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The Airpower Partisans Get it Wrong Again

September 17, 2015

Vietnam and Kosovo don't make the case for airpower.

Airpower, according to Elliot Cohen, who directed the Gulf War Air Power Survey, “is an unusually seductive form of military strength, in part because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment.” Yet the idea that air power is a panacea or superior to land operations is mistaken. Last month, in their essay at War on the Rocks, “Airpower May Not Win Wars, But It Sure Doesn’t Lose Them,” two senior Air Force pilots, Mike Pietrucha and Jeremy Renken, argued that the United States had departed from “the successful post-Vietnam template that relied on airpower to seek limited objectives.” Instead, they argued, the United States was mistakenly pursuing a “ground-centric approach” that “failed to achieve stated goals” in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There is plenty to take issue with regarding their use of historical evidence. In their effort to explain the utility of airpower and condemn inter-service rivalry, Pietrucha and Renken engage in a rewriting of history, notably in the case of the Vietnam War and NATO involvement in the former Yugoslavia. Their arguments, ironically, represent the worst aspects of inter-service rivalry at a time when what the United States needs is objective assessments of how it can best deploy national power to achieve national interests in regions ranging from the Asia-Pacific to the Middle East.

The authors’ decision to use the Vietnam War as an example of the weaknesses of land operations and, conversely, the strength (objective or relative) of airpower is an odd choice. Perhaps that’s why the authors dedicated only one sentence to Operation Rolling Thunder (1965-68). It’s impossible to discuss airpower as a vehicle to advance U.S. interests in the context of the Vietnam War, however, without giving Rolling Thunder a much more thorough examination.

Let’s start at the beginning. The Vietnam War became land-centric because of the limits of airpower. Pietrucha and Renken have their history backward: the vulnerability of air assets and the failure of airpower to achieve even limited objectives early in the Vietnam conflict dragged the United States into its ill-fated escalation of the ground war.

On February 7, 1965, Viet Cong insurgents attacked an airbase in Pleiku, South Vietnam and killed eight American servicemen. Up to that point, U.S. airplanes and helicopters had been supporting South Vietnamese troops who were being advised by U.S. forces. Two days later, General Westmoreland, commander of the advisory command in South Vietnam, requested troops for the express purpose of securing U.S. air bases which laid the groundwork for widening the land war. Meanwhile, after the Pleike attack, U.S. forces launched Operation Flaming Dart, which involved limited air strikes on North Vietnamese Targets. After a month, Flaming Dart hadn’t accomplished much, which led U.S. commanders to order Operation Rolling Thunder.

Operation Rolling Thunder was planned as an escalating system of air strikes against the government of North Vietnam to cause it to end support for the Viet Cong insurgency. In addition to failing to accomplish that end, Rolling Thunder was born from the very type of inter-service rivalry that Pietrucha and Renken denounce.

In response to General Taylor’s directive to end the North Vietnamese government’s support for the Viet Cong, Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay advocated for a coercive operation based on airpower and downplayed the need for land forces. Other services disagreed, but, as is often the case with the seductive nature of airpower, the lack of available land forces was a key selling point for Rolling Thunder. Airpower seemed to offer policymakers a silver bullet to achieve objectives at minimal cost. Of course, we know that this was a pipe dream. The bombings strengthened the resolve of the North Vietnamese, who became increasingly proficient at designing fortifications and anti-aircraft weapons sites. Numerous pilots were shot down, including Senator John McCain, who has advocated for a mix of airpower and land forces in recent conflicts.

Given the failure of Rolling Thunder, it’s easy to see why Pietrucha and Renken essentially ignore the operation in their article. Indeed, this is a clear counterexample to their thesis that airpower can further United States policy alone, or in combination with allied ground forces.The more recent case of U.S. airstrikes against Serbia to bring an end of the conflict in Kosovo, which, like Serbia, had been part of Yugoslavia, is more compelling. Prima facie, it seems as though the Air Force bombed targets, the Yugoslav Army was demoralized, civilians were unhurt, and finally Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic surrendered in the face of the overwhelming superiority of NATO airpower. However, if Rolling Thunder demonstrated the failure of air power in furthering national goals, then further examination of the Kosovo air campaign will demonstrate the inability of airpower alone to conclusively end limited wars.

The most important weapon the Americans had in Kosovo was not an aircraft or a bomb, but an agreement between the Russian government and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. After the 1998 financial crisis, the USDA had agreed to sell the Russian government food at discounted prices. The Russian government quickly became dependent on that aid to remain intact; when war broke out in Kosovo, Russia was forced to abandon a long-time ally in favor of the country that was feeding it. It is interesting to note that NATO began bombing on March 24, 1999 and continued bombing for 78 days. On June 3 – 71 days after NATO strikes began – the Russians told Milosevic that he should surrender. He agreed to NATO demands a week later.  The combined diplomatic pressure of the Americans and the Russians was decisive.

This was apparent at the time to General Sir Michael Jackson, then commander of KFOR, the Kosovo Force, that the Russian statement “was the single event that appeared to me to have the greatest significance in ending the war.” Sixteen years after the “end” of the war, KFOR – including U.S. ground troops – remains in place as a stabilizing force. Pietrucha and Renken conveniently neglect to mention this ongoing requirement for ground forces when they assess the Kosovo intervention as an example of successful and decisive victory from the air.

These critical pieces of background knowledge demonstrate the poverty an airpower-centric worldview. As limited wars become more militarily complex and politically delicate, it is illusory to believe or propose that one tool of national power can be used successfully in isolation to achieve national goals.

More importantly, purportedly strategic discussions attempting to determine the ultimate tool of national power are ultimately self-defeating. They hamper development of creative and varied solutions to new and unique problems. They create a culture of mutual distrust and rivalry between branches. And, most dangerously, they reinforce the cynicism that creates strategy based on identity rather actual necessity.

Don’t be seduced by the myth of limited, decisive airpower. It sometimes offers too little gratification and far more commitment than you bargained for.

 

K.A. Staron is a Captain in the United States Army. He has deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. This essay is a product of not having enough activities planned during a recent week of leave. The views expressed herein are his own and do not reflect those of the Department of Defense or the Army.

 

Image Credit: U.S. Air Force

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6 thoughts on “The Airpower Partisans Get it Wrong Again”

  2. The anti-air power presentation above rests on a historically, i.e. factually flawed, basis thereby rendering it all but valueless. The strategic approach of Rolling Thunder was 100 percent developed and directed by President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara. At the tactical level targets were selected by a Pentagon military team without a single Aviator on it, but the target selection would not have mattered. The LBJ / McNamara strategy was fatally flawed.

    When Secretary McNamara informed the USAF and USN they were to implement that strategy of attack against North Vietnam, both the CoS Air Force and the CNO Navy (General LeMay and Admiral MacDonald, if I recall correctly)) had their combined Staffs War Game that strategy, rather than rely solely on their experience based opinion that it would fail. The War Game results proved the obvious – it would fail to achieve the strategic / operational results aimed at by the LBJ and McNamara – to slow down or end North Vietnamese support for their campaign to overrun South Vietnam.

    The CNO and the CoS Air Force met with McNamara, informed him of those results, and asked for and were given an audience with LBJ — who rejected their analysis and results. He essentially ordered them to implement his strategy. In true U.S. Military fashion, this is a civilian led nation, they then did so and attempted to bring success to a campaign they knew would fail.

    That is what we career military officers do – obey the commands from our civilian superiors and attempt to make the best out of their absurdities. These facts in some details, I believe, appear in Army General McMasters Book. The Captain authoring the above would do well to conduct some research before writing articles.

    The Captain might also have discovered that when responding to an inquiry from President Kennedy – then Army CoS General George Decker informed him that if the President committed this country to a ground war in Vietnam we would lose. In response to that accurate analysis, Kennedy elected to not reappoint Decker to a second two year term as CoS Army, and instead replaced him with General Maxwell Taylor chomping at the bit to maximize Army influence and to implement his Flexible Response theory of military responses. A recommendation Taylor came to clearly regret when as American Ambassador to Vietnam he witnessed firsthand the failure of the LBJ / McNamara ground and air strategy.

    Also, Lt Gen Krulack, when Commander FMFPAC in 1968, informed LBJ (to his face) that his (Johnson’s) strategy for conducting all aspects of the Vietnam War would fail, LBJ retired Krulak rather than appointing him to CMC–as most of us officers in the Navy and Marines expected.

    Yes, the U.S. military has strategically failed repeatedly since World War II when conducting large military campaigns with the notable exception of General Ridgeway’s rescue of the MacArthur produced debacle in Korea and the success in the First Gulf War. One might also recall that General Walker did not want to proceed above the 38th parallel, but was overridden by MacArthur, DoD Secretary (from err Genera) Marshall and Truman. He did his duty and he certainly paid the price for the errors of his superiors — in rank.

    The U.S. military has repeatedly failed because when conducting “large scale” and protracted efforts the U.S. military can only succeed when we conduct conventional style operations using operational / tactical approaches of our choosing. We will never succeed, and have never succeeded, conducting a prolonged occupation of a resistant population since WWII – and any attempt by the U.S. military to so do has been brought on by its General or Flag Officers doing their duty and attempting to carry out a flawed strategy. Any belief on the part of any Flag or General (or other level) Officers that American military forces could succeed Colonial style to enforce out government’s will on the native people of a foreign occupied country in the latter half of the 20th and first part of the 21st Century is intellectually flawed. History has and continues to demonstrate the failed logic underlying that belief. This is not 1900 and we as a nation (thankfully) cannot repeat what we did when crushing the Philippine Insurrection.

    Unfortunately for the Army, they are undergoing the budget cutbacks that accompany their being the primary participant in two recent strategic failures – in Iraq and in Afghanistan. The flawed logic and political partisanship reflected in the above article will not restore the lost budget funds and manpower to the Army. The Captain would do well to review how the Army resurrected itself after Vietnam, and try to imitate that successful approach, or advocating it, rather than using what will be a failed approach of attempting to blame and ridicule other branches of the service. The Army does not deserve the treatment it is receiving budget and otherwise, absent the failure of the large scale COIN proponents to admit the error of their ways — that includes many Army Generals and Navy Admirals and Marine Generals.

    From a former Navy Officer (Surface Ships) whose career began in the early 1960’s and ended in the early 1980’s.

    1. I cannot speak in great detail on Vietnam, but Kosovo was planned and executed primarily at the NATO military command. The problem was that the two senior generals for the air campaign, General Clark as SACEUR and Lt Gen. Short as Kosovo ACC, were in complete disagreement over what kind of war they wanted to fight or how they wanted to fight it.

      Clark, as an Army officer, wanted to destroy the forces inside Kosovo, who were committing atrocities. He thought this would lead the Yugoslav government to pull out of Kosovo. As an Army officer, Clark also missed the reason the USAF doesn’t like CAS: it’s really hard. The army-centric effort that Clark insisted on was too inefficient to be effective without the insertion of a large NATO ground force.

      Short wanted to “go downtown”: bombing targets inside Serbia proper from the beginning, and rapidly crushing Yugoslavia’s industry and political infrastructure. Executed as he desired, this could have toppled the Yugoslav government and resulted in anarchy, which greatly complicates the peaceful handover of Kosovo to a peacekeeping force. Executed gradually, Short’s targeting ended up being perfect for coercion, but this seem never to have been his intent.

      What neither general fully understood was the distinction between wars and coercive negotiations, because they were both trying to fight a war, while their political tasking was to support coercion.

  3. The problem with the “does airpower win wars” debate is the omission of airpower’s use in coercion, which is not warfare but is often coincident with wars. Coercion is the use of threatened violence to drive negotiations in a favorable direction, while warfare is the use of actual violence to gain objectives without said negotiation. Both Vietnam and Kosovo had parallel efforts of warfare and coercion, so they really must be viewed as a total of four cases.

    (For more on coercion theory, I recommend Thomas Schelling’s Arms and Influence, Robert A. Pape’s Bombing to Win, or Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman’s The Dynamics of Coercion.)

    Rolling Thunder was an attempt to coerce the North Vietnamese government through the escalation of bombing, but it failed because we weren’t very effective at hitting targets, and most of the targets we did hit weren’t worth much. The use of precision-guided weapons in Linebacker II would bring much better results by actually hitting the targets, but Vietnam still wasn’t very conducive to successful coercion.

    The actual war in Vietnam was largely a counterinsurgency in South Vietnam, and we lost it for a variety of reasons, but it was not a style of warfare in which airpower is very relevant.

    Kosovo was also divided into a coercion campaign and a “war,” both of which were fought exclusively with airpower. The “war” was the campaign to degrade the Yugoslav army units deployed to Kosovo, and this effort was embarrassingly inefficient. Between force protection setting a high altitude floor, ROE/C2 that made prompt strikes difficult, and extensive cloud cover for most of the campaign, NATO aircraft were not efficient at finding, identifying, or destroying Yugoslav army vehicles, and were even less effective at defeating troops, making the warfighting effort in Kosovo a waste of resources.

    The coercion was dramatically more effective, simply because finding, identifying, and destroying large fixed targets is far easier than hunting mobile units. B-2 Spirits dropping JDAMs were orders of magnitude more effective than the attacks in Rolling Thunder, and Allied Force caused incredible damage to the Yugoslav economy. Estimates are murky, but 3-8 times the 1998 GDP of Yugoslavia was destroyed in the spring of 1999.

    Combined with Russia abandoning Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic had no option but concede to NATO’s demands, but while the success in Kosovo was enabled by airpower, it was a comedy of errors in strategic planning, successful only because of NATO’s overwhelming advantages in numbers and operational proficiency.

    What ultimately was decisive in Kosovo was not limited airpower, but NATO’s commitment to an indefinite bombing campaign, to be followed by a ground invasion if necessary.

  4. As a former 11-B, I find this debate painful and wasteful. If you want to control/hold a particular place, it requires some dumbone with a knife tied to a stick to stand on it. Waving from 15K feet doesn’t do much.