Box 3.2 The air campaign against Islamic State
• In mid-2014 a US-led coalition of several countries began an air campaign against Islamic State, an extremist militant group that has taken control of much of Iraqi and Syrian territory with the goal of creating a Muslim caliphate.
• The manner in which airpower is employed in this campaign marks a departure from operations in Afghanistan and Libya, where coalition forces were operating in support of indigenous ground forces. Here there is no organized, friendly force on the ground with whom the coalition can operate in conjunction.
• The coalition is using airpower to strike Islamic State directly, including its leadership and headquarters, training camps, oil refineries, storage facilities, armoured vehicles, tanks, artillery and fighting positions.
• The model is interdiction, along the lines of what was seen in the 1991 Gulf War, but with no intention that the air campaign will be followed by the deployment of coalition ground forces.
• With continued command of the air the coalition can operate with impunity, but there are no illusions, along Douhetian lines, that airpower ‘can win on its own’.
• The more limited goal is that the application of airpower can weaken Islamic State, force it to adapt in ways that will hinder its effectiveness and thereby ‘buy time and space for regional leaders to organize to solve the problem’.
See: Clint Hinote, ‘The Air Campaign Against ISIS: Understanding What Air Strikes Can Do – and What They Can’t’, Council on Foreign Relations, http://blogs.cfr.org, accessed 7 October 2015.
Airpower and counterinsurgency
An important area of inquiry in airpower theory in the later post-Cold War period is its role and value in conducting missions against insurgents and guerrillas. Strategic thought in this aspect of airpower theory from about 9/11 onward has been driven by real-life events on the ground, as apparent Western wins in Afghanistan and Iraq turned into protracted insurgencies and stabilization and reconstruction missions. The irregular conflicts that followed in these regions, as well as the 2006 Israeli war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, demonstrated the enduring difficulty of using airpower to root out guerrillas and insurgents. Insurgents meld themselves into the population, making it all but impossible for airpower to strike them without also killing civilians. Moreover, insurgencies by their nature provide few lucrative targets to strike with airpower. Notes airpower theorist James Corum, ‘[v]irtually all of the decisive targets favoured by the best known airpower theorists’, such as industrial nodes, national command centres and large conventional armies, ‘do not exist in wars against guerrillas or insurgents. Indeed, the air campaigns that are designed to shock and awe and demoralize a conventional enemy … are basically irrelevant to small wars.’45
That said, in their 2003 book Airpower in Small Wars, Corum and Wray Johnson found that there was still an important role for airpower in countering insurgents and terrorists. The increased situational awareness provided by airborne assets like UAVs is critical to any mission, low or high intensity alike, while precision airpower proved very effective in some irregular warfare circumstances, such as against Taliban targets in Afghanistan. Indeed, along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border US strikes against terrorist suspects became increasingly accurate over time. Moreover, lightly armed friendly forces operating without the necessary precision artillery can be highly dependent on the ability of precision airpower to inflict losses on the enemy. Overall, the theorists conclude that ‘[w]hile high-tech weaponry is not the whole answer to fighting terrorists and insurgents it certainly makes for an effective force multiplier’. Consistent with other theorists of this period, they also find that ‘[airpower] is most effective when it is carefully coordinated with ground forces’.46
More recent thinkers concur that while airpower has had a long history within counterinsurgency campaigns since World War Two, because of the nature of insurgency airpower is unlikely to have strategic effects on its own. Airpower can assist at the tactical level in killing insurgent leaders, interdicting supplies and striking insurgent sanctuaries, but since an insurgency is ultimately highly political in nature it must be closely coordinated within a broader strategy. The value of airpower in counterinsurgency is that when integrated with other military forces, it can help create the secure conditions within which other government initiatives can succeed.47 In addition, airpower can assist in peace support operations (see Box 3.3), which are missions that can be distinguished from counterinsurgency in that there is no enemy identified (see Chapter 6).
Box 3.3 Airpower in peace operations
• Peace operations like peacekeeping and stability operations are distinct from counterinsurgency (and conventional warfare) in that no enemy is identified. The intervening force attempts to remain impartial in the use of force, and to use force only in self-defence.
• Airpower would seemingly not be very relevant to a peace operations, but in fact there are several important applications.
• First, airpower can be critical for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR). Airborne ISR such as UAVs can provide peacekeepers with situational awareness, giving them information on the location of local forces, civilians and refugees. UAVs can also be used to detect improvised explosive devices, which pose a growing threat to UN peacekeepers. Many UN missions are chronically short of troops. By extending the eyes and ears of peacekeepers, ISR assets like UAVs can play the role of large numbers of peacekeepers on the ground.
• Second, airpower can be critical for mobility. Nations with peacekeeping operations typically have limited infrastructure and this restricts the speed with which a mission can deploy throughout the war-torn region. Fixed and rotary aircraft can overcome the limitations of ground transportation, extending the mission and eventually governance into remote regions. As with ISR, the use of air assets for mobility can partially make up for chronic personnel shortages in UN peacekeeping missions. If ground forces are not already in place in an area where there is a flare-up, air assets can transport troops quickly to the scene of the problem.
See: Erik Lin-Greenberg, ‘Airpower in Peace Operations Re-examined’, International Peacekeeping 18:4 (August 2011).
Strategic thought on drone-based warfare
In the post-Cold War era and especially in the period since 9/11 UAVs have become ever more present in the battlespace. As a sensory vehicle, providing ISR, UAVs were deployed in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, then in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s, and in the 2010s in the battle against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. UAVs were first deployed as a kinetic force combat platform in Afghanistan in 2001, when pre-existing unmanned aircraft were modified with precision missiles for air-to-ground strike. Thus was born unmanned combat using unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs). Since that time, unmanned platforms designed from their inception as combat vehicles have been used extensively for targeted killings of suspected terrorists, primarily in places like Yemen and the tribal region between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Strategic thought pertaining to UCAVs is in its infancy. First-generation UCAVs are tethered to a controller thousands of miles away, with the strike decision remaining in the hands of a human being. They are non-stealthy and slow moving. Such aircraft are seen by many as basically a better way of doing what manned aircraft already do. They can achieve precision strike over areas where it would be too risky to send a manned aircraft, or infeasible due to distance and pilot fatigue. The major impact of this generation of UCAVs on the conduct of war is thought to be (it is a debated point) a lower threshold for the use of force, with leaders more readily authorizing precision strikes because there is no risk to friendly forces.48 Meanwhile, UCAV doctrine involves air-to-ground strike, mirroring thinking on airpower interdiction noted above, and not air-to-air combat between two unmanned platforms. Due to the particular circumstances of the post-Cold War and post-9/11 period the United States and its allies have addressed irregular warfare and enjoyed complete air superi
ority. America’s UCAVs have not faced enemy UCAVs nor indeed enemy manned aircraft. Britain, Israel and America are the only countries known to have used UCAVs, while China and Iran are thought to be have operationally deployed UCAVs.49
Second-generation UCAVs are now being developed and this will have a greater impact on strategic thought. Such platforms will be highly manoeuvrable, low-observable aircraft with greater levels of autonomy, designed to operate in contested airspace. They may be involved in penetrating strike, penetrating ISR and suppressing enemy air defences, as well as close air support of the nature such platforms are already engaged.50 UCAVs may at first face manned aircraft, but as the speed of robotic warfare increases in line with computer processing speeds, the human is likely to be pushed out of the loop, leading to robot-on-robot warfare. Two doctrinal concepts have already begun to emerge with respect to autonomous UCAVs. The ‘mothership’ concept would involve deploying high-value robots that are programmed to seek out and achieve an objective and then return to a centralized command post. ‘Swarming’, by contrast, would involve fielding many inexpensive robots that operate independently but synergistically toward a goal. Each robot would in itself have little capability but would be preprogrammed to send a signal should it lock onto an objective, triggering the mass of robots to converge on the target.51
At a strategic level UCAVs are anticipated to have both positive and negative effects. On the one hand, they could become a valuable asset for deterrence. They represent a highly credible threat because of the absence of risk to personnel, and they offer long-range precision strike to address threats that may otherwise go unaddressed. Yet they could also be destabilizing at the strategic level by creating circumstances that have the potential to escalate into conflict. Already, for example, China has deployed UCAVs over contested islands in the East China Sea, and Japan has stated it would be more likely to shoot down an armed Chinese drone than a Chinese aircraft.
Conclusion
Airpower’s seeming and unexpected battlefield success in the 1991 Gulf War sparked a more significant degree of theorizing about conventional airpower than had taken place since the pre-atomic era. The scholarship was abundant and included works by Robert Pape, Stephen Biddle and Benjamin Lambeth, among others. Douhetian themes provided some of the analytical boundaries, such as the value of applying airpower against strategic targets, but much was new, notably the themes of jointness and operational interdiction, ignored by Douhet but consistent with Mitchell’s thinking. Subsequent conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq sparked an elaboration and refinement of earlier themes by Pape and Lambeth, but also prompted an assessment of new areas of inquiry, such as the use of airpower in counterinsurgency and the value of combining Western airpower with indigenous allies, by scholars such as Biddle, James Corum and others. As Mitchell would have predicted, the integration of airpower with land forces has been critical in post-Cold War operations. Most recent areas of inquiry focus on the implications of taking the human out of the airpower equation with existing first-generation remotely controlled kinetic force platforms, and the possibility of second-generation autonomous platforms.
In the first quarter century after the Cold War strategic thinking on airpower took place against the backdrop of America’s command of the air, i.e. the lack of threat to airborne assets. This situation emerged with the demise of the Soviet Union and has remained a unique aspect of the contemporary international security environment. The increasingly effective marriage of land manoeuvre forces with precision power, and later the uncontested use of unmanned airpower platforms, rested and continues to rest on the almost unquestioned assumption of US air supremacy. The boundaries of airpower theory will be tested and pushed forward again with the emergence of a peer competitor to the United States.
Questions
1 What are the main elements of Douhet’s and Mitchell’s strategic thinking and what has been identified as some of the strengths and weaknesses of their approaches?
2 What are the ideas of John Warden with regard to the 1991 Gulf War and how do these ideas relate to Douhet’s thinking?
3 What are the elements of strategic bombing and interdiction operations as identified in the 1990s and how do (or do not) these ideas relate to the strategic thinking of Douhet and Mitchell?
4 How has the use of airpower changed in the contemporary period as compared to during World War Two as a military tool for achieving political objectives?
5 Can airpower achieve strategic effects in war?
6 Is the ‘Afghan model’ a viable approach in the future application of airpower?
7 What is the value of airpower in conflicts featuring one or more non-state actors?
8 How does the rise of drone warfare impact strategic thought on airpower?
Notes
1 For a detailed discussion of Douhet’s background, see Phillip S. Meilinger, ‘Douhet and Modern War’, Comparative Strategy 12 (1993), 321–338. For an early examination of Douhet’s thoughts, see Edward Warner, ‘Douhet, Mitchell, Seversky: Theories of Air Warfare’, in Edward Mead Earle, Ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1943).
2 Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. by Dino Ferrari, ed. by Joseph Patrick Harahan and Richard H. Kohn (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1942), 9.
3 Meilinger, 328.
4 Ibid., 325.
5 Douhet, 24.
6 Ibid., 23.
7 Meilinger, 327.
8 Douhet, 28.
9 Ibid., 99.
10 Ibid., 94, 100.
11 William Mitchell, Winged Defense (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1925), 126–127.
12 References to Mitchell in this paragraph are taken from William Mitchell, Winged Defense (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2009), xv, xvi, 18.
13 David Berkland, ‘Douhet, Trenchard, Mitchell, and the Future of Airpower’, Defense & Security Analysis 27:4 (December 2011), 391.
14 See Andrew L. Stigler, ‘A Clear Victory for Air Power: NATO’s Empty Threat to Invade Kosovo’, International Security 27:3 (Winter 2002/03), 124–157.
15 John Warden, The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1989), 88–89. First published by the National Defense University Press, 1988.
16 John Andreas Olsen, John Warden and the Renaissance of American Air Power (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007), 108–109.
17 John Warden, ‘The Enemy as System’, Airpower Journal (Spring 1995), http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil accessed 7 October 2015.
18 Robert A. Pape, ‘The Limits of Precision-Guided Air Power’, Security Studies 7:2 (Winter 1997/1998), 97.
19 Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Airpower and Coercion in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 316.
20 Ibid., 24.
21 Ibid. 325.
22 Ibid., 326.
23 Benjamin S. Lambeth, ‘Bounding the Air Power Debate’, Strategic Review (Autumn 1997), 49.
24 Ibid., 53.
25 Benjamin S. Lambeth, ‘The Technology Revolution in Air Warfare’, Survival 39:1 (Spring 1997), 66.
26 Ibid., 65–66.
27 Benjamin S. Lambeth, The Transformation of American Air Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 8, 274.
28 US Air Force, Global Engagement: A Vision for the 21st Century Air Force (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defence, 1996). http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/global/global.pdf accessed 19 July 2016.
29 Ibid., 266.
30 US Air Force, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/global/global.pdf accessed 19 July 2016.
31 Benjamin S. Lambeth, ‘Air Power, Space Power and Geography’, Journal of Strategic Studies 22:2 (1999), 64.
32 Daniel L. Byman and Matthew C. Waxman, ‘Kosovo and the Great Airpower Debate’, International Security 24:4 (Spring 2000), 6.
33 Benjamin S. Lambeth, NATO’s Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment (Sa
nta Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2001), 224.
34 Stephen Biddle, ‘New Way of War? Debating the Kosovo Model’, Foreign Affairs 81:3 (May/June 2002), 140.
35 Daryl G. Press, ‘The Myth of Air Power in the Persian Gulf War and the Future of Warfare’, International Security 26:2 (Autumn 2001), 37.
36 Stephen Biddle, ‘Victory Misunderstood: What the Gulf War Tells Us About the Future of Conflict’, International Security 21:2 (Autumn 1996), 152.
37 Press, 41, 43.
38 Benjamin S. Lambeth, Air Power Against Terror: America’s Conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2005), 253.
39 Michael O’Hanlon, ‘A Flawed Masterpiece’, Foreign Affairs 81:3 (May/June 2002), 59.
40 Robert Pape, ‘The True Worth of Air Power’, Foreign Affairs 83:2 (March/April 2004), 118.
41 Jacqueline Klimas, ‘U.S. Bombers Hold Fire on Islamic State Targets Amid Ground Intel Blackout’, Washington Times, 31 May 2015.
42 Biddle, ‘Victory Misunderstood’, 162.
43 Stephen Biddle, ‘Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare’, Foreign Affairs 82:2 (March/April 2003), 35.
44 Karl P. Mueller, ‘Victory Through (Not By) Airpower’, in Karl P. Mueller, Ed., Precision and Purpose: Airpower in the Libyan Civil War (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2015), 373.
45 James S. Corum, ‘The Air Campaign of the Present and Future: Using Airpower Against Insurgents and Terrorists’, in Allan D. English, Air Campaigns in the New World Order (Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba Centre for Defence and Security Studies, 2005), 26.
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