A second capability brought on by airpower advances was stand-off precision strike. This was enabled by the dramatically increased precision of weapons – PGM – which during the Gulf War were guided by laser but now are almost exclusively guided by satellite. The advent of PGM guided by Global Positioning System (GPS) has meant that virtually any target that can be identified can be destroyed – although target identification itself remains problematic.
Finally, a critical new aspect of airpower in the 1990s and to the present day has been its positive impact on ‘situational awareness’ or the ability to see what is happening on the battlefield. This has been enabled by the introduction of UAVs and specialized manned aircraft, along with earth observation satellites. Not only has increased situational awareness brought about an almost complete knowledge of an operational situation, but denying the same information to enemy forces has enabled ‘information superiority’, also identified by the US Air Force from the 1990s onward by the core competency.
Giulio Douhet’s command of the air in contemporary times
The increased and unfettered use of airpower in the post-Cold War era was made possible because US airpower had achieved a quintessentially Douhetian attribute: command of the air or ‘air dominance’. ‘The real essence of American air power’s new-found leverage’, argues Lambeth, is ‘its ability to seize prompt control of the air and then to proceed, using that dominance, to destroy … an enemy’s diverse sources of military power [on the ground]’.29 That said, he is careful to point out the tactical limitations of airpower, even when operating in the desert where targets are relatively easy to identify. A high proportion of Iraqi tanks were destroyed by coalition army tanks and attack helicopters and not by precision airpower. During this time period the US Air Force identified one of its core competencies as being air and space superiority, defined to mean ‘control over what moves through air and space’, thereby allowing ‘freedom from attack and freedom to attack’30 – words that strongly echoed a Douhetian perspective. Because command of the air was enjoyed by default, with no enemy nation approaching US airpower capabilities, there is even less discussion of combat in the air than there was in Douhet’s time. Ironically, also during the 1991 Gulf War the US-led coalition destroyed the Iraqi air force on the ground, just as Douhet would have had it.
By the 1990s it appeared that the combination of increased precision, better battlefield information and therefore situational awareness, stealth technology and overall air dominance meant that airpower had matured to the point that its use could now produce strategic effects in warfare. That is to say, airpower could now have impacts that were game changing in nature, achieving national/political objectives directly, not just tactical/battlefield objectives like defeating enemy forces. This idea, along with others related to the role and value of airpower, was debated with renewed vigour at the end of the decade and in the aftermath of 9/11.
NATO’s air campaign in and around Kosovo in the spring of 1999, the war in Afghanistan in 2001–2002 and the Iraq War of 2003 sparked significant theorizing about conventional airpower, some of which centred on ideas that had been raised in the first post-Cold War decade, such as the ability of airpower to achieve strategic effects, the utility of punishment, the military effectiveness of operational interdiction and the value of decapitation; and others that were essentially new or had not been fully examined in the past, notably the use of airpower in combination with indigenous forces and with Western surface forces (i.e. jointness). Both the further examination of previous ideas and the exploration of essentially new areas of inquiry served to push forward the boundaries of existing airpower theory.
Can airpower achieve strategic effects?
In his work on the Gulf War, Lambeth was careful to set himself apart from the more ardent airpower proponents. ‘It is not [my intent] to suggest that air power can win wars all by itself … [S]uccess in major theatre wars will, as before, continue to require the involvement of all force elements in appropriately integrated fashion.’31 No sooner was the ink dry on that clarification than a war came along that seemed to suggest, at first glance, that it was after all possible for airpower to win a war all by itself. In the wake of Operation Allied Force, which comprised 78 days of air strikes against Serbian targets but no NATO ground force deployment, some scholars and practitioners saw the conflict as a watershed in the history of airpower, approaching Douhet’s view that wars could be won with airpower alone.
Although there were some voices lauding the apparent effectiveness of airpower in Kosovo, in fact the later post-Cold war period featured far more views that qualified – in some cases significantly – the ability of airpower to achieve political goals. Operation Allied Force was the most precise application of airpower in history in terms of non-combatant casualties, and Kosovo was indeed the first time in which airpower coerced an enemy leader to yield with no friendly land combat whatsoever. Yet it did not follow that the conflict demonstrated airpower could now win wars on its own. Airpower was the only military instrument utilized, but several non-combat factors were also identified as being critical to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s capitulation, among them the threat of NATO ground force deployment, economic and diplomatic pressure on Serbian elites, and the political isolation of Serbia. Overall, most airpower theorists would likely support the assessment of two scholars not long after the conflict, that ‘[t]he Kosovo experience does little to vindicate the general argument that air attacks alone can compel enemy states to yield on key interests’.32
Punishment
One aspect of the airpower debate that was at least partially supported by the Kosovo experience was the effectiveness of strategic bombing against commercial and industrial targets. Whereas both Douhet and Mitchell argued in favour of this as a means of crushing the material resistance of the enemy, Pape had raised and discounted a punishment strategy of attacking civilian sectors of the economy. Yet in an in-depth assessment of the Kosovo campaign Lambeth found that ‘in contrast to the coalition’s ultimately unsuccessful efforts to coerce Saddam Hussein into submission [in 1991], punishment did seem to work against Milosevic’.33 As concisely summed up by Stephen Biddle, ‘Whereas Serbia’s military survived nearly intact, its power grid and transportation network took heavy damage … It was the threat to this critical economic foundation that changed minds in Belgrade.’34 Some have concluded that striking strategic targets, including infrastructure, can make a contribution to the success of coercion.
Airpower’s impact on the morale of the targeted population, a topic that featured prominently in Douhet’s strategic thought, was mixed. The NATO attacks both inflamed Serbian nationalist sentiment and negatively impacted the population’s support for Milosevic to the degree that he had to take account of this in his calculations. Scholars revisiting the 1991 Gulf War a decade later found a similarly indeterminate picture. Airpower affected Iraqi morale and contributed to the collapse of the frontline infantry but ‘even after five weeks of bombing, the best Iraqi units … were willing to … fight. Air attacks did not neutralize the Iraqi force by crippling their morale.’35
Interdiction
Kosovo also brought into question the utility of operational interdiction. It is very easy to create decoys that are indistinguishable from real targets and this meant that most Serbian tanks remained unscathed by NATO airpower. Adversaries operating in mountainous, forested terrain, such as Kosovo, can easily camouflage their movements. At the same time, the effectiveness of airpower against light infantry, by definition operating without heavy mechanized equipment, is limited in almost any environment. This had already been demonstrated during the Gulf War, when many Iraqi military assets were destroyed not by airpower but by friendly army forces. Biddle, working from the Pentagon’s post-Gulf War assessments in the mid-1990s, calculated that between 1,000 and 4,000 Iraqi tanks and armoured vehicles survived the war. ‘By contrast’, he notes, ‘the entire German army in Normandy had fewer than 500 tanks
in July 1944’.36 Such a high survival rate might be explained by the fact that ‘seeing’ targets requires a heat signature and therefore movement, making a static, defensively oriented force ‘maddeningly difficult’ to detect.37
Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in 2001–2002 revealed significant advances in two airpower capabilities originally identified by Lambeth in the first post-Cold War decade: situational awareness and standoff strike. Almost any target that can be identified can be destroyed with precision munitions; the difficulty lies in detection. In Kosovo, much of the situational awareness picture was filled out by pilots who, confined by force vulnerability concerns, could not operate below 10,000 feet. Perhaps in response to such constraints, subsequent years saw dramatic advances in the capabilities of UAVs and other situational awareness assets. The war in Afghanistan ‘was conducted under an overarching intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance umbrella that stared down relentlessly in search of enemy activity’, notes Lambeth. ‘That umbrella was formed by a constellation of overlapping multispectral sensor platforms.’38
Significantly, advances in individual platforms were married with a new ability to synthesize information into a single picture, creating a clearer view of the battlefield than ever before. The overall effect of these developments was the emergence of a new airpower concept called ‘persistent surveillance’.39 In the years since the 2001–2002 Afghan war this concept has in itself persisted as a continually developing one. With the post-2003 shift to counterinsurgency missions, for example, a significant degree of emphasis has been placed on ensuring the persistent surveillance of roadways to warn against improvised explosive devices. The 2001–2002 war in Afghanistan also revealed enhanced denial/interdiction capabilities as a result of new developments in stand-off precision strike. Persistent surveillance assets were armed with precision strike capabilities to debut a new airpower concept of unmanned combat. Since then, this form of warfare has been used extensively, not only by the US military but also the Central Intelligence Agency.
Decapitation
Theorists and practitioners also revisited the strategic airpower concept of decapitation. Notwithstanding admonishments from scholars like Robert Pape, based on the evidence of the 1991 Gulf War, that decapitation is ineffectual and ‘doesn’t matter’, the concept proved enticing enough to be attempted again in the opening stages of the 2003 Iraq War. With dramatically improved precision in weapons US President George W. Bush moved forward the invasion date by one day in an attempt to strike Saddam Hussein directly and thereby ‘decapitate’ the Iraqi regime. The strategy was billed as ‘shock and awe’ (see Chapter 7) and a key component – familiar in airpower theory terms – was the belief that the removal of Saddam would deliver a big enough psychological blow to make his regime collapse. The Pentagon’s plan was to overwhelm the country’s leadership and military command infrastructure by using highly lethal precision munitions to strike strategically important targets, while at the same time avoiding wholesale destruction and civilian casualties.
But numerous strikes against command and control targets in the war’s opening stages failed to kill or topple Saddam. This, and also unsuccessful attempts to target Taliban leaders in the early stages of Operation Enduring Freedom, demonstrated that decapitation as an effective strategic airpower concept remained as elusive as ever. Such strikes are heavily dependent on accurate and timely military intelligence, and even a successful hit may not translate into coercive success since ‘no current theory can predict whether air power alone can force regimes to change or assure they will change in the right direction’.40 In fact, the impressive win in Iraq in 2003 took place only after the use of airpower was shifted to battlefield targets in support of ground forces. While aircraft prepared the scene for the ground campaign, it was the coalition ground forces that eventually toppled the regime.
New theoretical boundaries
The use and value of airpower working in combination with surface force elements marked a notable and in some respects new area of discussion about airpower in the later post-Cold War period. During the 2001–2002 war in Afghanistan US SOF operating on horseback used laser rangefinders and GPS devices to call in extremely precise air strikes, accurate to within a few metres. During the 2003 Iraq war airpower also worked very closely with friendly ground forces, helping them defeat enemy forces more efficiently. By contrast, for reasons of national interest, in the battle against Islamic State the United States has not deployed forces on the ground to provide pilots with target coordinates. Critics contend this explains the high number of US sorties that return without a weapon release because pilots are unable to distinguish between coalition fighters and Islamic State fighters.41
Although ‘jointness’ was part of the military dialogue throughout the 1990s, its practical application reached a qualitatively new level in the wars of the new millennium. Theorists have stressed that the revolutionary impact of advances in airpower technology, including precision strike and surveillance capabilities, has been to multiply the effectiveness of using air and ground power together. ‘Most analyses have focused on [airpower’s] ability to destroy ground targets directly’, Biddle predicted in a seminal study from the previous decade, ‘[y]et its indirect role in increasing Coalition ground force effectiveness … may [be] just as important’.42
Airpower also worked in tandem with indigenous ground forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, giving rise to a new theoretical framework for examining the use and value of airpower. According to the Afghan model of warfare, local forces (vice American conventional ground forces) combine with US SOF and precision airpower to carry out battlefield objectives. In Afghanistan American SOFs and airpower worked in conjunction with some 15,000 Northern Alliance fighters to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, while in Iraq American SOFs and airpower worked with Kurdish fighters to defeat northern Iraqi forces. Along similar lines, NATO airpower operated in support of rebel forces in Libya in 2011 (see Box 3.1).
Box 3.1 The NATO operation in Libya
• Bloodshed broke out in Libya after forces loyal to the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi fought back against an uprising by rebel forces.
• In March 2011 the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing ‘all necessary measures’ to protect Libyan civilians and civilian-populated areas against Qaddafi’s forces and to enforce compliance with a ban on flights over Libyan airspace.
• NATO established Operation Unified Protector to implement the military aspects of the resolution. Unstated but apparent from the beginning was the broader military and political goal of assisting rebel forces in overthrowing the Qaddafi regime.
• NATO’s targeting progressively expanded, first confined to implementing the no-fly zone; then including precision strikes against government forces on the ground, including tanks, artillery and loyalist soldiers; and finally moving beyond dispersed strikes against tactical activities to include strategic strikes against palaces, headquarters and communications centres.
• These strikes had some impact on the rebels’ ability to overcome Qaddafi’s better-equipped forces. But the balance was not fully tilted until Britain, France and other nations deployed SOF on the ground inside Libya to help train and arm the rebels.
• The coordination of NATO precision airpower in close air support of increasingly proficient indigenous ground forces ultimately served to remove the Qaddafi regime, providing further validation of the Afghan model of warfare.
The advent of the Afghan model gave rise to a scholarly debate as to its true and future value. Some scholars note that coalition airpower transformed Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance into a lethal fighting force, and that it enabled an inferior force to act decisively in northern Iraq. From this perspective, despite shortcomings, the model is a valuable option because it minimizes US casualties and can bring legitimacy to a post-conflict situation. Other scholars have criticized the approach, pointing out that although the model was highly effective in many areas
of Afghanistan, the reliance on Pakistani forces and Afghan militias in Tora Bora allowed Osama bin Laden to escape. Several theorists warn against the danger of over reliance on indigenous allies to conduct the ground force operation because such forces do not always have the necessary skill and motivation to accomplish the mission assigned to them. This is particularly because opponents, such as the Taliban, will quickly adjust to such tactics. ‘The Taliban did not just passively suffer under American attack’, argues Biddle in an assessment of the model, ‘they adapted their methods … and as they did the war changed character’.43
Some experts have focused on the Libya intervention and applied the term ‘aerial intervention’ to describe circumstances where an air-centric campaign is conducted to cooperate with indigenous ground forces, with few or no coalition ‘boots on the ground’.44 The Libya scenario, it is noted, was unique and particularly well suited to the Afghan model/aerial intervention approach. It was close to Europe and refuelling bases, the topography of Libya was suited to air strikes, and, most critically, there existed an organized, concentrated, indigenous opposition movement that provided a promising and viable partner. These factors are unlikely to come together on many occasions; for example, they do not apply in the air campaign against Islamic State (see Box 3.2). Nonetheless, the utility of the Afghan model is such that it should be a consideration in future international crisis management efforts.
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