10 things about air power that the Air Force doesn't teach you
Associated Press
- Over the past half-century, the US military has relied on its dominance of the air to control the battlefield.
- But waging the fight from above hasn't gotten the job done, and the true lessons of air power aren't being taught, writes retired Air Force officer William J. Astore.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
From Syria to Yemen in the Middle East, Libya to Somalia in Africa, Afghanistan to Pakistan in South Asia, an American aerial curtain has descended across a huge swath of the planet.
Its stated purpose: combatting terrorism. Its primary method: constant surveillance and bombing - and yet more bombing.
Its political benefit: minimizing the number of US "boots on the ground" and so American casualties in the never-ending war on terror, as well as any public outcry about Washington's many conflicts.
Its economic benefit: plenty of high-profit business for weapons makers for whom the president can now declare a national security emergency whenever he likes and so sell their warplanes and munitions to preferred dictatorships in the Middle East (no congressional approval required).
Its reality for various foreign peoples: a steady diet of "Made in USA" bombs and missiles bursting here, there, and everywhere.
Reuters/US Air Force file photo
Think of all this as a cult of bombing on a global scale. America's wars are increasingly waged from the air, not on the ground, a reality that makes the prospect of ending them ever more daunting. The question is: What's driving this process?
For many of America's decision-makers, air power has clearly become something of an abstraction. After all, except for the 9/11 attacks by those four hijacked commercial airliners, Americans haven't been the target of such strikes since World War II.
On Washington's battlefields across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, air power is always almost literally a one-way affair. There are no enemy air forces or significant air defenses. The skies are the exclusive property of the US Air Force (and allied air forces), which means that we're no longer talking about "war" in the normal sense. No wonder Washington policymakers and military officials see it as our strong suit, our asymmetrical advantage, our way of settling scores with evildoers, real and imagined.
Bombs away!
Wikimedia commons
In a bizarre fashion, you might even say that, in the twenty-first century, the bomb and missile count replaced the Vietnam-era body count as a metric of (false) progress. Using data supplied by the US military, the Council on Foreign Relations estimated that the US dropped at least 26,172 bombs in seven countries in 2016, the bulk of them in Iraq and Syria.
Against Raqqa alone, ISIS's "capital," the US and its allies dropped more than 20,000 bombs in 2017, reducing that provincial Syrian city to literal rubble. Combined with artillery fire, the bombing of Raqqa killed more than 1,600 civilians, according to Amnesty International.
Meanwhile, since Donald Trump has become president, after claiming that he would get us out of our various never-ending wars, US bombing has surged, not only against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq but in Afghanistan as well.
It has driven up the civilian death toll there even as "friendly" Afghan forces are sometimes mistaken for the enemy and killed, too. Air strikes from Somalia to Yemen have also been on the rise under Trump, while civilian casualties due to US bombing continue to be underreported in the American media and downplayed by the Trump administration.
REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani
US air campaigns today, deadly as they are, pale in comparison to past ones like the Tokyo firebombing of 1945, which killed more than 100,000 civilians; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year (roughly 250,000); the death toll against German civilians in World War II (at least 600,000); or civilians in the Vietnam War.
(Estimates vary, but when napalm and the long-term effects of cluster munitions and defoliants like Agent Orange are added to conventional high-explosive bombs, the death toll in Southeast Asia may well have exceeded one million.)
Today's air strikes are more limited than in those past campaigns and may be more accurate, but never confuse a 500-pound bomb with a surgeon's scalpel, even rhetorically. When "surgical" is applied to bombing in today's age of lasers, GPS, and other precision-guidance technologies, it only obscures the very real human carnage being produced by all these American-made bombs and missiles.
This country's propensity for believing that its ability to rain hellfire from the sky provides a winning methodology for its wars has proven to be a fantasy of our age. Whether in Korea in the early 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s, or more recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the US may control the air, but that dominance simply hasn't led to ultimate success.
Reuters
In the case of Afghanistan, weapons like the Mother of All Bombs, or MOAB (the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the US military's arsenal), have been celebrated as game changers even when they change nothing. (Indeed, the Taliban only continues to grow stronger, as does the branch of the Islamic State in Afghanistan.) As is often the case when it comes to US air power, such destruction leads neither to victory, nor closure of any sort; only to yet more destruction.
Such results are contrary to the rationale for air power that I absorbed in a career spent in the US Air Force. (I retired in 2005.) The fundamental tenets of air power that I learned, which are still taught today, speak of decisiveness. They promise that air power, defined as "flexible and versatile," will have "synergistic effects" with other military operations.
When bombing is "concentrated," "persistent," and "executed" properly (meaning not micro-managed by know-nothing politicians), air power should be fundamental to ultimate victory. As we used to insist, putting bombs on target is really what it's all about. End of story - and of thought.
Given the banality and vacuity of those official Air Force tenets, given the twenty-first-century history of air power gone to hell and back, and based on my own experience teaching such history and strategy in and outside the military, I'd like to offer some air power tenets of my own. These are the ones the Air Force didn't teach me, but that our leaders might consider before launching their next "decisive" air campaign.
10 cautionary tenets about air power:
1. Just because US warplanes and drones can strike almost anywhere on the globe with relative impunity doesn’t mean that they should. Given the history of air power since World War II, ease of access should never be mistaken for efficacious results.
2. Bombing alone will never be the key to victory.
3. No matter how much it's advertised as "precise," "discriminate," and "measured," bombing (or using missiles like the Tomahawk) rarely is. The deaths of innocents are guaranteed.
4. Using air power to send political messages about resolve or seriousness rarely works.
5. Air power is enormously expensive.
6. Aerial surveillance (as with drones), while useful, can also be misleading.
7. Air power is inherently offensive.
8. Despite the fantasies of those sending out the planes, air power often lengthens wars rather than shortening them.
9. Air power, even of the shock-and-awe variety, loses its impact over time.
10. Pounding peasants from two miles up is not exactly an ideal way to occupy the moral high ground in war.
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