The Advantages and Limits of Air Power Against ISIL

For years, there was an intellectual battle within Defense and military circles about the effectiveness of air power.  Some (predominately Air Force, of course), have argued that Air Power alone is capable of achieving  military goals in many conflicts.  Others, have taken the view that Air Power is really only another form of artillery, and that Air Power is only marginally useful as an adjunct to maritime and ground forces.

As with most such debates, the truth is in the middle.  Air Power is not a silver bullet.  It is most often most effective when used in joint actions with ground and maritime forces.  Yet, there are examples, where Air Power alone did achieve objectives.  And this is a view shared by most Air Force leaders.  Indeed, former Air Force Chief of Staff General Norty Schwartz and I made this argument together in an article in Aviation Week (sadly behind a paywall) refuting a book that argued that the Air Force should be disbanded.  We said:

Farley offers an incomplete history of the effectiveness of combat air power in recent conflicts.  He is certainly correct that early optimism about airpower as a panacea for modern warfare has proven misplaced.  The strategic bombing campaigns during World War II did not have the decisive effect that early airpower advocates envisioned.  And, Farley is also correct that the bombing campaigns in Vietnam failed to accomplish their goal.  But Farley’s unstated assumption that airpower can never be decisive apart from support for ground troops cannot be reconciled with history.  As even Farley admits, without the NATO air offensive in Kosovo, Serbia would have been unlikely to come to the table.

 There are other, more recent examples as well.  While the intensive bombing campaign against Iraq known as Operation Desert Fox in 1998 was heavily criticized at the time as ineffective, we have since learned that the operation was largely responsible for Saddam Hussein’s decision to end his WMD efforts.   U.S. military operations in Afghanistan in 2002 and in Libya in 2011 were largely exercises in air power.  And had we intervened in Syria, the focus of our efforts would have been on the use of air power.  Simply put, airpower is not a panacea that can replace the need for ground and naval forces–history has made that point abundantly clear–but in some circumstances, combat air power is an indispensable tool of national power.

I was therefore fascinated to find a great analysis of the power, and limits, of the use of Air Power in the war against the Islamic State, by Daniel Byman of the Brookings Institute.  First, Byman notes that Air Power has been effective in degrading the capability of terrorist organizations.  In addition to killing leaders, Byman notes that the use of Air Power limits a terrorist organizations capability:

Training on a large-scale is harder, if not impossible, as large gatherings can be lethal. Group leaders’ influence wanes, as they must hide or remain incommunicado. Trying to organize a kids’ soccer game, let alone a global terrorist network, becomes almost impossible if you can’t use phones or the Internet regularly. The indirect effects also matter. Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been laying low since U.S. military operations began, diminishing his charismatic presence from Islamic State propaganda and, presumably, disheartening his beleaguered troops. Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, the spokesman who headed the group’s external operations, was also charismatic and inspired terrorists around the world to attack—and eventually the United States tracked him down and killed him in an airstrike.

Yet, in this context, Air Power has a serious limit.  We can degrade and destroy the enemy, but unless we address governance issues that allowed ISIS to arise in the first place, we can prevail in the battle and still lose the war:

Nor does air power address the biggest long-term challenges in fighting the Islamic State: governance. The United States has proven again and again that it can dislodge terrorists, insurgents, and forces loyal to local despots. Filling the vacuum so that they don’t return is much harder. The terrorists often come back, or, at times, chaos rules. Neither outcome is an improvement for locals, and new terrorist groups can breed if there is no government to keep them down. You can’t provide that governance with a drone.

Moreover, for air power to be effective, you need capable local allies. Their forces can provide the necessary intelligence to find and target Islamic State fighters. In addition, when they advance, they force Islamic State forces to mass—making them vulnerable to air power. If Islamic State fighters stay dispersed and hidden, then forces on the ground can root them out. Local forces can also fill the vacuum after victory, ideally establishing a legitimate government and preventing the terrorists from returning or new extremist groups from arising.

The article is well worth reading.  You can find my own expanded thoughts on the uses and limits of air power, in this book review.

 

Who is Air Power's Great Theorist

James Holmes has a blog post today that asks a good question:  why hasn't air power had a theorist comparable to Clausewitz or Mahan.  As he notes, air power theorist often rely on sea power theory for guidance, which  iv valid only to a point:

For all that, air power is an intriguing beast. It’s interesting in part because — with apologies to Giulio Douhet and Billy Mitchell — there’s no master theorist of aerial endeavors. Clausewitz and Sun Tzu are men for all seasons, supplying insights that span all domains — earth, sea, sky — where warriors vie for supremacy. Sea power has Corbett and Mahan. While there’s no shortage of treatises about aircraft, no thinker of that stature explains how air forces ought to prosecute operations and strategy. Tactics and gadgetry rule.

Absent a theorist of their own, airmen commonly look to sea-power theory for guidance. And for good reason. The two domains share certain traits. Away from land, oceans are a featureless plain where vector mechanics — course, speed — rather than topographic features govern movement. Aviators use similar methods to navigate from point A to point B, except that they add a z-axis. Altitude constitutes that third dimension. Nor must they obey terrain so long as they stay high enough not to clip a mountain. Mahan’s depiction of the sea as a “wide common” traversed by ships in all directions thus maps to the wild blue yonder.

So do his six determinants of sea power — to a point. A society and its government clearly must be predisposed to take to the skies, and amass the skills to do so. Industry must be capable of manufacturing aircraft or, at a minimum, keeping up those purchased abroad. But the relationship starts to fray even on this basic level. For instance, air-power proponents like to contend that air power renders geography moot. No geographic barriers block air forces the way shorelines block fleets. And yet discounting geography would be alien to Mahan, one of history’s foremost geopolitical thinkers. This is something for writers to sort out.

The likeness between air and sea power is even more inexact when you descend to the operational level. For example, Mahan believed concentrated fleets of capital ships were the arbiters of maritime command. Smaller craft were there to act as eyes of the fleet and perform miscellaneous support functions. But the line-of-battle ship was where the fleet’s combat punch, and thus its destiny, resided. What’s the capital ship of the skies? The bomber? Hardly. Can you imagine bombers fighting other bombers? Rather, the smaller craft — the fighters — strive for air superiority and supremacy. Once they’ve scoured important airspace of enemy fighters, then bombers can go in under relatively permissive conditions to project power.

Read it all here.   Holmes ends his post with the suggestion that it high time for an aviator or scholar to set down the principles of air combat at the theoretical level.

As an answer in part to Holmes, I would suggest that the real challenge has been that the rapid technological progress in aviation has required a similarly rapid change in how air power is viewed and thought about.  I would argue that even a great work of air power written in 1945 would have only limited application today because of such advances as precision munitions, stealth, and the capabilities provided by space.