Conclusion
In the first two decades after the end of the Cold War scholarly minded practitioners like Andrew Krepinevich, Douglas Macgregor and Robert Scales undertook significant strategic thinking on the use of conventional landpower, as did civilian scholars like Stephen Biddle. Notable contributions were also made by the Pentagon and the US Army in official government documents.
Taken together, post-Cold War strategic thought on landpower in conventional war reveals a number of key tenets: conventional landpower is best employed using smaller, more mobile units that are dispersed on the battlefield and linked together through information technology; conventional land battles will feature simultaneous and synchronized operations that are non-linear in nature; massed effects can be achieved using information and precision technologies, thereby reducing the footprint (and therefore vulnerability) of ground forces; conventional ground war is a joint endeavour with land forces closely linked to other elements of the joint force; advanced technologies dramatically improve the land force commander’s ability to ‘see over the next hill’, but they cannot eliminate the fog and friction of war; and decision making will be pushed to lower echelons, increasing the important of a strategic understanding of warfare at the junior and non-commissioned officer level.
The nature of the actual conflicts that have taken place in the post-Cold War and post-9/11 eras, and continue to take place in the millennium’s second decade, is such that strategic thinking about landpower has focused significantly on irregular warfare and counterinsurgency. Liddell Hart had stressed the importance of weakening the enemy morally and warned against the tendency of treating war as merely a matter of concentrating superior force. Many of these lessons had to be relearned in the course of post-9/11 counterinsurgency operations. This strategic thinking will be examined in Chapter 5, but first we turn to strategic thought on the use of airpower.
Questions
1 What are the main tenets of Clausewitz’s and Sun Tzu’s strategic thought and how does their strategic thought differ?
2 How does Liddell Hart’s strategic thought relate to that of Sun Tzu?
3 What are the key differences between Clausewitz’s and Jomini’s strategic thought?
4 What were some of the elements identified in the 1990s and 2000s as to how the nature of land warfare was expected to change?
5 In what ways and to what degree was the changing nature of land warfare reflected in the wars in Afghanistan (2001–2002) and Iraq (2003)?
6 How does the increased use of SOF link to the changing nature of land warfare?
7 Do the ideas of Clausewitz or Sun Tzu best explain contemporary approaches to land warfare?
Notes
1 John Shy, ‘Jomini’, in Peter Paret, Ed., Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 170–171.
2 References from this section are taken from Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. by Samuel B. Griffiths (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 66–69, 77–79, 102.
3 B.H. Liddell Hart, “Foreword,” in Griffiths, v.
4 Basil H. Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach (London: Faber & Faber Ltd, 1954), 338–339.
5 Ibid., 342.
6 Ibid., 340.
7 References in this section are taken from Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, ed. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 75, 86–87, 89, 100–103, 117, 119–121, 579, 585, 595, 605, 617, 624.
8 References in this section are taken from Antoine Henri Jomini, The Art of War, ed. by J.D. Hittle (Harrisburg, PA: Military Service Publishing Company, 1947), 43, 50, 67, 79, 81.
9 J. Mohan Malik, ‘The Evolution of Strategic Thought’, in Craig A. Snyder, Ed., Contemporary Security and Strategy (New York: Routledge, 1999), 23–24.
10 J.D. Hittle, ‘Introduction’ to Antoine Henri Jomini, The Art of War, translated by J.D. Hittle (Harrisburg, PA: Military Service Publishing Company, 1947), 28.
11 Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War (New York: Warner Books, 1993), 60.
12 Ellwood P. Hinman IV, ‘Counterair and Counterland Concepts for the 21st Century’, Joint Force Quarterly (Spring 2008), 91.
13 Toffler and Toffler, 83, 89.
14 Andrew F. Krepinevich, The Military Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Asssessments, 1992 [released in 2002]); Andrew F. Krepinevich, Transforming the Legions: The Army and the Future of Land Warfare (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2004).
15 Douglas A. Macgregor, ‘Future Battle: The Merging Levels of War’, Parameters (Winter 1992/1993), 41.
16 Douglas A. Macgregor, Breaking the Phalanx: A New Design for Landpower in the 21st Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 4, 62.
17 Ibid., 74.
18 Macgregor, ‘Future Battle’, 33.
19 United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, ‘Joint Vision 2010: America’s Military Preparing for Tomorrow’, Joint Force Quarterly (Summer 1996), 40.
20 US Army White Paper, Concepts for the Objective Force (Washington, DC: US Army, November 2001), 3.
21 Ibid., 13.
22 Joint Vision 2010, 42.
23 US Army White Paper, 9, 13.
24 Ibid., 4.
25 The Army Vision Briefing, www.army.mil/armyvision/armyvis.htm, accessed 30 January 2001, no longer available online.
26 Joint Vision 2010, 46.
27 United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2020 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2000), 3.
28 Ibid., v.
29 Ibid.
30 Paul Van Riper and Robert H. Scales, Jr, ‘Preparing for War in the 21st Century’, Parameters (Autumn 1997).
31 Robert H. Scales, Jr, Yellow Smoke: The Future of Land Warfare for America’s Military (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 10.
32 Ibid., 13.
33 Robert H. Scales, Jr, ‘Return of the Jedi’, Armed Forces Journal (October 2009).
34 Robert H. Scales, ‘The Second Learning Revolution’, in Anthony D. McIvor, Ed., Rethinking the Principles of War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005), 43.
35 Scales, Yellow Smoke, 3, 23.
36 Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3.
37 Ibid., 2.
38 As quoted in Adam Leong KoK Wey, ‘Principles of Special Operations: Learning from Sun Tzu and Frontinus’, Comparative Strategy 33:2 (2014), 132.
39 Matthew Johnson, ‘The Growing Relevance of Special Operations Forces in U.S. Military Strategy’, Comparative Strategy 25:4 (2006). See also Alastair Finlan, ‘Warfare by Other Means: Special Forces, Terrorism and Grand Strategy’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 14:1 (2003).
40 Stephen J. Cimbala, ‘Transformation in Concept and Policy’, Joint Force Quarterly (Summer 2005), 28.
41 Wey, 133–138.
Further reading
Biddle, Stephen. Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
von Clausewitz, Carl. On War, ed. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), Books 1 & 8.
Gordon, Michael R. and Bernard E. Trainor. Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006).
Jomini, Antoine Henri. The Art of War, ed. by J.D. Hittle (Harrisburg, PA: Military Service Publishing Company, 1947).
Krepinevich, Andrew F. Transforming the Legions: The Army and the Future of Land Warfare (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2004).
Liddell Hart, Basil H. Strategy: The Indirect Approach (London: Faber & Faber Ltd, 1954).
Macgregor, Douglas A. Breaking the Phalanx: A New Design for Landpower in the 21st Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997).
Macgregor, Douglas A. Transformation Under Fire:
Revolutionizing How America Fights (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).
Murray, Williamson and Robert H. Scales, Jr. The Iraq War: A Military History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Scales, Robert H., Jr. Yellow Smoke: The Future of Land Warfare for America’s Military (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003).
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. by Samuel B. Griffiths (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963).
Toffler, Alvin and Heidi Toffler. War and Anti-War (New York: Warner Books, 1973).
United States Joint Chiefs of Staff. ‘Joint Vision 2010: America’s Military Preparing for Tomorrow’, Joint Force Quarterly (Summer 1996): 34–49.
Wey, Adam Leong KoK. ‘Principles of Special Operations: Learning from Sun Tzu and Frontinus’, Comparative Strategy 33:2 (2014), 131–144.
3 Airpower
Not much more than a century old, airpower and airpower theory have already provided a compelling and varied narrative. The emergence of a third dimension to warfare in the first decades of the twentieth century sparked some theorizing as to the role, promise and potential of airpower in warfare. The theorists most associated with early airpower theory are Italian General Giulio Douhet and American General William Mitchell. Douhet’s vision was a grand one of airpower being revolutionary in nature, a weapon so powerful it would replace other forms of warfare. Mitchell’s thinking was more circumscribed, viewing airpower as an important domain of war to be integrated with, not replace, other forms of warfare. Many of Douhet’s key tenets were proven wrong by the events of World War Two, while elements of Mitchell’s perspective held up and have become the foundation of contemporary US Air Force doctrine.
During the Cold War conventional airpower theory received relatively little attention, dominated as the era was by nuclear strategy. But beginning with the 1991 Gulf War, which seemingly vindicated some of Douhet’s ideas, the post-Cold War period has contained numerous conventional airpower cases and examples. This has resulted in a significant degree of strategic thinking about the role and utility of airpower. This chapter examines contemporary strategic thought in the air dimension. It begins by highlighting and offering a critique of the key ideas of Giulio Douhet and William Mitchell. It then examines new ideas about airpower, some of which can be viewed through the prism of the Douhet or Mitchell lenses, but many of which are substantively new. Notable post-Cold War airpower theorists, all civilian scholars but some with military backgrounds, include Stephen Biddle, James Corum, Benjamin Lambeth and Robert Pape, among others. The chapter concludes by briefly raising strategic thought on the newest form of airpower, unmanned kinetic precision force.
Giulio Douhet
A general in the Italian army in the 1920s,1 Giulio Douhet was the earliest and arguably history’s most ardent proponent of what may be called the ‘promise’ of airpower. This is the idea that wars can be won by airpower alone or almost so, eliminating or substantially reducing the need to send in soldiers (or sailors), and thus making warfare almost bloodless from the perspective of the predominant air power. Douhet’s views were premised on the strongly held belief that the airplane as a military instrument was qualitatively new, rendering obsolete or at least substantially less important old modes of warfare based on land or at sea. His reasoning was simple: while armies had to contend with the uneven configuration of the earth, and navies were bound by coastlines, airplanes had ‘complete freedom of action and direction … Nothing a man can do on the surface of the earth can interfere with a plane moving freely in flight … All the influences which have conditioned and characterised warfare from the beginning are powerless to affect aerial action.’2 From the beginning this perspective had its critiques, notably from Douhet’s own superiors in the Italian army. His ideas thus set in train ‘the fundamental debate, never resolved, of whether airpower is unique and revolutionary, or whether it is just another arrow in a soldier’s or sailor’s quiver’.3
Douhet was the author of many works on airpower, but the volume for which he is best remembered is The Command of the Air, first published in 1921, expanded in 1927 and later translated into several languages. The book sets forth what may be called the ‘Douhet model’ of warfare, with several key tenets. The first, reflected in the title of the book, is that victory in warfare absolutely depends on achieving ‘command of the air’, what today we would call ‘air supremacy’.4 For Douhet, command of the air meant ‘to be in a position to prevent the enemy from flying while retaining the ability to fly oneself’.5 Douhet spoke in absolute terms, arguing that those with command of the air would enjoy ‘complete protection of one’s own country’, while those without it could be subject to ‘offensive power so great it defies human imagination’.6 A second tenet centred on how a nation should go about achieving command of the air. Although he devotes some space to aerial combat, Douhet stressed that an enemy air force should be dealt with primarily by destroying it while it was still on the ground, and by targeting the industries and factories from which the air force would get its materials.
But military forces and installations were not where Douhet saw a nation’s centre of gravity. Rather, it lay in the population and this led to the third and perhaps most controversial tenet of his thought. Douhet was the first to argue that the target of overwhelming offensive airpower should be population centres. The fundamental premise and resulting logic train behind this view was that airpower was a military instrument of such a qualitatively new – and terrifying – character that its utilization would create panic among the population, have a devastating impact on civilian morale, lead to the population’s uprising against the government and thereby bring about the enemy’s capitulation and an end to the war even, perhaps, before the army and navy had time to mobilize. He drew no distinction between soldiers and civilians, arguing that in the age of aerial offensives, all citizens become combatants. The attacks themselves should be mass attacks, the use of overwhelming force as opposed to individual strikes, and they should be against large area targets, including industrial, commercial and civilian sites, using explosive, incendiary and (remarkably) poison gas bombs. In Douhet’s view, bombing accuracy was not a concern because ‘if targets were so small as to require high accuracy, then they were probably not worthwhile targets’.7
Douhet thus presents command of the air as the requirement for guaranteeing a nation’s security: ‘In order to assure an adequate national defense, it is necessary – and sufficient – to be in a position in case of war to conquer command of the air’ (emphasis in original).8 In his analysis he was not unlike Mahan, arguing whoever controls a particular dimension of warfare, sea or air, will surely triumph. At a time when air forces were a component of the army, Douhet was an adamant advocate of an independent air force, which would significantly increase in importance just as the navy and army would proportionately decrease in importance. To the extent surface forces had a role, it would be a defensive one, designed to hold a front and prevent an enemy force from seizing one’s own air force establishments. Thus a final tenet of the Douhet model was that not only institutionally but also as an actor on the battlefield, airpower should operate independently of the other dimensions of warfare. Douhet argued strongly against ‘auxiliary aviation’, defined as ‘that mass of air power which facilitates or integrates land and sea actions’9 – what today we might call ‘joint warfare’. In his view, the strength of airpower lay in the strategic dimension and not in the support of surface forces. Auxiliary aviation, he argued, was ‘worthless, superfluous, harmful’ because it did not contribute to command of the air.10 Any attempt at combined air–sea or air–ground operations was a waste of resources.
William Mitchell
Douhet’s contemporary, William Mitchell, a general in the US Air Service, shared Douhet’s belief in paralysing a nation through command of the air and the use of airpower against economic and industrial sites. ‘To gain a lasting victory in war, the hostile nation’s power to make war must be destroyed’
, he argued in his 1925 book Winged Defense; ‘this means the manufactories, the means of communication, the food products, even the farms, the fuel and oil and the places where people live and carry on their daily lives’.11 But unlike Douhet, Mitchell continued to believe in the value of targeting an enemy’s surface forces. His strategic thought included the importance of attacking the enemy’s most important ground positions, menacing his airplanes on the ground, and striking his sea craft. Today, the use of airpower against fixed military, industrial or civilian targets in and near political and economic centres is known as strategic bombing, while the use of airpower against military forces, including supply lines and fielded forces, is known as theatre air attack.
For Mitchell, the advent of winged flight would compel a completely new set of rules for the conduct of war.12 No longer would warfare be a tedious and expensive process of wearing down the enemy’s land forces by continuous linear attacks. The warfare of World War One, during which Mitchell commanded allied air assets, was a thing of the past to be replaced with air forces that would strike deep behind enemy lines – a vision that presaged the AirLand Battle thinking of many decades later. Armies, he argued, would still be necessary since ‘everything begins and ends on the ground … any decision in war is based on what takes place ultimately on the ground’. Mitchell therefore emphasized airpower’s role in land warfare and the value of combining airpower into an overall war plan involving land forces.13 But Mitchell argued naval vessels, with the exception of submarines, would become increasingly obsolete because they were completely vulnerable to bombardment by aircraft. ‘The surface ship as an element of war is disappearing; sea power as expressed in battleships is almost a thing of the past.’ Navies would be pushed more and more out to sea, unable to defend a nation’s coasts and safe only outside the growing radius of aircraft. ‘Nothing’, Mitchell argued, ‘can stop the attack of aircraft except other aircraft’. Finally, like Douhet, Mitchell was an ardent supporter of an air force being established as a separate service from the army.
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