"Strategy and Air Power" - AEI

Strategy and Air Power
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubI...pub_detail.asp

By Thomas Donnelly
Posted: Wednesday, March 2, 2005

NATIONAL SECURITY OUTLOOK
AEI Online
Publication Date: March 1, 2005

More than any of the other armed services, the U.S. Air Force
approaches the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review with a sense of
foreboding. Touted just a few years ago as the shining exemplar of the
revolution in military affairs and the new American way of war, the Air
Force is today under increasing scrutiny from Congress and the Pentagon
to justify its procurement priorities in the context of the global war
on terror. Neither the Air Force's most fervent detractors nor its
most devoted acolytes, however, offer an accurate assessment of the
role of air power in the post-9/11 strategic environment. The time is
ripe for a more realistic, balanced reappraisal of what air power
can--and cannot--be expected to accomplish against present and future
threats to U.S. national security.

For more than a decade, the U.S. Air Force has been the darling of the
defense policy community. In contrast to the allegedly hidebound Army,
conventional wisdom during the 1990s imagined the Air Force as darting
from trouble spot to trouble spot, repeatedly tipping the balance of
power in favor of the United States in otherwise unwinnable conflicts.
As much as anything else, it was the video-game-like images from the
first Gulf War of precision-guided munitions neatly deposited onto
Saddam's tanks and palaces that revived America's confidence in its
military and began to put the ghosts of Vietnam to rest. And indeed,
until very recently, U.S. military power seemed all but synonymous with
air power, which offered to leverage America's extraordinary advances
in computing and information technologies to create an entirely new way
of war. David Halberstam, prompted by the Balkan wars and particularly
the Kosovo conflict, captured in amber the sense of excitement that
surrounded this intoxicating new creed shortly before the September 11
attacks:

With the accuracy of modern airpower it was possible to paralyze the
modern state by taking out its central nervous system, as if quickly
and swiftly injecting it with a temporary poison that stilled its
capacity to function both militarily and otherwise as a state.
Moreover, it could be done with limited risk on the part of American
forces, it caused limited collateral damage given the amount of
munitions dropped, and it even caused comparatively limited physical
damage, or at the least, the physical damage could be fairly accurately
controlled. With this strategy you could harm the people who had
started the war, not the poor grunts whose misfortune it was to be
soldiering out in the field.[1]

Thus, air power promised not merely conventional military supremacy,
but war free from the bloody horrors that previously had defined
war--war without casualties. It was the perfect "end-of-history"
military theory to accompany the broader "end-of-history" ethos
that captured the minds of foreign policy intellectuals in the wake of
the Soviet collapse.

But the promise of air power, its advocates insisted, transcended the
strategic pause of the 1990s and the occasional need of the United
States during this period to quash the ambitions of tin-pot dictators.
When great-power rivalry returned to the world stage sometime in the
coming decades, most likely in the form of an ascendant People's
Republic of China, the ensuing contest for global mastery would be
determined by control of air and space. Thus, supposedly
transformational technologies like missile defense and next generation
fighter aircraft, initially conceived in the fading twilight of the
Cold War, would ultimately prove their strategic worth.

History, alas, is a harsh mistress. The September 11 attacks, the
subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the counterinsurgency
campaigns that have increasingly defined the day-to-day reality of the
global war on terror have all recast these assumptions about U.S.
national security. Rather than the high-tech, target-rich enemy of the
future that the Pentagon was gearing to fight, the U.S. military has
instead been confronted by fluid, stateless networks of guerrilla
fighters, who lack the fixed infrastructure--the "central nervous
system," in Halberstam's phrasing--that precision-guided munitions
are so adept at paralyzing. Furthermore, rather than simply hunting
down and picking off al Qaeda terrorists, President George W. Bush has
framed the global war on terror as a broader struggle to shape the
political conditions of the greater Middle East. Although the Pentagon
has been loathe to acknowledge it, such a mission cannot help but
prioritize American land forces--which, in the zero-sum world of
inter-service rivalries and especially at a time of record budget
deficits, has inevitably meant a relative increase in the influence of
the Army and Marines and a relative diminution of influence for the
other services.

And indeed, the defense budget that the Bush administration recently
submitted to Congress for fiscal year 2006 is widely perceived as a
bitter pill for the Air Force, principally in its proposed cuts to the
planned acquisition of the F-A/22 fighter aircraft. The service has
also been criticized in some quarters as of late for failing to realign
its procurement priorities to more accurately reflect the realities of
the post-9/11 world. Military analyst Ralph Peters, for instance,
recently wrote, "Today's Air Force clings to a fight-the-Soviets
(or at least the Chinese) model with greater passion that
yesteryear's Army clung to the horse cavalry."[2]

Such charges, which provoke predictable ire among blue-suiters, are in
a sense a just reward for the ways in which the Pentagon's
transformation project was manipulated to protect the Air Force's
favorite programs. It was the fighter mafia who turned the
"revolution in military affairs" into a reactionary movement and is
still fighting a rearguard action through the Quadrennial Defense
Review (QDR). And besides, there is no narrative more attractive in
Washington than a fall from grace.

Nonetheless, the animating principle of America's defense strategy
must be something more than a sense of inter-service rivalry. Rather
than reenacting the budget wars of the past, what is badly needed now
is an honest and balanced appraisal of U.S. air power and its potential
contribution to the global war on terror and beyond.

Rethinking the Revolution

The revolution in air power over the past several decades has achieved
every goal anticipated by its original theorists save one. Upon
reflection, it now appears that there have been only a handful of cases
where U.S. air power can be said to have "won" a war in the sense
of being politically decisive. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and the seventy-eight-day air campaign in Kosovo are only
partial vindications, as Japan surrendered only after a four-year
amphibious campaign rendered the homeland vulnerable to invasion, and
the outcome of Kosovo was only barely decisive. The "shock and awe"
attacks at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom are even more
indicative of air power's limitations: they were extremely powerful
and made a huge contribution to the ultimate success of the invasion,
but as we have seen since, they were also far from decisive.

Perhaps more genuinely revolutionary has been the vastly improved
coordination between precise airstrikes--call it "precision
power"--and ground maneuver. In Afghanistan, the combination of U.S.
Special Forces, Afghan militiamen, and American precision power
scattered the Taliban and al Qaeda forces whenever they massed to
defend a city or a vital point. Precision power has even changed the
face of urban combat in, for example, the Fallujah operations this past
fall, as Marines and soldiers maneuvered to fix insurgent forces in
place, then, as often as not, relied upon firepower from the air to
destroy them.

Before the introduction of precision-guided missiles and bombs,
airstrikes were accurate within approximately 500 feet and required
high-risk, low-altitude bombing runs; today's satellite-guided bombs
are accurate to within 20 feet and laser-guided bombs to within 10
feet.[3] These exponential improvements in accuracy have truly
transformed operations in the air and on land. In the invasion of Iraq,
fully 64 percent of the bombs dropped were precision guided. Almost
certainly the proportion of precision weapons used during the
counterinsurgency campaign is even higher.

A related component in the advance in air power has been the revolution
in airborne reconnaissance, surveillance, intelligence gathering, and
battle management capabilities. From large, specially designed aircraft
like the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) and Joint
Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) to the
proliferation of various electronic "pods" on tactical aircraft,
the ability to find an enemy and target him rapidly and from great
distance has grown by leaps and bounds. Perhaps most important is the
ability to synthesize data from various platforms and sensors to create
a clearer general picture of the battlefield than ever before.

All of these amazing air power capabilities offer important
contributions to the military's current missions in the greater
Middle East. Yet, like the rest of the armed services, today's Air
Force essentially remains an improved but smaller version of its Cold
War self. To be sure, reductions have been made in the bomber and
ballistic missile fleets. But the curious result is a force
increasingly dominated by shorter-range aircraft even as the service
itself has begun to acknowledge its truly global missions.

To the extent that today's force is suited to the challenges facing
the United States in the greater Middle East, it is in no small measure
because the long-term commitment of the Bush administration to the
region has ensured that American air power will have continuing access
there. Indeed, since 9/11 the variety and span of facilities used by
U.S. aircraft has been quite stunning, ranging from Central Asia to
West Africa to Southeast Asia. Given anything near the current level of
American access in the future, the value of tactical Air Force in
Middle East operations will continue to be far higher than conceived in
the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review.

But if that's the good news, the bad news is that as these kinds of
operations endure--call them air cavalry missions--at such high levels,
the legacy fleets of F-15s and F-16s are being ridden into premature
old age. The F-15, in fact, operates with flight restrictions because
of metal fatigue on its wings and tail. Likewise, the plane perhaps
best suited to the job, the venerable A-10, is older still. A number of
solutions are possible, from continued production of F-16s to the
creation of a fleet of long-loitering unmanned combat aerial vehicles
(UCAVs) designed as on-call fire support for ground maneuver forces.
One of the measures of the upcoming QDR is how well it addresses this
issue.

Indeed, long-loitering UCAVs are promising instruments of
counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations in other respects. As
belatedly discovered after the September 11 attacks, they are extremely
useful in surreptitiously seeking out, identifying, and eliminating
terrorist targets. In November 2002, for instance, a CIA-operated
Predator drone roaming the skies over the deserts of Yemen located and
destroyed a car carrying six suspected al Qaeda operatives. In
addition, the sustainability and expendability of unmanned aerial
vehicles makes them ideal platforms for surveillance and force
protection of critical infrastructure--a vital mission both in
expeditionary operations such as Iraq as well as homeland security back
in the United States.

The Other Air Force

Beyond questions about the combat systems of the Air Force, the present
challenges posed by Iraq and the global war on terror prompt equally
pressing decisions about the service's support aircraft, most notably
its fleets of tanker and cargo aircraft. Previous Pentagon defense
reviews have tended to pay less attention to such issues--and so the
service finds itself today with an insufficient fleet of C-17
airlifters and an increasingly decrepit fleet of tanker aircraft. Such
systems are essential to far-flung air operations; they put the
"global" in U.S. air power.

The initial decision to restrict the C-17 program was made in the early
1990s by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. Primarily a cost-cutting
choice, it was nonetheless a reflection of how dimly understood the
post-Cold War world was at the time. The problem is that airlift
needs--that is, the reality of the operations of the recent past
translated through a series of formal Pentagon "mobility
studies"--are constantly expanding. Even allowing that some formal
airlift requirements may be based on very spurious reasoning about the
requirement to move large ground units by air, the need for greater
airlift capacity is real.

America's fleet of C-130 aircraft, the Air Force's cargo-carrying
workhorse, is even older than its C-17s. Recently, General John P.
Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, disclosed to Congress that thirty
C-130s will be grounded and fifty-eight more inspected, after cracks
were found developing on their wings. The design of the plane is itself
a half-century old.

As much if not more than tactical fighters, the global war on terror
requires that the Air Force prioritize the revitalization of its cargo
fleet. Airlift capability has proven especially relevant in the
counterinsurgency operations in Iraq, where guerrilla attacks on the
country's roads have made airborne transport of equipment and
supplies a preferable, more secure alternative to ground convoys--a
mission that the Air Force, to its credit, has readily embraced. As of
late 2004, increased air operations meant that more than 400 trucks and
1,050 drivers were kept off Iraq's most dangerous
roadways--delivering approximately 450 tons of cargo a day.[4]

Equally crucial is the need to address the problem of aerial refueling.
Unfortunately, the scandal surrounding the Air Force's plan to lease
rather than purchase new tankers has exacerbated the problem by
delaying any solution. Tanker aircraft have become increasingly
essential to U.S. military operations; in Operation Iraqi Freedom,
tanker aircraft flew more than 6,000 sorties, over a quarter of the
total Air Force flights.[5] With future operational requirements driven
by the need for greater range, the need for tankers is equally
important, doubling or tripling the combat range of both tactical
aircraft and long-range bombers, as well as the range of cargo
aircraft.

The current tanker fleet of KC-135 aircraft averages forty-four years
of age. Even more than combat aircraft like F-15s and F-16s, these
tankers are reaching obsolescence and plagued by low readiness rates.
The upcoming QDR must address the requirement to accelerate a tanker
replacement program even as the various investigations surrounding the
collapsed leasing proposal continue.

Planning for the Worst

Looking beyond the immediate challenges posed by Iraq and global
counterinsurgency operations, there is a distinct danger in taking for
granted the relatively low air-defense threat in which the United
States operates today. The increasingly effective marriage of land
maneuver forces with precision power rests on the almost unquestioned
assumption of U.S. air supremacy. Since the end of the Cold War, the
U.S. Air Force has had no serious or sustained contest over any air
space on the planet. The Taliban's air assets were largely a joke.
During the invasion of Iraq, the Iraqi Air Force did not fly a single
sortie. Through Operation Desert Storm and the no-fly-zone operations
of the following decade, the Balkan wars, and Operation Iraqi Freedom,
land-based air defenses have had minimal effect on U.S. air operations.

This is unlikely to remain the case in the future. One need only review
a brief list of the potential adversaries--Iran, North Korea, Pakistan,
China--to recognize that many of America's possible enemies field
forces that would badly strain the current or planned capabilities of
the U.S. Air Force.

Consider the possibility of a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. The most
immediate challenge in such a scenario, no matter the precise tactics
imagined, is how to conquer the tyranny of distance. While the Navy
would play a central role in any East Asian crisis, the United States
would also have to rely upon land-based Air Force aircraft. While the
B-2 bomber would be a key platform and the Air Force is improving its
facilities on Guam to handle B-2 operations and maintain its stealthy
systems, the B-2 fleet comprises just sixteen airplanes.[6] Of course,
with tanker support, F-117s, F-15 and F-16 tactical fighter
bombers--and in future, hopefully, the F/A-22--could operate from
Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, for example. However, all such
airfields are well within range of Chinese retaliatory missile strikes,
and allowing U.S. aircraft to operate from these countries would de
facto drag them into a conflict with Beijing--a politically uncertain
proposition, at best.

A Taiwan Strait, Pakistan, or Iran crisis would also occur in a far
more dangerous air-defense environment than the Air Force has faced in
recent years in Afghanistan, Iraq, or the Balkans. Moreover, whether
there would be sufficient time for a methodical air-defense suppression
campaign is unclear; the urgency of responding to a nuclear event or to
provocative Chinese actions over the strait militates against excessive
caution. Such scenarios make a powerful case for stealthy attack
aircraft such as the F/A-22 as well as today's B-2s and F-117s, but
none of these is, in and of itself, wholly sufficient. They also make a
powerful case for diversifying U.S. basing arrangements in the region.

One way to make the most of the B-2 fleet--now that the production line
is closed and cold--is to upgrade the aircraft's electronics systems,
particularly the outdated computer architecture. The bomber would also
be much more flexible if it carried sensors and other systems to detect
unanticipated air-defense radars and adjust its flight path
accordingly.[7] Regardless, the Air Force's plans for its "high-end
mix" fleet, especially its capability for long-range strike, need to
be more thoroughly scrutinized in the 2005 QDR than in past reviews,
particularly in light of these emerging threat scenarios.

Best and Worst of Times

Over the early years of the post-Cold War era and through the initial
quadrennial defense reviews, the U.S. Air Force has enjoyed tremendous
successes. The revolution in precision strike seemed to validate its
air power theories and was rewarded in Pentagon budget wars. This run
of fortune continued through the invasion of Afghanistan and the hopes
for a quick "shock and awe" victory over Saddam Hussein. But the
long-term realities of the U.S. military engagement in the Middle East
have brought the assumptions of air power into question.

The Bush administration has made the political decision to hold the
growth of the "baseline" defense budget--that is, not counting
spending not directly "billable" to operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan--and, out of necessity, to slightly shift resources away
from the Air Force and Navy to the Army and Marine Corps.

Thus, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, the Air Force
is confronted with hard choices about what it really means by "air
power." In answering this question, it is burdened not only with
trying to adapt to the current challenges posed by the global war on
terror, but also a range of future threat scenarios. In some ways the
Army, once the most maligned service for its alleged devotion to old
ways, has been able to do the most to unburden itself of Cold War
baggage since the September 11 attacks--simply by virtue of the fact
that a clear new mission has been thrust upon it in the form of the
counterinsurgency operations in the global war on terror. The Air
Force, by contrast, faces a much less clear path forward--yet its
transformation remains equally vital to U.S. national security
interests.

Notes

1. David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace (New York: Scribner, 2001),
50.

2. Ralph Peters, "Saving the U.S. Air Force," New York Post,
February 11, 2005.

3. Steven Kosiak, "Matching Resources with Requirements: Options for
Modernizing the Air Force," Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments, Washington, D.C., August 2004: 52.

4. Eric Schmitt, "Cargo Flights Added to Cut Risky Land Trips," New
York Times, December 15, 2004.

5. U.S. Central Command Air Forces, "Operation Iraqi Freedom--By the
Numbers," April 20, 2003: 7-8.

6. The total B-2 fleet is actually twenty-one aircraft, but just
sixteen of these are "combat coded"; the remainder are retained for
training and other purposes.

7. For a fuller discussion of potential B-2 upgrades, see Barry Watts,
"Backgrounder: Moving Forward on Long-Range Strike," Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Washington, D.C., September 27,
2004: 16-18.