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August 14, 2006

Air Power

[Y]ou may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life--but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men in the mud.

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War

In response to a reader request, I'd like to take a look at what air power can and cannot accomplish in combat. Specifically, the reader asks for a piece "about the effectiveness and implications of extensive use of air power in situations like Iraq and Lebanon."

Modern air power is frightfully effective within certain boundaries. An AC-130 gunship can lay down a curtain of fire so deadly nothing can cross it to reach targets on the far side. A B-52 bomber can drop enough dumb bombs to level large parts of a city. Utilizing 'smart' weapons, aircraft can eliminate point targets, putting a missile right through a window or destroying a specific car or armored vehicle. No modern army wants to go to war without at least air parity, and much of America's military superiority is predicated on our ability to achieve air dominance over a battlefield in short order.

These advantages only go so far. The mass destruction airpower can generate is rarely the desired end state of conflicts the United States finds itself in these days; even during the initial invasion of Iraq, care was taken to try to hit only the targets we wished to destroy, minimizing collateral damage. But no matter how much care is taken, there is almost always some collateral damage. Modern weapons are simply too devastating to avoid that, and in the case of Lebanon, Hezbollah's placement of its weapons systems in and among the civilian population guarantees collateral damage even in the case of a perfectly targeted strike. The U.S. is actually developing weapons that hold less explosive in order to reduce the collateral damage because they can now place weapons so precisely. But 'smart' weapons are only as smart as the intelligence they are given. To start the invasion, a U.S. strike hit a field where we believed Saddam Hussein was hiding. The strike hit right on target; but Hussein was nowhere in the vicinity. The U.S. ran into worse problems during the Kosovo War when a bomb hit right on target, but because of a bad map, the target was the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.

Airpower is also limited by weather. While the U.S. Air Force has a number of all weather aircraft, bad weather markedly reduces the effectiveness of airpower. Smart weapons that use GPS coordinates can still function, but weapons that depend on a laser to 'paint' the target are useless in conditions of rain, fog, sandstorms, and other poor weather conditions. While the weather in the Middle East is generally conducive to air operations, that advantage can never be counted on.

Airpower's ability to support small scale operations is further degraded by operational choices made by the Air Force over the years. The U.S. Air Force has never liked ground support operations. Ground support is dangerous, it's not sexy, and it requires too much coordination with the Army. Air Force Generals like strategic bombers and sleek fighters, not ugly, slow ground support craft. Thus the Air Force's ongoing attempts to retire the A-10 Thunderbolt II, one of the best ground support aircraft ever designed, and their refusal to look into dedicated ground support aircraft. Instead they offer the A-16, an F-16 that is optimized for ground support. While that's a nice thought, the F-16 simply isn't capable of flying low and slow enough to provide good ground support. Ground support aircraft need to be able to see what it is they're shooting at in order to be effective, which means they need a low stall speed. The F-16 simply cannot fly slow enough when fully loaded to be an effective ground support aircraft, and it also cannot carry nearly as much ordnance so its ability to support the ground fight is further limited.

So what does this mean for counterinsurgency (COIN) fighting in Iraq or trying to destroy Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon? Airpower can still be of use, but its effectiveness is not nearly what we might expect given the lethality of the weapons. In COIN, airpower is only useful in situations like Fallujah where the insurgents control the town and the intent is to regain possession. In that case, airpower can be of great use in hitting concentrations of insurgents, destroying strong points, and so on. When you're looking at a situation like what currently obtains in Baghdad, however, airpower can be counterproductive in the COIN fight. Even if an airstrike kills insurgents, if it also eliminates civilians the insurgency can come out ahead depending on the two sides' ability to exploit the incident through information operations. This has been a massive problem for Israel in Lebanon; because Hezbollah has thoroughly intermingled its forces with Lebanese civilians, any Israeli strike on Hezbollah targets will kill civilians, and Hezbollah has done an excellent job of publicizing these deaths. Even if the strikes are killing many members of Hezbollah, the civilian deaths may provide Hezbollah with the political support it will need to replace those dead. The U.S. has seen similar issues with use of airpower in Afghanistan and Iraq, striking targets that were later claimed to be a wedding party or a tourist bus coming from Syria. Even if the targets were good targets, by making them appear innocent the insurgencies gain strength.

I am, of course, biased in favor of ground power. That is what I do, after all. But history and our current experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan appear to back me up on this. Airpower is a great combat multiplier in many situations. But it is not the be-all and end-all of military power, and when it comes to COIN its strengths can be turned to the enemy's advantage. When considering future uses of American hard power, it would be wise to keep that fact in mind.