Airpower Realities 

The clarion call for more troops in Iraq inevitably appears with the fashionable lament that an excessive fascination with the unfulfilled promise of airpower is a primary cause of America’s problems there. Had it not gutted its ground forces to pay for the Air Force’s favorite technological toys, so the argument goes, hundreds of thousands of conventional ground forces would have been affordable and perhaps available for the pacification of Iraq. Set aside for a moment the inevitable domestic and international opposition that would accompany a conventional military expansion, and the argument is seductive, despite its complete lack of intellectual or empirical support. Within it are two points of contention: American military forces are woefully lacking in ground troops—the root cause of excessive American casualties in overseas operations—and the air zealot’s claim that airpower can do it all is to blame.

More than 2,000 American military personnel have died in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last four years. The cause of this, according to policy detractors, is the shortsighted decision to mount a military invasion with far too few ground forces to pacify and control the state after its vicious totalitarian government had been toppled.

But modern liberal democracies are not efficient at occupation. They don’t have the temperament for it. Regardless of the number of ground troops America commits to Iraq—or anyplace else—it must leave eventually. The reason is simple. It is not our land. We don’t live there. Sooner (preferably) or later, the Iraqi people must and will govern themselves. America’s military is there to provide the stability necessary so that the Iraqi people can make their initial choices without undue coercion or duress. Until that time, America is committed to intervention. No military force, no matter its size or power, can provide a permanent and desirable end-state, for no such static condition is possible. It has never existed and never will. Things change. People change.

This is not mere fatalism. It is incumbent upon a great nation, and worthy of a great people, to assist others in the spread of freedom and the acquisition of basic human rights. American military power ended a terrible chapter in Iraq’s brief history. Another may be beginning, but the argument that the more ground troops America commits to so-called Phase IV (postwar) operations the more effective the occupation will be and the fewer Americans that will die is a flawed and overly simplistic truism.

Somehow we are to believe that if enough American soldiers show up, Iraqi insurgents and foreign terrorists will throw down their weapons and run away. This is the logic that led to the massive troop build-ups in Vietnam. Surely, President Johnson’s military advisors repeated, a few hundred thousand more troops will turn the tide. When the president asked if committing more troops would mean accepting more casualties, the response was terse: No. It won’t. The advice was wrong then, as it was for the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and it is wrong now, as the ongoing pacification of Chechnya is brutally demonstrating to Russia. The reason is simple. The more troops sent in to occupy a nation’s homeland, the more targets available to its defenders. Initially disrupted, guerrillas retreat to the anonymity of the population where they probe for weakness and experiment with new tactics. Tanks, armored fighting vehicles, helicopters—once feared—become the most desirable high profile targets.

If proponents of the ‘more ground forces are better’ school of thought were intellectually honest, they would submit their thesis to more rigorous analysis. The crux of that analysis would be an assessment of the counterproposal: wouldn’t fewer ground troops be better?

If one truly wanted to reduce American casualties, the mathematically precise argument is clear. If America had initially dedicated just 100 troops to the occupation of Iraq, then it would have at least 1,900 fewer Americans killed there over the last 40 months. The argument is absurd, of course, but logically no less flawed than the idea that more Americans placed in harm’s way, the fewer that will be harmed.

But a far better argument exists. It is crafted from historical experience and modern technological and cultural realities. The advantage America possesses in its battles with extremism does not exist in toe-to-toe combat between G.I. and guerrilla. It exists in the asymmetric advantages America possesses in mobility, deadly accurate firepower, and incredible battlespace awareness.

In modern warfare, it is impossible to deny the spectacular success of American airpower’s role in the invasion and toppling of Saddam’s cruel regime. Ground forces swept to Baghdad at top speed because airpower had eliminated virtually all resistance in their path. The only effective impediment was nature, as a massive dust storm temporarily halted the armored advance. But airpower, supported by the incredible array of navigation, communication, and intelligence gathering capabilities of its space assets, remained effective.

The argument that airpower can win wars alone has not been made since Italian Air Marshall Gioulio Douhet wrote in 1920 that any military funds not spent on air operations are wasted. While zealots including America’s Billy Mitchell have made variations on the claim that airpower should be the first and foremost military expenditure, none since Douhet have gone so far to state that airpower alone can accomplish all military objectives of the state—or indeed (with the exception of some forms of deterrence) any state objectives in isolation.

The fact remains that superior airpower is today a necessary if not sufficient component of success in any military engagement the United States chooses to engage. Airpower may not alone win a war, but the United States cannot contemplate winning a war without it. Perhaps it is because American air superiority has been so dominant that military planners and commentators simply assume it as a condition of war, and not the result of a continuous and impressive effort of America’s land and sea-based airpower.

Today, airpower provides unprecedented support in the fight against guerrillas, terrorists, and separatist militias bent on forcibly replacing the fledgling Iraqi and Afghani democratic institutions. Ground forces do not have to rely on heavily fortified point positions in hostile territory, obliged to conduct blind seek and destroy patrols that are so susceptible to ambush, but rather can enter vertically into known problem areas under the watchful eyes of air and space assets, conduct their missions, and retreat quickly to safe areas far removed from the battlefield. Astonishing developments in unmanned aerial vehicles provide cover for these insertion teams, continuously available sky borne eyes and ears that today can even provide suppression fire when unexpected opposition does arise.

This information age mode of fighting, in which teams of specially trained ground forces heavily supported by air and space power work in tandem with indigenous conventional forces, has been described by students and faculty at the Air Force’s school of strategy as the “Afghan Model.” Such a mode of fighting, emphasizing the many superior capabilities of the American military working jointly in highly coordinated operations, reduces the necessary ground footprint of traditional occupational forces, limits the exposure of American service personnel to hostile fire in both time and place, and requires the ongoing support of indigenous governments—thus bringing local interests to the fore and distancing the American military from any perceived role as an occupying force. The ongoing transformation of the American military from its Vietnam-era reliance on massive ground invasion and occupation forces to a 21st-century precision weapons system ready and able to support American policy and friendly governments around the globe requires that it stay the course in its commitment to a balanced joint force—dominant on land, at sea, and in the air, space, and cyberspace—in which all forms of military power play key and decisive roles.

Dr. Everett Carl Dolman is Professor of Comparative Military Studies at the US Air Force’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies (SAASS). His focus is on international relations and theory, and he has been identified as Air University’s first space theorist. Dr. Dolman began his career as an intelligence analyst for the National Security Agency, and moved to the United States Space Command in 1986. In 1991, he received the Director of Central Intelligence’s Outstanding Intelligence Analyst award. Dr. Dolman is also co-founder and managing editor of Astropolitics: The International Journal of Space Power and Policy.