Airpower and Unconventional Warfare

Delivered as Presentation by IKRAM SEHGAL to the seminar on “Air Power in the 21st Century” organised by The Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad on Saturday 22 December 2001.

“Airpower” and “unconventional warfare” have radically changed the concept of war in the 20th century. Addition of the fourth dimension, the air, has brought speed, flexibility and dynamism to the modern battlefield while “unconventional war” has meant a non-linear battlefield with no front and no rear, with soldiers without uniforms targeting combatants and non-combatants alike without observing Marquess of Queensbury’s rules of gentlemanly conduct. The savagery of unconventional warfare can be very pervasive, even regular forces have resorted to conduct anathema to the Geneva Convention as seen in Qila-e-Janghi with respect to prisoners of war.

Airpower had already become a decisive factor during conventional war, Stealth technology and precision guided bombs has force multiplied its lethality.  However, airpower is costly, fragile and can never be a substitute for clear military objectives. Rapid advances in science and technology ensured that airpower has accuracy, speed and is difficult in countering, making it also more decisive in unconventional wars, unconventional warriors not having the resources to afford counter-measures or avoid being manipulated into providing conventional targets. World War II and the Arab-Israeli wars show the decisive effect of airpower on conventional forces, a number of intangible factors delayed decisiveness in unconventional warfare till very fairly recently. The major intangible, intelligence, unless reliable, can limit the influence of airpower on conduct of military operations, effectiveness of airpower depending upon its timely and accurate availability. An infantry soldier firing his weapon sees the enemy physically in real-time, artillery is dependant upon forward observation officers (FOOs) acquiring targets, like Special Forces providing forward air observation in Qila-e-Janghi and Tora Bora. A conventional army may find it difficult to acquire accurate information because an unconventional enemy does not (and should not) conform to the known rules of warfare. The technological advance has been startling, when one looks at the Gulf War, the Bosnia and Kosovo air campaigns and compare it with Afghanistan.

On Sept 11 in New York, an unconventional enemy crafted a commercial aircraft into unconventional airpower and made a major impact on conventional forces, conventional forces miserably failing to protect against unconventional means. In Afghanistan, the US faced for the first time since Vietnam an unconventional enemy but used both superior technology and human assets to acquire intelligence, and having target acquisition delivered maximum force with decisive effect. Intelligence succeeded for unconventional forces and failed for conventional forces in New York, in Afghanistan stealth technology was not needed but smart bombs were guided by real-time intelligence in causing crippling damage to the Taliban rank and file, both materially and psychologically. Airpower was devastating in Vietnam but failed the US because Viet Cong seldom gave lucrative targets to airpower already straitjacketed by US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara’s fatal decision to restrict air support within South Vietnam, allowing North Vietnam to be used a staging point for guerilla warfare in the South. With the North Vietnamese dragged their feet during subsequent Paris Talks in 1972, US President Nixon ordered air strikes against Hanoi and Haiphong in North Vietnam, only 700 B-52 sorties brought the North Vietnamese back to a successful conclusion of the peace negotiations. In Afghanistan we have seen an awesome display of US airpower, a combination of cruise missiles, B-52s, B-1 and B-2 bombers, as well as unmanned Predator aircraft, both armed and unarmed, and F-14s, F-15s and

F-16s, etc launched from ground bases and aircraft carriers, delivering virtually designer-made precision-guided munitions (smart bombs), this crescendo rising to a Wagnerian climax at Tora Bora in non-stop bombing for over a week. The effects of this concentrated assault could be seen on the dozen or so shell-shocked Qaeda prisoners paraded by the bounty hunting Mujahideen (you cannot purchase an Afghan, you can only rent him by the hour). They shuffled into view like Zombies, living dead.

Writing in “Unofficial History”, Field Marshal (then a Brigadier) Slim (of Burma), mentions the panic created in the whole Brigade by a very good British infantry battalion at Gallabat who could not bear Italian bombing for even 10 minutes. Despite all its decisive effect, one of airpower’s limitations lies in its basic inability to hold ground. It is also relatively too expensive, being vulnerable to far cheaper anti-aircraft weapons and total dependance for its success rests on strategic and tactical intelligence. If a relatively strong country had been supporting the Taliban’s unconventional forces morally and materially, airpower’s effects could have been drastically checked and/or curtailed. As the massive onslaught of B-52 carpet bombing and precision-guided bombs on Tora Bora has shown, topographical factors can severely limit the use of conventional airforce against unconventional forces. Airpower can create opportunities but political realities can only be altered by exploitation by ground conventional and unconventional forces to bring down political rivals or targets, as the sudden break-up and rout of the Taliban has shown. While the Taliban’s resilience was overcome by airpower creating shock and dislocation. Gen Jim Jones, Commandant of US Marines, speaking on CNN’s Larry King Live, contrasted the Kosovo air campaign with Afghanistan in the use of airpower. In Kosovo they had no one on the ground to act as “eyes and ears” to “paint” the targets, in Afghanistan this was done effectively. Speaking on the same programme, Senator John McCain spoke of the tremendous impact of airpower but said in the end soldiers like the US marines have to go in on the ground to complete the job.

Achieving or not achieving air superiority can decide the outcome of other conventional or unconventional war, it is a balancing factor that can change the equation for the positive. Airpower brings great flexibility to land forces and can cause severe psychological damage not only on the enemy leadership but also rank and file as we have seen in Afghanistan recently. In actual fact, the Taliban and Northern Alliance ground forces came into live ground contact only at Shebergan near Mazar-i-Sharif and for a short time at Konduz, thereafter the Taliban were relentlessly pursued by concentration of airpower. With Afghanistan in the throes of impending famine, US used another strategic employment of airpower, dropping hundreds of thousands of food packets in a bid to reach directly into the hearts and minds of the Afghan population. The result of these “food bombs” strategy is not yet known.

Airpower as an offensive weapon must be employed primarily to accomplish strategic objectives before turning to tactical needs. Sound intelligence and all air resources must be pooled to be virtually and laterally integrated, commanded and controlled by air experts rather than being employed by jacks of all trades. There is a case for a poor man’s airforce to meet the land forces needs while the battle for air superiority is raping.

Strategic and tactical planners firstly ensured that application of superior technology was combat effective and well integrated. The Taliban did not have the means of countering either the force and/or its effects. They did not have the military sense to avoid giving lucrative targets to airpower, resulting in a total rout. Aircraft were used in multi-role or multi-tasked wherever necessary and whenever possible to create “strategic paralysis”. However, this does not equate to defeat, if opposition forces had remained tactically vital, they would have required defeat in detail. Faced with the contrasting requirements of garrisoning urban areas and to defending them, the Taliban made the classical mistake of not doing either properly. They denuded their garrisons by occupying defensive locations and were pounded in their pitiful defensive lines around cities. Though US airpower is even now acting against the Al-Qaeda to inflict defeat in detail, the Taliban almost total extinction as viable governing entity was caused by airpower. The Mujahideen, they had disarmed in 1996 on coming to power were re-armed by the Taliban as a last resort in the vain hope that they would side against a common external enemy. A combination of pent-up hatred at the humiliation of several years at the hands of the Taliban and the green of US dollars easily subverted their loyalties. Providing adequate intelligence to US Forces, they also supplied fighting soldiers (on payment) for ground combat. Supplemented by unarmed reconnaissance vehicles predators (UAVs), positioned satellites, electronic surveillance units, etc. this served to identify and destroy the Taliban’s control mechanism producing, transporting or giving combat. Airpower pulverized the Taliban but it could not accomplish the primary war aim and/or attack what it could not sense, it allowed Mullah Umar and Osama bin Laden to escape, at least till now. Without knowledge it cannot defer attacking what it should not have, thus causing civilian casualties. Airpower can blow a door of its hinges but unlike a simple combat soldier Nathu Khan, it cannot see what is behind the door. The manhunt for both Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders goes on.

While there is no doubt about its effectiveness, an unconventional enemy has to be as obliging as the Taliban to be decisively defeated by airpower.

Airpower and the nature of war Impact

Despite some severe limitations airpower has transformed the nature of war. In the very first minutes of hostilities aircraft can appear over the very heart of a country, bringing death and destruction instantly to locations and populations that would normally need much campaigning and loss of lives as well as material. In keeping with the threat of this new military capability defence against air attack-interceptors, ground-based anti-aircraft guns, and surface-to-air missiles — have also improved rapidly. The race between offensive and defensive technologies has generally ended in favour of the offence.

Revolutionary changes

Two very revolutionary offensive capabilities have been developed by the United States of America. Stealth denies an enemy the ability to detect, and therefore protect against, a deep and damaging strike. It gives the attacker a decisive advantage over almost any kind of sensor, from radars to sonars. The second capability, precision-guided munitions (PGMs), gives the attacker the means for explosive “surgery” as well as use of his weapons with a much higher degree of efficiency.

War is nothing more than organized murder, sanctioned by a government. While war may sometimes be necessary, it should be quickly and efficiently concluded, less harm will be done to innocent people in the process. The very horror of war has sometimes deterred its necessity, this negative attribute is the only source of hope for the future survival of our species, the inability of “civilized” nations to use their most potent weapons — thermonuclear arms — during the Cold War.

Rationality for Detente

That rationality was mostly motivated by the advances of airpower, including strategic missiles and orbital satellites, in the future we will see application of the same principle. Stealth technology and PGMs together makes decision-makers who send young men off to die also become targets. No one is truly safe from such a precision attack, personal vulnerability might well make a decision-maker think twice and then again before committing his country to war. From the conduct of the Afghan War, it seems America has developed the doctrine and installed the capability to target those who instigate war. There are some things which a nation had to protect in order to survive. Clausewitz calls this an enemy’s “centre of gravity”. The real centre of gravity of any nation are its decision-makers, whether Presidents, Prime Ministers, dictators, or juntas. Despots may enjoy exercise of power, but hiding in deep bunkers cannot be fun. Now with the “Daisy Cutter” and other bunker buster bombs available, it is a calculated risk. A single enemy intelligence officer, or a domestic traitor, needs to “paint” the target only one time. One must have the ability to apply the well-named Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) principle of nuclear arms to conventional weapons, to fight a war with ultimate efficiency.

Qualities Airpower Is Costly

An effective air force requires a vast infrastructure of training, maintenance, and administrative support, a whole range of specialized industries that draw talent and productive resources away from other sectors of the economy.

Airpower Is Fragile

More fragile than the airplanes themselves are the supporting network of radars, command centres, communications facilities, fuel systems, and munitions depots. An entire air force can be wiped out in a few hours as the Egyptians found out at the hands of Israelis in 1967 at the start of the Six Day War. And as the Iraqis learned in the Gulf War, even the most strongly built shelters cannot protect an Air Force that has lost control of the air space above them.

Airpower Is Not a Substitute for Clear Military Objectives

Even though they are extremely skilful in the political employment of airpower, the Israelis have conducted hundreds of air strikes on “terrorist bases” without significant impact on the political base of the terrorist threat to the Israeli people. The “limited punitive air strike” has only limited effectiveness. It plays well on the evening news to a domestic audience, but it generally only serves to solidify the enemy’s will to resist.

While airpower can never conquer ground it can take the fight to the enemy’s heart and brain in a way and with a speed impossible for the more traditional fighting arms. An air-blitz is the story of Afghanistan today where the Taliban could not even touch US aircraft pulverizing them from way above. Like democracy, airpower has changed the face of the world.

Propositions Regarding Airpower

1. Whoever controls the air generally controls the surface.

2. Airpower is an inherently strategic force.

3. Airpower is primarily an offensive weapon.

4. In essence, airpower is targeting; targeting is intelligence; and intelligence is analyzing the             effects of air operations.

5. Airpower produces physical and psychological shock by dominating the fourth dimension — time.

6. Airpower can simultaneously conduct parallel operations at all levels of war.

7. Precision air weapons have redefined the meaning of mass.

8. Airpower’s unique characteristics require centralized control by airmen.

9. Technology and airpower are integrally and synergistically related.

1. Whoever Controls the Air Generally Controls the Surface

“If we lose the war in the air, we lose the war, and we lose it quickly”. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery

2. Airpower is an Inherently Strategic Force

“Airpower has become predominant, both as a deterrent to war, and — in the eventuality of war — as the devastating force to destroy an enemy’s potential and fatally undermine his will to wage war”.Gen Omar Bradley

3. Airpower Is Primarily an Offensive Weapon

War, once declared, must be waged offensively, aggressively. The enemy must not be fended off, but smitten down. Adm Alfred Thayer Mahan

4. In Essence, Airpower Is Targeting; Targeting Is Intelligence; and Intelligence Is Analyzing the Effects of Air Operations.

“How can any man say what he should do himself if he is ignorant of what his adversary is about?” Baron Antoine-Henri Jomini

5. Airpower Produces Physical and Psychological Shock by Dominating the Fourth Dimension — Time

“How true it is that in all military operations time is everything”. Duke of Wellington

6. Airpower Can Simultaneously Conduct Parallel Operations at All Levels of War.

“Whereas to shift the weight of effort on the ground from one point to another takes time, the flexibility inherent in Air Forces permits them without change of base to be switched from one objective to another in the theatre of operations”. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

7. Precision Air Weapons Have redefined the Meaning of Mass

“Of what use is decisive victory in battle if we bleed to death as a result of it?” Sir Winston Churchill

8. Airpower’s Unique Characteristics Require Centralized Control by Airmen

“Air warfare cannot be separated into little packets; it knows no boundaries on land and sea other than those imposed by the radius of action of the aircraft; it is a unity and demands unity of command”. Air Marshal Arthur Tedder

9. Technology and Airpower Are Integrally and Synergistically Related

“Science is in the saddle. Science is the dictator, whether we like it or not. Science runs ahead of both politics and military affairs. Science evolves new conditions to which institutions must be adapted. Let us keep our Science dry”. Gen Carl M. Spaatz

Ten Principles derived from the 10 Propositions Regarding Air Power

1. Control the heights or pay the price.

2. Airpower can be a peculiarly “strategic” force.

3. Strike the enemy to create opportunities.

4. Airpower is about applying force to nodes, processes, webs, intersections, and unions.

5. Enemies are bound to be resilient.

6. Combined arms aim at convergent effects.

7. Mass is concentrated force.

8. The object of force application determines the form of force control.

9. The informed application of superior technology can vitiate the enemy.

10. Technology is unconfinable.

• Effective integration can produce superior force.

What requires refinement is that “generally” air control equates to surface control. Humans live on the earth. The land, even in the “Third Wave,” is our home. We can only transit these other media. We have always had and likely will always have ground combat because the ground is so dear to us. Armies are important because the land remains important. Naval forces and air forces ultimately serve to help control and defend the land. Land forces secure and protect both naval ports and air bases, the Achilles’ heels of sea power and airpower.

Even so, airmen should understand and can assert that air and space power can swing the balance, because failure to control the heights can impose extraordinarily penalties on people forced to operate on the land and the sea.

Negative and Positive Deployment

Basically, air power delivers “strategic information” but to call bombs “negative” information and food “positive” information is to employ a very idiosyncratic logic and lexicon.

Strategic Paralysis

Does air produce strategic paralysis? A State suffering from strategic paralysis is unable to terminate the war-actually or legally. It’s paralyzed. Paralysis does not equate to defeat. Such a State’s armed forces may remain tactically vital, requiring defeat in detail. After defeat in detail, the paralyzed State may require occupation. What is the situation in Afghanistan today or Kosovo yesterday? Are defeat in detail and support of occupation tasks too trivial for airpower? Of course not. Air and space power can be powerful even when only employed to achieve tactical effects.

Does airpower obviate the need for a tactical reserve on the ground? An economy-of-force is not a magic force. One might offer that people who bear the consequences of bad propositions or tragic misjudgments ought to make their own risk assessments. Airmen may assert the “ubiquity” of airpower, but the ground forces pay the price if the claim is hyperbole. On the other hand, to say that air and space do in fact support or execute strike and that strike creates opportunities seems to be irrefutable without ignoring those who work to make strike possible — as well as the opportunities it creates.

Adequacy of Intelligence

To base the effectiveness of airpower on the adequacy of “intelligence” illuminates airpower’s greatest shortcoming. Airpower can blow a door off its hinges, but — unlike a simple soldier or marine — airpower cannot see what is behind the door. Airpower cannot attack what it cannot sense. Without knowledge, airpower cannot defer attacking that which it ought not attack. One cannot assess the effects of air attacks without understanding and predicting the relationship of targets to adversary’s capability. Airmen are unable either to assess or predict to perfection. All they know with certainty is that combat has cumulative effects and that at some point these take their toll on the enemy. To assert that “the real air assessment usually comes after the war” is either to admit that we have scant idea just what it is we are contributing or to embrace the post hoc fallacy as a principal measure of effectiveness. Airpower, when integrated with ground power and naval power, can bring a fight to its culminating point. How much of that movement can be produced by air always defies easy assessment.

Thus, the intelligence that counts may be more the abstract noun than the concrete one. The intelligent questions to ask and answer are those that help identify the enemy’s nodes, processes, webs, intersections, and unions that produce, transport, or control combat power. Smart enemies will attempt to hide and defend these. The author correctly notes the importance of thinking in terms of systems and assessing effects of attacks on key elements in an enemy’s systems. The next step is to appreciate that it is production of combat power, transportation, and control that count. The ground soldier in contact with the enemy harbours no doubt as to “what” produces enemy combat power in the form of incoming rounds.

Enemy’s Resilience

Airpower’s individualized contribution to military success defies easy assessment is because enemies are bound to be resilient, they are obligated to resist and that we ought to count on it. Destroying an enemy’s will to resist by air attack does not remains a vision anymore, we have seen it happen in Afghanistan. Enemy’s hostile will must be tough and durable. Bunkered or dispersed, disciplined troops can take tremendous poundings from bombs and artillery and still fight effectively. However, the relentless attack from the air on Tora Bora can shake even the toughest soldier. Evidence from a few eager-to-please and compliant prisoners of war cannot refute a much larger body of empirical data.

Creating Shock and Dislocation

Speed and surprise do not, substitute for mass. Speed and surprise aim at massing or concentrating effects — both physical and psychological. To assert that there is such a thing as “the conquest of time” by airpower is to attribute magical, supraliminal power that airpower lacks. Squadrons of bombers and fighters can move more quickly than the ground corps or the carrier battle group. They can strike deep and hard, but they do not conquer time. The World War II bombing of Dresden and Hamburg, for example, produced tremendous shock and destruction in a very short period of time, but the dislocation was not enough to bring the ruling Nazis to their knees, the precision bombing of Afghanistan has because it targeted decision makers, Mullah Umar had nowhere to hide. Time is critical to opportunity, but air cannot be described as “dominating... time”. Perhaps air “exploits” time to concentrate its physical and psychological effects to erode the resilience of enemies more rapidly. Yet, even attacking 150 cities at once may not be enough to end the fight.

Convergent Effects

The principle at work seems to be simpler and more solidly grounded. Combined arms aim at convergent effects, and air and space power — being so wonderfully flexible can be peculiary strategic in effect. Air and space power, brings speed, range, perspective, and freedom of manoeuvre of agility, invaluable attributes that only air and space power can contribute. Striking the enemy is the best way to create opportunity, the aim of force application, is to harmonize the kinds of force applied, where the force is applied, and when it is applied to increase the likelihood of a cascading collapse of the enemy’s combat power.

Concentration of Force

Precision weapons have not redefined the meaning of mass, mass in scientific terms is one of the forms that energy takes, in military terms it is merely the concentration of effects, the shorthand for the concentration of force. Force is both abstract and concrete. Troops of combat units, weapon-delivery platforms, and weapons-possess energy and are production units. They produce lethality or force. Production capacity — the lethal or forceful effect — is sometimes dependant on the size of the production unit, sometimes on the velocity of the force applied. Size may be unrelated to production capacity. By concentrating force to hit what they aim (which may or may not be what they should aim at) precision weapons achieve the desired lethal effects with fewer engagements than non-precision weapons.

Delivery of Food

The precision aerial delivery of food bombs — accepting for the moment that such things are germane — pose very important questions. In Afghanistan the US has dropped millions of food packets. Must an airman control the delivery of food? Ought the delivery of food packets be controlled by a greengrocer type of person? Or ought control of the delivery of food bombs be determined by the objective of “bombing” with food in the first place? Sun Tzu and Clausewitz urged that the aim or function of an operation ought to determine its form. An airman may be uniquely qualified to tell how best to deliver food bombs, but how can an airman know any better than anyone else why food needs delivery or where the food needs to go?

Strategic Paralysis (For Small Nations?)

If there is a single set of concepts which has dominated superpower strategic bombing doctrine, then it includes: high mass, high speed, high tempo and high sustainability; all brought together in parallel to achieve the unconditional surrender of an enemy through the single-handed application of air power. The evolution of this paradigm has been visible through the major conflicts of the century and has culminated in the air campaigns of this decade. It is perhaps now commonly accepted as being as classically representative of ‘strategic bombing’ as was the World War II Allied bomber offensive in its time. Today, the greatest application has been in Afghanistan where the war has almost been singlehandedly won by airpower.

Warden’s Rings

The new archetype for ‘strategic bombing’ was established in 1991 in the Gulf War. The methodological basis for that air campaign was the now well-known strategic targeting model composed by Colonel John Warden III (retired). The model commonly referred to as ‘Warden’s Rings’ or the ‘Five Ring Model’ comprises five concentric circles depicting a hierarchy of systems within a national system. It suggests a means of prioritizing targets by identifying generic centres of gravity for an enemy’s sustainment of a national war effort.

The model has become popular among both large nations and small since its inception. What is sometimes overlooked by small nations in the crowd, however, is that the theory presumes a superpower (or superpower coalition) level of resourcing. It centres on achieving strategic paralysis — the large scale destruction of critical functionality within the enemy war making machine through the felling of entire sub-systems. In doing so it assumes military capability and capacity well beyond the normal means of small nations.

Small air forces do not do strategic paralysis; in the same way that small nations do not do invasion. The effort customarily required to collapse (and keep collapsed) entire enemy systems makes it large nation or large coalition business. The approach requires an immense quantity and concentration of resources (military and economic) for often indefinite periods of time.

Strategic paralysis is not for small nations. The classic bombing campaigns of the century have, each in its own way, attended to the collapse of whole enemy systems — social, industrial, military, logistic or otherwise. They each involved rates of effort well beyond the means of small nations.

Offensive Air Potential

The Gulf War strategic air campaign was an important demonstration of maximum superpower offensive air potential, but may in the final analysis offer little to the independent small nation or non-superpower coalition seeking the maximization of its offensive air fleet. Paralysing an enemy nation by dropping thousands of tons of bombs per month on vital parts of its heartland is in fact a very narrow application of air power for strategic outcomes.

In the war between India and Pakistan in 1965, air superiority was never contested, air power was largely restricted to ground support and the air war came to an early halt as a result of shortage of spares and weapons imposed by international embargo? Air power has been similarly peripheral in subsequent scuffles in South Asia.

Controversy continues to surround the contribution of air power in the war in South East Asia. One argument alleges that political constrains and interference from Washington inhibited air power so much that only when it was fully applied by the air campaign in December 1972 against North Vietnam was the political objective achieved and the Hanoi regime forced to the conference table.

Force Application and Control thereof

Object of Force Application

The important principle seems to be that the object of force application ought to determine the form of force control. There is nothing talismanic or magic about airpower. If joint professional military education is effective, any strategist of combined arms can advise where best to employ airpower to achieve its effects. Any targeteer can hunt for targets, unlikely that any airman is better than anyone else in assessing the relationship of targets to effects. Why have few airmen become C-in-Cs, is it because airpower always supports something larger than the application of airpower?

Application of Superior Technology

The informed application of superior technology can vitiate the enemy. Technology must be applied with superior concepts of operations and codified in superior doctrine, assimilated in the right things, in the right numbers. Victory cannot be assured by superior weapons. Rather, the informed application of superior technology—informed by experience and the knowledge gained in realistic training, by sound doctrine, by innovative concepts of operations, and by the warrior spirit—can hurt the enemy badly. If airmen help create the superior technology and devise the superior concepts of operations for employing it, then perhaps airmen ought to control these applications. Likewise, unless airmen understand airpower and can provide operational pull and technology push, they mortgage our future.

Integration

When fighting with combined arms it’s how we must fight effective integration can produce superior results. While one form of force may be better suited to a particular function than another, that fact in no way makes one superior and another inferior, one “dominant and decisive,” and another subordinate or irrelevant.

Through modern technology and revised tactics, the classical role of bomber aircraft can now be achieved by much smaller airframes. Precision weapons offer the same destructive power on target with markedly smaller weapons loads; air-to-air refuelling negates the need to carry large fuel loads for long missions; and self-protection armaments have increasingly been replaced by electronic warfare technologies, or made largely obsolete by stealth.

Multi-rolling or Multi-tasking

The loss of the connection between aircraft type and mission type is also obvious in basic modern aircraft design. The economic imperatives faced by modern defence forces have seen an increase in emphasis on multi-rolling. Indeed, the ability to both fight and bomb is now a basic requirement in the world’s latest generation of offensive aircraft, including those of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) and Eurofighter programmes. Incidentally, Lockheed has won the JSF control in competition with Boeing.

Two apparent elements mark a strategic campaign. In Vietnam, the first was undermining of the North Vietnamese will to support the war. The belief was that a comprehensive bombing campaign against the heartland of Vietnam would convince Hanoi that South Vietnam was not worth the effort. As long as North Vietnam paid no major price for the war, its participation was likely to remain unchecked.

The second element involved the destruction of the North Vietnamese capacity to support the war. This was tied in with the obvious role of North Vietnam in passing Chinese and Soviet supplies to the guerrillas and North Vietnamese regulars fighting in the south. North Vietnam had to be sealed off in order to break the logistics chain.

US Defence Secretary McNamara continued to maintain that the prime role of air power was to support ground forces in South Vietnam. He effectively reduced the air campaign to one of limited interdiction and CAS (avoiding high order strategic bombing), retaining the hope of convincing the North Vietnamese regime that South Vietnam could not be taken. The task for air power was reduced to the interruption of the supply system at its terminal phases — an expensive and ultimately impossible job with most of the bombs falling in empty jungle. America was fighting the war with ‘one hand tied behind its back’. McNamara had set a strategy for attrition and protracted war.

Substituting Gunboat Diplomacy by Airpower

Politicians saw air power as a means of providing political signals, rather than as a military means to a political end. They reserved the asset for their own poorly calculated use and air power became the ‘major unplayed trump card’ of the Vietnamese conflict.

Contemplating the failure of its spring offensive and now facing air attack at home, Hanoi bid for the revitalization of peace negotiations. President Nixon’s subsequent reduction in bombing effort in aid of those talks was, however, met with renewed stalling at the peace table in Paris. In December 1972 Nixon ordered an all-out campaign against North Vietnam — discarding the previous interdiction focus and pursuing, instead, the disruption of the country’s economic and political life. The aim was to force North Vietnamese acceptance of terms in order to allow a peaceful US withdrawal.

After eleven days of concentrated bombing (more than 700 B-52 sorties alone) the US achieved its terms. It was the first time since the war had begun that the unrestricted strategic use of air power was cleared. These were called interdiction by the Americans, they were only so far as they were still unable to attack the truly original sources of the conflict in China and the Soviet Union. The de facto heart of the enemy regime was accessed and the effect of that process was a key factor in bringing about the North Vietnamese acceptance of Ceasefire terms. Experts speculated that similar action in 1965 could have brought about the withdrawal of communist forces from South Vietnam at the beginning of the conflict. In the words of General Westmoreland:

“This kind of bombing that should have been started as soon as a strong military and political base had been established in South Vietnam did in fact induce the Communists to make concessions that were considerably less attractive [to them] than those they had striven for at enormous cost for seventeen years”.

From a military point of view the operation achieved its objective; creating the high visibility damage intended. Analysis of the success of the operation in achieving its political objectives, however, is more complex. If the political objective was simply to send the message, then the message was sent and the operation can be considered a success. If the political objective was, however, to reduce the frequency of terrorist attacks against the US, then the analysis is more difficult. What is known is that Libyan sponsored terrorist activity, particularly against US targets, declined significantly in the remainder of 1986 and through 1987. What is also known is that the American example was quickly followed by a firming up of anti-terrorist measures by a number of European governments. As favourable primary and secondary political effects, these outcomes can be argued to constitute success. However, it is also known that Libyan sponsorship of terrorism did continue under the guise of surrogate groups, and also that in December 1988 Libyan agents are suspected of behind the bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, killing 273 people.

Airpower against unconventional enemy

Vietnam

The SAM threat was countered by ECM and Wild Weasel defence suppression. Precision guided munitions were introduced with devastating effect, especially on bridges. Despite being unable to attack North Vietnamese aircraft on their bases, air supremacy was established.

But whether air power was not allowed to ‘dominate’ the war in Vietnam or whether circumstances combined to reduce its effectiveness, the result was the same. It did not determine the outcome and even the reasons for the Hanoi government’s going back to the conference table in 1973 may ultimately be found to be more complex than simply submission to the B-52 attacks on Haiphong.

For the Air Force, the guerrilla struggle during most of the Vietnam war was an unacknowledged anomaly that may well reappear. Bombing doctrine remains geared to a fast paced conventional war, and the conviction that such doctrine is appropriate for any kind of war permeates the service. Consequently, this particular war had wide-ranging unexpected ramifications, but although it brought two of the most powerful Third World countries into conflict, air power had no influence on its outcome.

Afghanistan Model

Circa 80s

In Afghanistan in the 80s despite strenuous Soviet attempts to interdict the weapon supply routes from Pakistan, and further modification to tactical flying patterns, the impact of the new surface-to-air defences not only impaired Soviet effectiveness but boosted Mujahideen morale enormously and further weakened Soviet resolve to stay in Afghanistan at all. By February 1989, when regional arms agreements came into force, about 1,000 Stingers had been dispatched to the Mujahideen. They were probably responsible for the destruction of 300-400 Soviet aircraft. All published figures of losses originate from the Mujahideen side and therefore, like most similar claims, were probably inflated. Whatever the exact figure, the losses ultimately proved too much even for the USSR, which originally at least had perceived a national security interest to be at stake.

Tactical Air Mobility

While offensive air support is an enemy force reducer, the provision of tactical air mobility is a friendly force multiplier. Provided, for the reasons already advanced, that hostile AA fire can be suppressed, reduced or evaded, both helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft can make a considerable contribution across the peacekeeping continuum. Helicopters can provide infantry with mobility over inhospitable terrain to match or exceed that of non-compliant insurgents. Territory which can take 3-4 days to cover on foot can be overflown by a helicopter in 20 minutes. Heliborne troops can outflank and envelope while at the same time induce surrender or compliance, reducing the advantages to dissidents of topographical features and distance. Algeria and, before the advent of Stinger, Afghanistan provide comprehensive examples of such operations. Casualty evacuation, reinforcement and resupply and the speedy provision of highly-visible military support to an isolated civilian authority are further roles giving positive support to peacekeeping operations. The cumulative impact of the provision of air mobility is to reduce the number of ground troops required in any specified area. Even when a permanent military presence is considered essential throughout the region, the ability to reinforce rapidly by air would still reduce the total number of ground forces required. It is well argued that air power cannot hold ground, but it can make it very difficult for hostile forces to do so and it may thereby dissuade recalcitrant political groups from having recourse to armed force, or persuade them to abandon it, in pursuit of political objectives. Air power, like any other kind of military power, cannot impose a political settlement, but it can help to create a peacekeeping environment in which a political settlement is preferable to continued conflict.  AA weapons, he does not need to defeat the interventionists but simply to raise the costs of their effort beyond the national political, military and economic price they are prepared to pay. That is the uneasy lesson for air power, and any other kind of military power, in a Bosnian scenario.

The Technology Differential

Such considerations are likely to influence the future application of air power at least as much as the dramatic successes of the Gulf War.

The gap between Western aerospace technology and the rest, demonstrated so brutally in the Gulf, has not narrowed. Western air forces may preserve advantages but the differential will move progressively further up the technological scale.

As a result, air warfare will usually take place in an electronic environment affecting communications, navigation, target acquisition, weapon delivery and precision guidance. Low level operations are likely to continue to be problematical, with the traditional difficulties of high-speed target acquisition and identification in adverse topographical and climatic conditions further aggravated by the widespread deployment of man-portable low level SAMs such as Stinger and derivatives of Blowpipe, plus any further Russian developments. There were sources of conflict, there was economic expansion and there was no over arching regional security structure. Circumstances here suggested that air power could ultimately become an arbiter in conflict rather than a contributor to stability.

Gulf War Experience

Regardless of the private hopes airmen may have had during the Gulf War that air power might achieve the coalition’s military objectives without a ground campaign, the modest fraction of the air-to-surface attacks focused against the strategic core (15%), had more pragmatic objectives. Planners wished to exert pressure from the outset directly against the heart of Iraqi power — an idea consistent with other strategic bombing campaigns. In some cases, as in the nuclear weapon programme, the strategic air attacks were less effective than hoped or believed at the time.

Paradoxically, air power probably did determine the outcome of the Gulf War on its own, but as a result of strategic, operational, and tactical simultaneous synergism. In the face of early ignorant, bigoted and self-interested opposition from armies and navies, men of great vision and strength were needed to ensure that air power put down the roots from which ultimately Desert Storm was to spring.

References

1. “Air Power”, Air Marshal Tony Mason

2. “Strategy, Air Strike and Small Nations”, Shaun Clark RNZAF

3. “Developing Air and Space Doctrine for the 21st Century”, Defence Symposium Apr 30 - May 01, 1996, Marwell Air Force Base, Alabama

4. “Poor Man’s Air Force”, Ikram Sehgal, The Nation

5. “Fighter Wing”, Tom Clancy

6. Research by A H Amin

1. Airpower in Unconventional War

2. Airpower and the Nature of War

            a. Impact

            b. Revolutionary Changes

            c. Rationality for Detente

3.            Qualities

            a. Costly

            b. Fragile

            c. Not a substitute for Clear Military Objectives

4.            Proposition

            a. Control of Air

            b. Strategic Force

            c. Offensive weapon

            d. Intelligence and analysis

            e. Psychological shock

            f.  Parallel operations

            g. Precision weapons

            h. Centralized control

            j. Integrated technology

5.            Principles

            a. Control the heights

            b. Strategic force

            c. Create opportunities

            d. Application of Force

            e. Resilient enemy

            f. Convergent effects

            g. Concentrated Force

            h. Force control

            j. Superior technology

            k. Technology unconfinable

6.            Strategic Paralysis

            a. Adequacy of Int

            b. Enemy’s Resilience

            c. Creating Shock & Dislocation

            d. Convergent Effect

            e. Concentration of Force

            f. Delivery of Food

7.            Strategic Paralysis

            a. For small nation

            b. Warden’s Rings

            c. Offensive Air Potential

8.            Force Application and Control Thereof

            a. Object of Force Application

            b. Application of Superior Technology

            c. Integration

            d. Multi-rolling or multi-tasking

            e. Substituting gunboat diplomacy

                by airpower

9.         Airpower against unconventional Enemy

            a. Vietnam

            b. Afghanistan

10.       Tactical Air Mobility

11.       Technology Differential

12.       Gulf War Experience