters, the struggle means the constant search for a holy grail of strategic effects that in essence ignore the fundamental principle of “distinction” between civilians and militaries. In other words, feeding the belief of some that it is psychological factors and non-destructive means that win wars.

For detractors, a misunderstanding of airpower means believing that ancient “Douhetian” principles govern the application of airpower. This means ignoring the truth that increased casualties – friendly, enemy, and civilian – obviously result when ground forces are introduced. It means believing that some medieval principle of chivalry and fairness should still govern the use of force.

The very definition of airpower, aerospace power, air and space power, whatever you want to call it, is modernity. In comparison with three millennia of constant human warfare, aircraft are barely celebrating their centennial. Everything military about the information age and “transformation” and 21st Century warfare is about airpower. Mind you, I’m not just referring to specific airplanes or weapons. Airpower is a way of thinking: It is about distances and speed and effects not constrained by geography or time or physical confrontation.

So what’s wrong with modern airpower?

First, all of the most interesting pieces of evidence about airpower’s dominance and decisiveness are in complete dispute: Though modern airpower defeated the Iraqi army before the front lines were ever crossed by coalition armored and mechanized divisions in 1991, close air support of ground forces continued to be problematic and irritating. Bombs weren’t perfect. Aircraft didn’t destroy as many tanks or armored vehicles as enthusiasts claimed. Scud missiles, and nuclear, biological and chemical weapons weren’t found. Saddam Hussein wasn’t toppled. Intelligence lagged behind airpower technologies. Most fixed targeting was boilerplate and unimaginative. The parallel effects of airpower remain just a theory. Iraq wasn’t defeated because of a five-ringed model or from the inside out. Coercion is unproven.

Yet something profound happened. Nothing really went as predicted by most who were doing the predicting: the costs to the American public weren’t bank breaking, the environment survived, chemical and biological weapons weren’t used, no terrorist attacks occurred, Israel was not dragged in, there were not tens of thousands of coalition body bags. Those who stated that the value of airpower was exaggerated and that the war would drag on Vietnam style were proven wrong. High-tech weapons worked, and the U.S. military performed brilliantly. Airpower won in a magical display. But neither strategic attack against the Iraqi leadership nor defeat of the Iraqi army can solely claim victory.

And if there is any method to madness, despite the U.S. military’s performance, Saddam Hussein won by losing. He could say to himself and to the Arab world that he survived the best that the entire world could throw at him. We may have followed a brilliant choreography, accumulating impressive statistics, flying invisible airplanes, but we completely failed to understand our opponent. There was, and is, some fiendish prestige in defeat by a form of warfare portrayed as distant and inhumane.

Yours is a society that cannot accept ten thousand casualties, Saddam bragged before the Gulf War, bating the United States to fight his version of some ancient grotesque battle.

I hope we are such a society. Somehow I know we are.

As the Bush administration prepares for another war with Iraq, I’ll go way out on a line and say that Iraq still likes America. The typical Iraqi male who served in Saddam’s Army during Desert Storm has a deep respect bordering on awe for the U.S. military. They’ve seen what American technology, training, and teamwork produced. The Gulf War is probably as close as we will ever come to a full-scale war that is at the same time filled with humanity. Iraqi soldiers were killed and injured by the thousands to be sure, but the way in which military force was used, for all of the mistakes, the miscues, and the criticisms, probably paved the way for restoration of peaceful relations.

Contrast the Iraq experience with the attitude of those who served in the Yugoslav military during Operation Allied Force in 1999. When I was in Yugoslavia in August 1999 after the war, it struck me that the conscripts and officers and ministers had nothing but contempt and deep-seated hatred from America. This feeling emanated not only from a sense of historic Serbian victimization, but also because of a belief that NATO and the United States did not do what was courageous and engage the Yugoslav military on an honorable field of battle. Obviously, there is dementia in the fantasy that the Yugoslav Army could have emerged victorious. Yet I can’t help but think that airpower provokes these kinds of emotions, even if it is not intentional. And the hesitant and perhaps even incompetent use of force breeds future antagonisms.

The Yugoslav war was the most politically constrained operation of the past dozen years. But perhaps for the sake of our humanity we should ask whether contrary to the view of many political decision-makers, some warfighters, and most critics, taking greater risks in Yugoslavia-hitting harder-might not only have shortened the length of the war, but at the same time, it likely would have opened up the Yugoslav civilian population to no greater dangers.

For airpower theorists and practitioners, here is my vision of the future: Some future American President is grappling with the best way to use force is some looming conflict. The Air Force chief of staff requests a meeting with the President to make the best case for airpower. Sir, he says, please don’t constrain airpower, don’t gradually escalate, don’t place too many constraints on targeting, or hesitate because of fear of civilian casualties. The Gulf War model, not Yugoslavia, is the best application of airpower.

And the President thinks for a moment, and says: Well, General, Slobodan Milosevic is at the Hague and Saddam Hussein is still in power. How do you explain that?

There are, of course, a million explanations.

After Operation Allied Force, competing post-war arguments have also been made about what NATO actions “won” the war, why Milosevic decided to surrender when he did: Was it strikes in Kosovo or the “threat” of a ground war? Did attacks on civilian morale targets such as electricity and news media, or so-called “crony” attacks on Milosevic and his internal Mafia win?

What we know is that Milosevic, like Saddam, had his own skin uppermost in mind. When he failed to disrupt NATO’s war, when civilian casualties didn’t bewilder Europe into submission, when the Russians and then the Chinese didn’t save him, he was finished.

Both in Iraq and Yugoslavia, and now in Afghanistan, what was bombed and when is central to the development of future strategies. Promiscuous claims can only have the effect of sowing confusion about airpower and its place. Promiscuity shields air warriors from the need to develop finer targeting doctrines, from making choices, from in essence growing up.

In the absence of proof, the airpower clergy makes extravagant claims that 1991 or 1999 somehow proved current airpower theory and doctrine, or at least their theory, that airpower is now dominant, or that it is an independent form of warfare, that it can be modeled, that the effects can be predicted, that physical destruction and occupation and attrition are somehow blasŽ, that warfare has changed.

This is the same dynamic that is at play when airpower adherents blame everyone else when things don’t go the way they want. It’s easier to lament an ignorant citizenry and a craven civilian leadership or a money driven liberal media or even the Army for standing in the way of some idealized perfect smart war. It’s easier to do that than to look inward and ask what it is about airpower itself that demands an ever greater degree of openness and creativity so that a completely new image of warfare can be created.

When I was in Yugoslavia in 1999, the strange quality of today’s post-modern and highly discriminate wars was very apparent: Two hundred and twenty-eight thousand air-delivered weapons were expended in Iraq; about one tenth that number were used in Yugoslavia. Now, every bomb and missile can be audited. Because of precision, evaluation can be fine art, specific intended targets are separable and obvious, even individual civilian injuries can be inspected, broken windows are noteworthy.

In some ways, it is a terrible burden for a mode of warfare that has demonstrated the potential to be so less destructive and deadly than its ground counterpart. And yet, the targeting demand on precision weaponry and warfare is that every weapon counts, targets have to be meticulously chosen, the choreography and pace of a conflict is essential.

In the absence of rigorous analysis of targeting and effects, of what made the largest contribution, of what the enemy thought and why, everyone by default becomes an airpower expert. This is especially the case if “effects-based” and information warfare proponents argue that it is psychological strategies – information strategies – that are the most likely to achieve war aims at the least cost in terms of lives and destruction.

If it’s a debate over psychology, over what is the best target to “convince” Milosevic or Saddam, then of course, everyone has an opinion.

So what is Afghanistan, this war in the shadows? When I look at the seven-month old operation, I ask myself whether decisions made in the formulation of the initial war plan contained miscues that ultimately let much of the Taliban leadership and Osama bin Laden to get away. The Taliban were overrated and Al Qaeda underrated. With new intelligence sources, weapons, and many innovations, airpower was used to great effect in attacking an army in the field, but the application of airpower was uninspired. Strategic attack was suppressed, and an airpower strategy to close off the exits of the country was never developed. We could argue about all of these things, but the essence seems to be a presumption on the part of airpower’s skeptics who favored and believed that only ground forces and covert operations could win.

We should be very careful of the implications of this type of warfare that we can not see. For we live in a society where images – the World Trade Center, Osama bin Laden videos, real and imagined destruction and carnage – dominates everything. Just look at the impact of gun camera videotapes from the Gulf War. When first seen, the very quality of the tapes, black and white and grainy, gave them a quality that contrasted with, and seemed more real than, over-produced professional television.

But the gun camera tapes also spawned disparaging labels like “Nintendo” or video war by those who did not believe what they were seeing. To some, the selection of tapes that always suggested successful strikes was a deception that masked carpet bombing and World War II like fire storms and atrocious casualties that were being hidden from view. After all, that was still the dominant image of airpower.

Naturally, a debate soon enough begins in every air war over death being waged behind the scenes, about civilian collateral damage and hidden mistakes. In other words, there is a struggle between two diametrically opposed images of war, pre-air war and post-air war. This is a debate that began long before people started to bellyache about any politically driven casualty aversion on the part of the Clinton administration.

My absolute favorite story about the Gulf War is a story about two young Marine sergeants given the task on the second day of the ground war to drive a flat bed tractor trailer loaded with 200 captured Iraqis from Kuwait back to the prisoner holding area in Saudi Arabia. Just the two of them, driver and security guard, with 200 of the “enemy.”

It’s a long drive, and when they get to the collection point, off in the distance, one of the sergeants sees a general officer, and he runs up to him and says, “Sir, could you come here, please, I want you to see something.”

And the General responds, “you know soldier, I have seen things all day.”

But the Marine sergeant insists, “no, you have to see this.”

So the General comes around the side of the truck, and there are 200 frightened bedraggled faces peering down at him. And the sergeant looks up at the truck and sings, “Old McDonald had a farm …”

And they all respond, every single one of them, “E-I-E-I-O.”

What can you say about a war that ends with 90,000 prisoners? A war in which there is so little animosity between combatants? What can you say except thank God that through our technology and our overwhelming force we are slowly finding humanity even in the most inhumane of enterprises?

In February 1991, a terrible fight was anticipated against a capable foe. Because the damage done by airpower was never fully appreciated by military and political decision-makers, expectations of what might happen at the end were never revised. Clearly Generals Schwarzkopf and Powell themselves saw the results in very old-fashioned images of carnage, and here’s how they justified the decision to stop the fighting.

“We had closed the back door. The bridges across the Tigris and Euphrates were out … It was literally about to become the Battle of Cannae, a battle of annihilation,” Schwarzkopf said.

“We had achieved our military mission, we had achieved the political objective we had been assigned,” Powell agreed. “It was time to stop the killing …”

Earlier this year, I visited yet another war zone. In the Darul-amin neighborhood of southern Kabul, there is one of those extraordinary sights that Schwarzkopf and Powell and Franks, well that anyone who makes decisions about the use of force, needs to see. For three miles along the old boulevard going out to the old palace created in the 1920’s, there is not a building left standing. The old Soviet Embassy, ministry buildings, cultural center, national assembly, homes, factories, schools, are all broken and pockmarked from blast and shrapnel.

Here is where the Soviets fought and lost the capitol, where the communists were defeated, where the Taliban marched to power, where the Northern Alliance attempted to topple them. Here are the effects of ground warfare: Not a home is undamaged, there are hardly any trees left.

What is the equivalent for modern airpower? When the Amiriyah shelter was bombed in Baghdad in February 1991, 400 civilians were killed in the mistake. Yet few seemed to see the lesson behind the incident: If airpower with modern precision weapons wants to kill civilians, here is what just two bombs can do. Four weeks into an intense air war 400 civilians were killed in a single incident, as many Iraqi civilians as had been killed in the previous month of bombing. And this is and was the exception rather than the norm. Yet there is something about the invisibility of airpower, and the distorted view during its coming of age, that leaves us with other images.

I said at the beginning that modern airpower allows civilians to be more immune than they have ever been in previous large-scale wars. But modern airpower, and frankly, modern societies, also makes civilians potentially more vulnerable.

What we indeed witnessed in 1991 was how rapidly modern militaries can inflict great damage. Environmental calamity on a global scale never occurred, but destruction was unprecedented in its efficiency, especially for a conflict that only lasted forty-three days. Iraqi damage inflicted in Kuwait was wanton and indiscriminate. The worst coalition damage, on the other hand, occurred not because of indiscriminate attacks or intent to inflict physical harm, but mostly because of unanticipated effects due to the increased accuracy of weapons and the interconnectedness of society. The effects of precision bombing reverberated through a surprisingly modern Iraqi system. The objects that were and are traditionally military targets, such as electrical power, telecommunications, transportation, or in the case of Iraq, oil, turned out also to be the essentials of modern life, particularly urban life.

During and since Desert Storm, air wars have largely spared civilians from the effects of bombing. Yet in Iraq we got our first taste of the other side of living in a networked and modern society. The focus of attacks on electrical power efficiently disabled life support systems with unintended effects on the very non-combatants who were specifically not the object of attack. By taking away electricity, we also removed the essential of modern life: water distribution and purification, sewage treatment, air conditioning, and heating. Civilian harm was ironically compounded by the very fact that civilians were otherwise spared the direct effects of bombing in a highly discriminate campaign.

For whatever criticisms I make of strategy and targeting and operational lessons learned, there is no question as a result of being on the ground in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan that modern air wars are fought with the utmost concern for civilian casualties and damage. A greater percentage of smart weapons are being used in each subsequent conflict. Targeting is more and more scrutinized and “micro-managed” at every level. Enormous efforts are made in weaponeering and targeting, largely successful, to avoid short- and long-term civilian effects. In Afghanistan, no attacks on infrastructure such as electrical power or bridges were even allowed.

When mistakes or complaints do occur these days, changes are rapidly implemented, and many unpublicized restrictions are levied. Altogether, the accumulation constitutes a rich fabric of operational history, one that cries out for greater airing. These include informal rules about when to bomb things and where not to use certain weapons. Here, non-American aesthetics, about new warfare health “syndromes,” about controversial weapons such as cluster bombs or depleted uranium, make a huge difference. In Yugoslavia, some decry the fact that the French and other allies opposed the dominant targeting dogma. I applaud it.

Somewhere in the middle are a lot of people – including politicians and civilian leaders – who don’t quite know if there is a truth. They are buffeted by embedded historic and Hollywood images of war, by inter-service rivalries, by their own government propaganda, by pundits who don’t know what they are talking about, by special interests. Once again in Afghanistan, U.S. air warriors were thwarted in fighting their perfect war because of parents who took away the car keys and grounded them. Those parents still don’t get the magic.

I said at the beginning that modern airpower is in its adolescence. As a result, it suffers all of the attributes of youth: petulance, poor self-image, a sense of both omnipotence and inferiority.

Because we are still learning, there are some important questions to be asked about the meaning of air warfare life.

First and foremost, what happens when bombs hit their targets? Do we really know? In modern air warfare, American style, the effects are no longer – are hardly ever – firestorms and rubble. Most targets are parts of networks, and meaningful effects are measured not only in terms of physical destruction, but in terms of systemic (or functional) impact. This is at least the theory. Where air warfare theorists fail is in their claim that they understand these effects or can predict the impact attacks will have on enemy militaries and decision-makers.

Second, why do civilians die? The Gulf War represented the maturation of so-called smart war, and was on the cusp of the Cold War and pre-Cold War aesthetic of total destruction. Smart weaponry and overwhelming conventional force fed into a new aesthetic, the human rights aesthetic, where people like myself could for the first time measure the effect on the civilian population. This was for the simple reason that for the first time war could be fought amongst the civilian population while sparing them many of the physically destructive product. If bombing was not so accurate, there would be no argument about this or that target decision or weapons selection, for the overall damage would be so great as to obscure the details.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld can claim that Operation Enduring Freedom is the least bloody conflict in history, but how does he know? How many civilians died, and how does that compare with Yugoslavia or Iraq? Have we indeed done the best we can? The U.S. government and military makes no systematic study of the question, even as it becomes the central feature of every inherently less destructive war.

Which brings me to the third question: Is there any shame in the lopsided military victories that the United States has achieved when it has employed airpower in the last 12 years? This is not an argument that we need to place ourselves in a position to die in the name of chivalry. It is, however, a recognition that our use of a remote instrument, our magnificent ability to largely remain above the battlefield and the enemy, our tendency to fall back upon secrecy because of increasingly exotic intelligence sources and targeting strategies, all feeds a distrust and contempt in our adversaries and potential adversaries. The next generation of terrorist is being spawned today because of some of these factors. Asymmetric strikes are spawned at Khobar Towers and USS Coles and World Trade Centers because of the very fact that no military can hope to successfully confront us on the battlefield, not at least in the air.

This is another special burden for airpower, one that challenges our humanity. If we doggedly claim that we “won,” that we always win, without seeing the political and spiritual damage done by the very mode of warfare we engage in, if we merely content ourselves with the limited war aims we constantly seek, then we are merely creating a world of permanent confrontation.

About the author. Mr. Arkin gave this presentation at the 2002 RAAF Aerospace Conference, Canberra, Australia, on 28 May 2002.