Air Power Comes of Age

When U.S. warplanes attacked Bosnian Serb targets in April 1994, the engagement marked a turning point both in the anguished debate over U.S. military intervention in the Balkans and in the more enduring controversy over the role of air power in U.S. military strategy. Since late 1992, advocates and opponents of intervention had debated whether selective air strikes could help halt Serbian aggression in the mountainous, heavily forested terrain of Bosnia-Herzegovina, or whether such action would only lead the United States into another Vietnam-like quagmire. The Clinton administration's decision was motivated largely by the sense that Western passivity in the face of Serbian aggression had become an unacceptable option, but it also reflected a new willingness to experiment with a limited approach to the use of air power.

Ever since the invention of the airplane in the early 1900s, military analysts have disagreed about its potential to determine the outcome of modern conflicts. And after every war, there has been bitter argument about how much air power achieved and how best to use it in the future. Consensus has been elusive in large part because of the clash of powerful institutional interests. For the Air Force, claims about air power were first a ticket to bureaucratic independence and then a path to ever-larger shares of the Pentagon's budgetary pie. For the Army, such claims have long been seen as jeopardizing its central role in the nation's defense.

In recent years, following the spectacular performance of U.S. aviation forces in the Persian Gulf War, the air power debate has taken a new and important turn. Contrary to assessments made by many analysts before Operation Desert Storm, it is now clear that advances in technology and tactics mean that air power can--under the right circumstances--exact a devastating and decisive toll on armored forces in the field, even if these forces operate at night or in bad weather. While the potential of air power remains limited in many situations, especially those involving insurgency-type warfare, the outcome of the Gulf War has again raised the question of whether air power alone can win certain wars.

As the United States confronts growing pressure to intervene in conflicts around the globe, air power is increasingly seen as a way to flex U.S. military muscle without risking the lives of American ground troops. This new potential may make possible deeper cuts in military spending. Thus, the stakes of today's air power debate go far beyond a budgetary squabble between the Army and the Air Force.

NEW LESSONS IN AN OLD DEBATE

Before the Gulf War, arguments surrounding air power drew on two principal cases: World War II and the Vietnam War. To many, the lesson of both these conflicts was that air power alone could not prove decisive in defeating an enemy. During World War II, hopes that air power could smash Germany's civilian morale and defense industry proved unfounded; meanwhile, Japan continued to fight in the face of massive firebombings of its cities. In Southeast Asia, a military victory was elusive even as U.S. aircraft dropped three times as much bomb tonnage as was used during all of World War II. As historian Loren Baritz commented in his 1986 book on Vietnam, summing up the jaded view of many observers: "Over and over again we have to learn the lesson that air power cannot win wars, and having learned it we immediately forget it."

The wreckage of a lost techno-war stood as powerful evidence for those who preached skepticism about air power following Vietnam, yet these critics clearly misinterpreted the experiences of both this war and World War II. According to the final report by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, issued in 1946, "Allied air power was decisive in the war in Western Europe." Though the long-range bombing of Germany proved disappointing, the survey found that tactical air power was vital in supporting Allied forces during and after the 1944 invasion of Normandy. The survey also claimed that even without the use of atomic weapons, the relentless pounding of Japan by U.S. bombers would eventually have guaranteed that country's unconditional surrender, without requiring a ground invasion.

In Vietnam, U.S. bombing raids repeatedly failed to sever supply lines into South Vietnam or to destroy Viet Cong forces in the field. However, the massive bombing of North Vietnam in 1972 is widely credited with helping to secure the peace agreement signed in January 1973. And though the Air Force's hightech weapons proved disappointing through much of the war, by the early 1970s, U.S. aircraft were employing "smart" missiles and bombs in a manner that portended their later success in the Persian Gulf. U.S. pilots used these weapons with devastating effectiveness to repel the 1972 Easter invasion of South Vietnam--one of the few instances when North Vietnam employed armor in open terrain. Laser-guided bombs, a technology that became familiar even to civilians during the Persian Gulf War, were used frequently during the United States' final few years in Vietnam to take out bridges, rail links, and other vital targets. Of the 21,000 laser-guided bombs dropped in Vietnam, some 17,000 reportedly struck their targets.

The Persian Gulf War offered incontrovertible evidence that air power can, under the right circumstances, play a decisive role in military conflict. Numerous U.S. commentators had expressed skepticism that Iraq's forces could be ousted from Kuwait without a bloody ground war, yet few later doubted that it was the awesome destruction wrought by U.S. air power that won the war. Though the Bush administration decided to launch a major ground offensive, both to end the war more quickly and to humiliate Saddam Hussein, it is clear that prolonging the air war would inevitably have led to Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait. Rather than preparing the battlefield for ground forces, the role traditionally envisioned for tactical air power, U.S. aircraft had destroyed an enemy land army virtually alone.

At the Pentagon, officials voiced minimal disagreement about the decisive role of air power. As Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said in 1991, the Iraqi army "was crushed, I think, by the air campaign. . . . W hen we finally did have to move our ground forces in, and we sort of kicked in the door, they collapsed fairly rapidly." In early 1992, Cheney commented that the Iraqis "didn't fight back because the air war turned out to be absolutely devastating."

The Gulf War demonstrated aviation forces' new ability, absent in World War II and Vietnam, to strike precisely at targets deep inside enemy territory. The United States crippled Saddam Hussein's command-and-control network by striking 45 key targets in Baghdad, while avoiding the kind of carpet bombing that was central to U.S. attacks against Berlin and Tokyo during World War II. Relatively small numbers of precision attacks achieved enormous success against Iraqi power supplies. In many cases, a single air strike was sufficient to disable a power plant; in World War II, by contrast, it took scores of B-17 bombers dropping hundreds of bombs to achieve the same results. The United States required roughly 500 sorties and 1,200 tons of bombs to shut down 28 of Iraq's oil refineries, disabling its oil production. In World War II, U.S. bombers dropped 185,841 tons of bombs during 50,000 sorties against 69 Nazi refineries, but cut production by only 60 percent.

In North Vietnam, U.S. forces found it nearly impossible to take out key bridges and railroads from the air until the introduction of laser-guided bombs. In the Gulf War, the United States easily destroyed 41 important bridges and 32 replacement pontoon bridges in a matter of weeks. And the performance of U.S. forces in the Gulf War showed that they could successfully confront a Third World power heavily armed with surface-to-air missiles, antiaircraft guns, and interceptor planes. While North Vietnamese air defenses had inflicted heavy losses on U.S. aircraft, U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf were able to neutralize similar defenses and minimize their losses.

TECHNOLOGY AND TACTICS

Weapons such as laser bombs and guided missiles clearly played a crucial role in the increased precision and diminished vulnerability of U.S. air forces in the Gulf War. "There is no doubt about it, precision-guided munitions validated themselves towards the end of the Vietnam War and they rewrite a whole chapter on how to conduct air operations as a result of this war," commented Lt. Gen. Charles Horner, architect of the air campaign against Iraq.

Apart from precision-guided munitions, long available but only now being used to their full potential, U.S. air forces capitalized on other advances in technology--stealth, radar imaging of ground forces, and new systems for managing communications on the battlefield--and in tactics.

Stealth technology involves the use of new designs and materials to minimize the likelihood that an aircraft will be detected by radar or infrared sensor systems. For instance, oblique angles are used to deflect radar waves away from the receiver; afterburners are eliminated to reduce heat emissions. Without stealth, U.S. bombers can still penetrate heavy air defenses, but this effort is a complicated undertaking, requiring large numbers of support aircraft to jam enemy radars and disable surface-to-air missile sites. In contrast, as Gen. John M. Loh, commander of the Tactical Air Command, explained in 1991, "Stealth gives us freedom of action, the freedom to penetrate radar defenses when and where we want at points and times of our choosing, the freedom to concentrate our mission planning on destroying targets rather than countering enemy threats, and the freedom to use the best attack option every single time." In Operation Desert Storm, says Loh, stealth "enabled us to gain surprise each and every day of the war."

The use of radar imaging has given the United States new capabilities for acquiring targets. Aircraft carrying the airborne warning and control system (AWACS), for instance, combine several types of advanced radar, sensors, and communications equipment to provide a mobile airborne command post surveying air, land, and sea. Unlike ground radar, which is fixed in position and scans overhead, AWACS aircraft enable U.S. planners to track hundreds of enemy aircraft simultaneously, even from hundreds of miles away. Though it was first deployed in the 1970s, this technology is still unavailable to most Third World countries.

During the Gulf War, the United States also deployed a system to track armored vehicles and "see" the battlefield on the ground. Called the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS), it uses radar technology mounted on a modified Boeing 707 aircraft to link air and ground operations while flying behind friendly lines. Both wide-area and detailed radar is built into the plane's belly. Along with other technologies, JSTARS was able to pinpoint the location of heat-producing Iraqi tanks and armored personnel carriers at night and in bad weather.

The Gulf War also showed that individual aircraft using infrared sensors could locate armored forces under conditions of limited visibility. Even dug-in Iraqi tanks proved vulnerable at night because they cooled less quickly than the surrounding desert.

Advances in data processing have permitted improvements in battlefield management as well. In the past, it took military officers hours or even days to collect information about the location of enemy forces and develop battle plans based on that information. Today, faster computers and better links among different elements of the U.S. military allow commanders or even pilots to synthesize information from ground radar stations, surveillance aircraft, satellites, and listening posts almost immediately, so that they can mount attacks with minimal delay.

Complementing these technological advances are doctrinal changes implemented over the past decade that have greatly increased the effectiveness of air power. During the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. planners sought to offset a quantitative Soviet advantage in Western Europe with tactics that would take advantage of the U.S. technological edge to strike at an enemy's so-called centers of gravity. What emerged from this process was a military doctrine known as AirLand Battle. Defense analyst Michael Klare explains that the strategy places new emphasis on "identifying enemy structural weaknesses, particularly command-and-control nodes, and targeting those for early attack." AirLand Battle thus offers a means of hobbling a large force structure, quickly achieving air superiority, and paving the way for the decisive use of air power against enemy land forces. "Synchronized, violent execution is the essence of decisive combat," stated a Pentagon document describing AirLand Battle. The fruits of this doctrinal change were displayed in the first hours of the Gulf War, when U.S. aircraft struck a range of key Iraqi command targets, disabling large portions of the Iraqi air-defense system and severely damaging Saddam's ability to manage his forces.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE 1990S AND BEYOND

To many observers, the Gulf War proved that air power could become the primary instrument for winning future wars. "After an eighty-year maturation process, air power now dominates modern warfare," declared Air Force Col. Dennis Drew, a leading air power theorist, in a spring 1991 article in Strategic Review. Following Desert Storm, the Air Force stepped up lobbying for more spending on everything from the new F-22 fighter plane--a plane built to replace the F-15--to a program to convert B-1 nuclear bombers into the "workhorses" of a long-range U.S. conventional bombing force that could attack future enemies from bases in the United States.

Other analysts, however, have rightly warned against indiscriminately applying the lessons of the Gulf War to other conflicts. Iraq's dismal performance in the Gulf War is certainly cause for caution. The circumstances surrounding the Gulf War favored the United States in several respects. "What we did not learn was how to defeat a modern, well-trained, well-motivated force in a dynamic environment," commented Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for tactical warfare programs, in 1991.

While advances in military strategy and technology have increased air power's effectiveness against a modern nation dependent on complex command systems and fielding large armored forces, it remains a less useful instrument against decentralized insurgent forces. It is also less effective in forested or mountainous terrain. In this sense, key lessons about air power learned in Vietnam remain valid.

Air power could not decisively sway battlefield conditions in South Vietnam in part because of the jungle terrain, but also because the Viet Cong did not orchestrate their operations through a small number of centers of gravity. Nor did these operations, often executed by guerrilla forces, depend on the use of armored equipment that could be targeted with precision-guided munitions. Efforts to cut off supplies transported to South Vietnam along the Ho Chi Minh trail were doomed because the level of materiel required to sustain operations in the South was extremely low. Even with today's sophistication, air power would probably have been unable to defeat the insurgent forces operating in South Vietnam.

An appreciation of the limitations of air power underlay the Clinton administration's uncertainty about launching air strikes against Serbian artillery in Bosnia. In April 1993, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Colin Powell told Congress that bombing alone could not win the war. "They are locked into a conflict," he explained, "and if the killing does not take place by artillery it will probably take place by some other means."

Powell's successor, John Shalikashvili, had also expressed doubts that air power could achieve decisive results. "There is no military solution," Shalikashvili said just days before NATO issued its February 1994 ultimatum threatening air strikes in retaliation for any further Serbian aggression. "The only way the conflict will stop is if the three parties want to stop it and agree to a truce." Even Air Force analysts, many of whom supported intervention, acknowledged the many unknowns surrounding air strikes in the Balkans and questioned whether air strikes alone could persuade the Serbs to reverse their course.

The recent conflicts in the Persian Gulf and Bosnia, combined with an understanding of past wars, suggest that the truth regarding air power's potential lies somewhere between the extreme positions that have often characterized the air power debate. The specific strengths and weaknesses of air power have important implications for U.S. defense policy in the 1990s and beyond.

First, it is far from clear that Third World states heavily armed with modern weapons present the extreme danger that Pentagon officials suggest in attempting to justify annual defense expenditures of near-Cold War levels. Iraq had one of the finest integrated air defenses in the developing world, including 16,000 surface-to-air missiles and 7,000 antiaircraft guns. It also had an advanced air force that included more than 900 combat aircraft and boasted some of the best French- and Soviet-made fighters available. When war came, however, this equipment proved nearly worthless. Iraq's vaunted air defenses were quickly rendered inoperable; when aircraft did come up to intercept attackers, they proved no match for American planes.

Neither is it clear, as claimed by the Pentagon, that the United States must invest in a new generation of hightech weapons to maintain its qualitative edge over potential new foes. In easily defeating one of the Third World's most advanced military powers, the United States was aided by the use of JSTARS, cruise missiles, and the F-117 stealth fighter, but less sophisticated weapons also played an important role. Central to U.S. operations were less glamorous military technologies like electronic warfare equipment, night-vision devices, laser-technology kits to upgrade bombs, and navigation and target pods that can be added on to planes. Many of these technologies have been in use since the 1970s and were mounted on planes that were old or not especially sophisticated. F-111 bombers built in the late 1960s, for example, were able to destroy Iraqi armor at night and in bad weather through the relatively inexpensive technique of adding on infrared systems and laser-guided bombs. Much of Iraq's armor was destroyed by the cheapest combat aircraft in the U.S. Air Force, the A-10 Thunderbolt.

The Gulf War showed that highly sophisticated air power elements can speed victory and save American lives. but it also showed that, given the weakness of Third World states, low-tech weapons are still adequate in handling many missions on the modern battlefield. In addition, the huge U.S. advantage in battlefield management proved as important as the performance of individual weapons.

Given low rates of literacy and technological competence, Third World military forces often cannot maintain and operate advanced military equipment, and lack the sophistication to exploit the full potential of these weapons. This fact was dramatically underscored nearly a decade before the Gulf War, when Israel used advanced battlefield management techniques to devastate Syrian air defenses and aircraft during warfare in 1982. "Conventional warfare depends increasingly on the skillful manipulation of electronically transmitted information," military analyst Eliot Cohen has observed. "The advantage goes overwhelmingly to combatants who can bring together information from many sources."

TOWARD WIN-HOLD-WIN

In recent months, U.S. officials have focused with concern on North Korea, designating it as the leading "threat state." Yet while North Korea deploys military forces as large as Iraq's in 1990, the experience of the Gulf War indicates that this threat may be less significant than Pentagon planners suppose. "North Korea's armed forces suffer from many deficiencies," CIA director Robert Gates told Congress in 1992. "Their training and, consequently, combat readiness is questionable. They have weaknesses in air defenses and logistics. . . . The North Korean defense industry is based on 1960s technology and beset by quality problems."

If war came to the Korean peninsula, North Korean commanders might well find themselves, like their Iraqi counterparts in January 1991, largely blinded within the first few hours or days of hostilities as U.S. air strikes wiped out key command-and-control nodes. North Korean ground forces could find, as the Iraqis did, that turning on mobile air defenses means having them destroyed by radar-seeking HARM missiles. North Korean combat pilots might quickly learn, as the Iraqi pilots learned, that taking off is nearly suicidal in the face of U.S. systems that can track them from the moment they leave the runway and attack them with air-to-air missiles launched outside visual range. Without air defenses or close air support, North Korean forces in the field might soon conclude, as did tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, that flight or surrender is their best option.

None of this means that a new Korean war would be won effortlessly; on the contrary, most analysts agree that it would be far bloodier than the Gulf conflict. But it is clear that North Korea suffers from many of the same weaknesses that assured Iraq's defeat. Far from substantiating the Pentagon's argument that Third World threats can in some cases be of First World magnitude, Desert Storm undermined it, calling into question the need to spend tens of billions of dollars on expensive and sophisticated new weapons.

Pentagon officials, for example, have insisted that the expensive F-22 fighter program, conceived at the height of the Cold War, should go forward in large part to ensure air superiority over future regional adversaries. Yet the lesson of Desert Storm is that such adversaries are not even close to challenging such superiority and that the United States can indefinitely maintain its edge in the air with existing aircraft. Plans to spend billions on programs to adapt the B-1 and B-2 nuclear bombers for conventional missions should similarly be recognized as exercises in overkill. The advantage of using a larger plane is that it can drop larger quantities of bombs. However, the success of smaller tactical aircraft in precisely striking important targets deep in enemy territory during the Gulf War argues against the need for larger conventional bombers. Both the F-22 and the B-1 and B-2 conversion programs should be canceled.

The effectiveness of air power in the Gulf War also casts doubt on the Pentagon's insistence that the United States must be able to fight simultaneously two major regional wars with ground troops--the so-called win-win strategy. Last September, former Secretary of Defense Les Aspin issued the Bottom-Up Review, a planning document that analyzed the needs of U.S. military forces through the 1990s and reaffirmed the Bush administration's policy of preparing for a two-war scenario. Aspin and his successor, William Perry, have argued that only by preserving the capability to implement a win-win strategy can the United States avoid tempting aggressors to act in one part of the world when it is waging war in another. However, plans for fighting two wars simultaneously would require substantially larger ground forces than would be needed to fight two wars in quick succession--a strategy known as win-hold-win.

A win-hold-win strategy would use air power alone to confront and contain the attacking forces of one regional aggressor while employing a full spectrum of forces to deal with another aggressor. Once the first land war was won, U.S. ground forces would be redeployed to the theater where air power had been holding the line. Under a win-hold-win scenario, which Aspin originally favored, the Pentagon could take steps over the next few years to reduce the defense force to one large enough to handle a Desert Storm-size contingency and with enough reserves left over to conduct a large-scale humanitarian operation or other minor intervention. This would entail cutting the number of aircraft carriers planned under the Bottom-Up Review from 12 to 8, cutting the number of Army divisions from 10 to 8, and cutting the number of tactical air wings (analogous to Army divisions) from 13 to 10.

Several recent analyses suggest that the new effectiveness of air power makes a win-hold-win strategy viable. A 1992 study by the RAND Corp. simulated regional conflicts that might arise between 1997 and 2010. Like the Pentagon's own planning documents, its analysis focused on managing simultaneous conflicts in Iraq and North Korea, regarded as the most likely sites of future confrontations. The study hypothesized an Iraqi invasion of the Saudi peninsula that would involve a force larger than the one it deployed in 1990 and that would thrust farther south. It concluded that U.S. air power alone would be able to stop the enemy offensive in two weeks and destroy the bulk of Iraq's armor in another ten days at most. This implies that if the United States were waging a ground war in Korea, it could feel confident in its ability to contain another Iraqi invasion on the Saudi peninsula.

Less clear from the RAND study, however, is whether the reverse is also true: Could U.S. air power stop and largely obliterate a North Korean invasion force while U.S. ground troops were tied down in Southwest Asia? This scenario would place greater demands on U.S. forces. With the South Korean capital of Seoul not far from the border, a North Korean invasion force would have a greater chance of scoring significant gains before it could be stopped by air power. Moreover, as the invasion moved into densely populated areas, the United States would find it harder to employ air power, both because of the risks of killing civilians and because battlefield sensors, so effective in a barren desert environment, would be impaired in terrain filled with civilian cars and trucks.

These limitations on air power in Korea do not mean that a win-hold-win strategy is imprudent. Unlike Saudi Arabia, South Korea is hardly a sitting duck. In recent years, South Korea's annual defense budget has been twice that of North Korea's, and while its forces remain smaller than that of its communist neighbor, South Korea deploys many tanks, combat aircraft, and naval vessels that are far superior to anything fielded by the North Koreans. Its forces have also benefited from years of training by U.S. advisers and are more capable than ever of putting up a tough fight. Meanwhile, according to the CIA, North Korea's military forces are becoming increasingly obsolete. South Korean forces, backed by U.S. troops and equipment already posted in the area and limited U.S. air support, would likely deter North Korean aggression even in the far-fetched case that U.S. ground forces became tied down in Southwest Asia fending off another Iraqi invasion.

A REDISTRIBUTION OF FORCES

The recent drawdown of U.S. forces has been carefully orchestrated to distribute new cuts evenly among the services. Shifting the balance of power within the armed forces is difficult: top Army officials bitterly contest any suggestion that ground forces have become less relevant on the modern battlefield.

"While the circumstances of warfare have changed considerably in terms of weapons system advances and capabilities . . . the essential nature of warfare has not changed," said Army Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan in May 1993. "Units are still required to close with the enemy to get within direct fire range, engage the enemy, and either destroy him or force him to move off of contested terrain. War takes place where people live and people live on the ground. It is there that all the effects of our great military establishment are directed, to seize and control territory and make the enemy amenable to our will."

This situation underscores the need for decisive White House leadership in the area of defense policy. Since taking office, President Clinton has focused heavily on domestic matters, spending little political capital on the task of overhauling national security policy. Firmer leadership is needed to shake up a Pentagon that plans to spend nearly as much money over the next decade, in inflation-adjusted dollars, as it spent in the 1970s.

Clinton should undertake two tasks. First, he will have to take on the enduring problem of interservice rivalry, perhaps by revising the National Security Act of 1947 to broaden the powers of the secretary of defense. That legislation was aimed at breaking down divisions in the military by creating the Department of Defense. Yet it did not give the secretary of defense sufficient authority over the services. As a result, existing areas of redundancy--such as the separate air forces maintained by each service--have persisted. With the end of the Cold War and the escalation of fiscal pressures on the U.S. government, it makes sense to attempt a further consolidation of the military establishment. Along with reducing redundancy in the armed forces, this move could allow for a force structure that better reflects the new effectiveness of air power.

Second, the White House and State Department must challenge the dominance of worst-case thinking that guides U.S. defense policy and military spending. Despite a pledge to rethink U.S. defense assumptions from scratch, Aspin's Bottom-Up Review failed to acknowledge that the changing capabilities of air power carry profound implications for force planning: the costly and overcautious win-win regional defense strategy should be abandoned in favor of win-hold-win strategy.