Critiques
Much of what Douhet argued was subsequently proven wrong by the character of World War Two. The advent of radar removed the freedom of action and direction of a plane moving freely in flight that Douhet had spoken of (in fact, ground-based artillery had done so even earlier); air forces destroyed one another largely in the air; no power submitted to using poison gas bombs; victory required far more than command of the air and the use of air forces; and over time precision in airpower has become one of its most useful attributes. Perhaps most glaringly, the German strikes on London civilians demonstrated the degree to which Douhet had underestimated the toughness with which civilians will endure bombardment, and overestimated the degree to which aerial strikes would create panic.
Meanwhile, Mitchell could not have foreseen the manner in which air defences (dismissed in Winged Defense as almost completely ineffectual) would advance. The suppression of enemy air defences has become a first and critical requirement of any conventional warfare mission. Surface ships, too, adapted to include anti-aircraft defences, as well as their own strike aircraft in the case of aircraft carriers, and long-range precision force to directly impact events ashore even as they operated further and further out into the ocean. That said, Mitchell’s insistence that airpower would need to be integrated with landpower has more than held up, while his observation that naval vessels would be vulnerable to aircraft and compelled to operate outside their radius is an early echo of the A2/AD discussion so prevalent today with regards to the US Navy, China and land-based anti-ship missiles (see Chapter 1).
Although Douhet and Mitchell were manifestly wrong in some of their predictions, they did get many things right. Airpower has indeed become a critical component of most if not all military missions. Their strategic thought is an important starting point in examining contemporary theory on the role and value of airpower because it created categories of debate (can airpower win wars on its own?) and areas of focus (strategic bombing, tactical support) that have endured to the present age, and have framed much of the theorizing about airpower in the post-Cold War era.
The first post-Cold War decade
The first decade of the post-Cold War era started and ended with conflicts that seemingly vindicated Douhet’s view that wars could be won with airpower almost or entirely alone. Those who watched the 1991 Gulf War live on CNN could not help but be awed by the apparent offensive power of precision strikes from the air. Immediate post-war assessments centred on the view that with this conflict precision in airpower, pursued for decades, had reached a qualitatively new level such that airpower had finally become the decisive force in battle. Even more convincing was the argument, a decade later, that NATO’s 1999 air war in and around Kosovo represented a ‘clear victory for air power’ and perhaps the first time in history airpower alone achieved military and political objectives.14 But what stands out most significantly about the evolution of airpower theory in the first post-Cold War decade is the degree to which the role and value of this dimension of warfare was questioned and qualified. As the decade went on airpower scholars added a degree of rigour to theorizing about conventional airpower, thereby pushing forward the boundaries of existing airpower theory.
John Warden and airpower’s role in targeting the centres of gravity
The starting point in discussing post-Cold War strategic thought on airpower lies with the ideas of US Air Force Colonel (retired) John Warden, considered the architect of the 1991 Gulf War’s air campaign. As deputy director of the US Air Force Directorate of Warfighting Concepts when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Warden was tasked with putting together a plan for a retaliatory air response. The outcome was Instant Thunder, a strategy that called for simultaneous air strikes against Iraq’s centres of gravity, including its leadership; command, control and communications apparatus; and key infrastructure sites and facilities. In his view, airpower could attack ground forces directly, paralyzing the enemy in a relatively bloodless fashion and avoiding the need for a large ground campaign. In the end, of course, a short ground campaign was necessary; nonetheless Warden’s intellectual contribution was recognized as central to Desert Storm’s success.
When Warden was asked to draw up an airpower response to the Iraqi invasion, he had already spent several years thinking about airpower strategy and theory. In his 1988 book The Air Campaign, Warden set forth his ideas on planning and executing an air campaign at the operational level, including air superiority, offensive and defensive operations, and the use of airpower for interdiction and in close air support of ground forces. His views on close air support, in particular, proved somewhat controversial because of the central role and potential he accorded airpower. ‘[T]he soldier on the ground’, he argued, ‘will find close air support useful in almost every conceivable situation, from pursuit to retreat’. In fact, he argued, ‘[t]he air campaign, under some circumstances, may be far more important than the ground campaign’.15
Nonetheless, the clarity of his thinking in The Air Campaign brought Warden the appointment as deputy director of the Directorate of Warfighting Concepts. Although the book had focused on the operational level of war, Warden immediately turned his attention to the strategic application of airpower and it is this strategic thinking for which Warden is best remembered. In a summer 1988 essay called ‘Global Strategy Outline’ Warden argued the enemy was a ‘system’, dependent for its effective functioning on certain centres of gravity – one of Clausewitz’s key concepts – that, if successfully targeted, would bring about his surrender. He depicted the centres of gravity as five strategic rings in concentric circles, much like an onion. According to his Five Rings Model, the circle at the very centre was strategically the most important. It was the bull’s eye or the ‘command ring’ of the nation-state and it included the country’s leadership and key command and control centres. The circle surrounding this inner core Warden identified as the infrastructure critical to the prosecution of war, such as energy, oil and gas; the third circle also comprised infrastructure but of a somewhat less critical nature, including bridges, roads and railways; the fourth circle represented the population and agriculture, the citizens and their food sources; finally the fifth circle, the least vital in war, was the state’s fielded military forces.16
Ideally in war one would successfully target the leadership and central command and control centres, compelling the adversary to make concessions – a strategy that has been characterized by Robert Pape and others (see below) as ‘decapitation’. But Warden also argued that the effect of a simultaneous attack on multiple target sets within each of the five rings would be exponential and would bring about surrender. This strategy he later labelled as ‘parallel attack’, a term that first emerged immediately after the 1991 Gulf War. ‘The most important requirement of strategic attack is to understand the enemy system’, Warden argued in a 1995 article.17 The enemy has a number of ‘vital targets’ and if a significant percentage were to be struck in parallel then the damage would become ‘insuperable’. For Warden serial warfare – manoeuvre and counter-manoeuvre, attack and counterattack, reaching the culminating point in campaigns – was the historical experience. But technological advances had now made possible parallel warfare, the near-simultaneous attack of the enemy’s strategic- and operational-level vulnerabilities and centres of gravity.
Robert Pape and the value of strategic and operational denial strategies
Many of the ideas of a second notable airpower theorist of the post-Cold War, Robert Pape, are set out in opposition to those of Warden. In his 1996 book Bombing to Win: Airpower and Coercion in Warfare, Pape, a civilian scholar at the University of Chicago, identifies two major types of coercive air operations: strategic bombing and operational interdiction. The former, defined as air attacks against fixed military, industrial or civilian targets in and near political and economic centres, he further categorizes into missions that seek punishment, denial or decapitation. A punishment strategy inflicts punishment on civil
ians, seeking to raise the societal costs of continued resistance to the point the resistor concedes to the coercer’s demands. It is this form of strategic bombing that best captures Douhet’s thinking and, in Pape’s view, has dominated perspectives on military coercion. A denial strategy seeks to deny the resistor the military ability to achieve its political or territorial objectives. An ideal strategic bombing denial strategy would involve targeting things like weapons plants and critical raw materials used in war production. Unlike punishment, denial measures require the ‘pinpoint accuracy’ of weapons. Finally, ‘decapitation’ is a new form of strategic bombing, demanding and enabled by the increased precision of weapons. The logic behind decapitation is that the key leadership facilities and communications networks in the opponent’s political centres, as well as key nodes in a nation’s economic infrastructure, like oil refineries, are ‘a modern state’s Achilles heel’: ‘[I]f [these targets] are knocked out, the whole house of cards comes down.’18
In contrast to strategic bombing, operational interdiction involves only denial. Such missions target the opponent’s military ability to achieve its political or territorial objectives by focusing on the battlefield and on lines of supply to the battlefield. Ideal targets of airpower in this regard (again requiring pinpoint accuracy) would include an enemy’s fielded forces; theatre-level command, communications and logistics; and lines of supply between military production sites and the combat theatre. These sorts of air interdiction tasks take place behind enemy lines, or they might include close air support of troops at the front line. Such tasks had their origins in World War One; it is these activities that Douhet dismissed as irrelevant and that Mitchell continued to view as valuable in the conduct of war.
The core of Pape’s argument is that strategic bombing in its punishment and decapitation forms is ineffectual and ‘doesn’t matter’.19 Airpower can be useful for close air support and interdiction at the theatre level, while strategic bombing denial can matter under some circumstances. When it comes to punishment strategies, Pape’s argument echoes conclusions drawn decades earlier from Germany’s World War Two bombing of Britain. ‘The supposed causal chain [of punishment] – civilian hardship produces public anger which forms political opposition against the government – does not stand up.’20 Pape argues such punishment actually generates more public anger against the coercer than the government. Nor do decapitation strategies work because of the difficulty of locating individual leaders; decapitation is primarily a problem of intelligence, not combat effectiveness. Governments are still hard to overthrow, and even if overthrown may be replaced with a still less palatable leadership (from the coercer’s perspective).
Coercive airpower operations that focus on denial strategies can make a difference to the outcome of a war. Yet Pape avoids describing such operations as actually being ‘effective’, only allowing that they can ‘matter’ or be a contributing element, and even then he is careful to add limits. Strategic bombing denial strategies are helpful only in the case of a protracted war of attrition that is decided by overall economic and material superiority. Pape is more positive about the value of airpower when it comes to the theatre-level denial strategy of operational interdiction, and the close air support of troops. ‘The coercive strategy that benefits most from the PGM [precision-guided munitions] revolution is theatre air attack’, he argues, ‘[t]his is because many of the most important theatre interdiction targets, as well as ground support targets, are point targets requiring direct hits.’21 Such targets include things like tanks, armoured personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery howitzers, communications bunkers and bridges, all of which are easier to destroy from the air with PGM than without – although, Pape notes prophetically, given the Kosovo experience later in the decade, the task is still difficult (see below). The increased effectiveness of tactical airpower does not mean that it has replaced landpower as the penultimate coercer; rather, it means that airpower at this level ‘can do most of the work, leaving ground forces to mop up’ (emphasis added).22
An important caveat is theatre airpower’s applicability, or lack thereof, to non-conventional war. Whereas conventional forces use large mechanized platforms, operate along fairly defined front lines and seek to destroy enemy military forces, unconventional forces (whether state or non-state) operate in small units dispersed over large areas, have no defined front lines and seek to gain control of the population. The character of unconventional war is such that there are no or minimal supply lines to target, and the fielded forces themselves, being mixed in with the population, are extremely difficult to identify and therefore target. Anticipating debates that arose in subsequent years, Pape concludes that in general, denial air strategies are more likely to succeed against conventional forces than against guerrillas.
Benjamin Lambeth and the strategic bombing straw man
Building on Pape’s analysis, long-time airpower specialist Benjamin Lambeth of the RAND Corporation presents a perspective that accords in many ways with that of Pape but is distinguished by its ‘glass-half-full’ assessment, against Pape’s ‘glass-half-empty’ characterization. Originally a specialist in Soviet airpower, in the early post-Cold War period Lambeth centred his analysis of airpower on the 1991 Gulf War, stating his views in a number of articles and ultimately in a 2000 book, The Transformation of American Airpower. He finds that the most ineffectual ways of employing airpower – strategic bombing for decapitation or punishment – are, in essence, straw man goals that were pursued either marginally or not at all.
Much of the airpower debate after the Gulf War centred on whether striking ‘centre-of-gravity’ targets, defined as leadership and infrastructure targets located in and around Baghdad, made a difference to the 1991 Gulf War’s outcome. But Lambeth notes that this goal, what Pape calls decapitation, was by no means a central one for coalition leaders. Centre-of-gravity targets accounted for less than 10 per cent of the allied sorties flown throughout the war. Meanwhile, the discussion over the efficacy of punishment attacks is a moot one, rendered obsolete by the growing precision of weapons. Far from seeking punishing attacks against large numbers of civilians, post-Cold War Western militaries strive for ever greater precision and as absolutely few civilian casualties as possible. Douhet’s model of inflicting high costs on civilians as the first step in a logic leading to enemy surrender, Lambeth notes, is ‘scarcely likely’ to be the approach adopted by any present-day allied joint force. ‘Douhet was driven by that logic because air power had no capability at the time he wrote to do anything but cause indiscriminate destruction of civilian targets.’23 In the post-Cold War era, with advanced precision technology, there are far different options.
Airpower and the value of operational interdiction
Where Lambeth and Pape agree is in the areas of emphasis noted above – that airpower can reduce the costs of warfare to ground forces, and that it can do much of the battlefield work, prior to introducing ground forces. The Gulf War demonstrated that airpower could enable a commander to hold off ordering a ground force frontal assault against enemy forces until such time as the potential costs of a ground-based offensive in terms of friendly lives had been substantially reduced. ‘[A]irpower now has the potential to carry a lion’s share of the burden for shaping and determining war outcomes, thereby enabling other force elements to achieve their goals with a minimum of pain, effort, and cost.’24 This suggested, in turn, that ‘the principal role of land power in high-intensity conflict may now be merely to secure a win rather than achieve it’.25
Lambeth neatly characterizes the core of the airpower debate unleashed by the 1991 Gulf War as being one between land warfare specialists who argued there is still a requirement for ‘boots on the ground’ to conclude a win in warfare, and airpower proponents who argue the ability of modern airpower to affect land warfare had ‘crossed a threshold in which its effects are fundamentally greater than before’.26 He sees value in both perspectives, and is careful to factor the role of landpow
er into his airpower strategic thinking. Airpower alone cannot win wars, and the issue is not whether airpower can ‘do it alone’. Rather, advances in technology have dramatically increased the combat potential of airpower in comparison to that of other force elements. ‘What is distinctive about contemporary American air power … is that it has pulled well ahead of surface forces, both land and maritime, in its relative capacity … to achieve the effects of massing forces without having to mass.’27
Airpower’s role in power projection, stand-off strike and situational awareness
The Gulf War demonstrated that advances in airpower had enabled a number of capabilities previously unavailable to commanders, including power projection, stand-off precision strike and increased situational awareness. ‘Power projection’ refers simply to the ability to move military forces to distances far away from the homeland and to sustain them there. This can be achieved using ships and, in the case of the United States, carrier battle groups, but in the 1990s it also became possible using new strategic lift aircraft capable of transporting very large loads great distances without refuelling. The unique aspect of air force power projection, noted the US Air Force’s vision statement of the time, Global Engagement: A Vision for the 21st Century Air Force, was that power projection could be done rapidly, in terms of days or even hours, rather than weeks and months. The Air Force thus identified one of its core competencies to be ‘global attack’, or the ability to attack rapidly anywhere on the globe at any time.28
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