Sep 3, 2007 9:30 PM

Air Force: Got It All Wrong

Effects are what the U.S. Air Force sees as important, but these are hard to measure. Even when accurate battle damage assessment is available, the effect of airpower is difficult to quantify, especially in a counter-insurgency campaign where political effects — the results of perceptions — are often more important than purely military ones. This […]

Effects are what the U.S. Air Force sees as important, but these are hard to measure. Even when accurate battle damage assessment is available, the effect of airpower is difficult to quantify, especially in a counter-insurgency campaign where political effects -- the results of perceptions -- are often more important than purely military ones.

This from the always-awesome Air Forces Monthly mag in an article discussing the U.S. Air Force's "surge" in Iraq: flying more sorties with bombers and fighters, dropping more bombs in an effort to kill more insurgents. The author is right that effects can be hard to guage -- from the air, that is.

But on the ground, the effects of massive air power on today's battlefields are pretty clear. "Last week I saw the damage being done in the battle for hearts and minds," The Guardian's Mark Townsend reported from Helmand, Afghanistan:

In the British headquarters a girl was brought in by her family. She lay on the table, blood leaking from her tiny frame. Occasionally her body would convulse, her screams reverberating around the base. On either side, three of her siblings whimpered. They, too, had been lacerated by masonry after a U.S. bomber strafed their home last Sunday morning while the Taliban were firing from the same compound.
*The number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan's Helmand province has fast become the conflict's most controversial element, and now threatens to undermine Britain's entire war effort. Attempts to stop the resurgence of the Taliban are uniting the population against U.K. troops. *

It's not just in Helmand province, and not just a problem for British troops and U.S. airplanes. In Uruzgan in June, during a pitched battle between Dutch soldiers and Taliban fighters, air strikes by Dutch F-16s killed scores of Taliban ... and dozens of Afghan civilians. It's the inevitable result of relying on air power to make up for troop shortages. For in stark contrast to the prevailing military lingo -- "precision guided munitions," "surgical strikes," etc ... -- air power is still a blunt instrument, especially compared to the precision of infantry firepower.

But the Air Force continues to argue otherwise. The service still espouses a doctrine of "Effects-Based Operations" -- that is, the calculated application of firepower to affect complex systems. Consider this March 2003 Pentagon briefing by Air Force Colonel Gary L. Crowder, discussing how to bring down an electrical grid such as Iraq's:

*An effects-based approach might look at that system and say, "If I looked and analyzed the enemy as a system in this particular case, I might only need to have to take out two of those power plants to enable me to go do that." *
*Slide, please. *
*In such a way, I would prioritize, then, those targets by the manner in which they would enable me to achieve that effect of neutralizing the adversary's electrical power, and I would only have to -- slide, please -- strike two targets. *
*Well, there's a good advantage of that. The first advantage is, one, you created a far less amount of destruction on the ground that you have to go and rebuild. Another advantage of that is that I now only have to attack two targets instead of 12. *

Sounds subtle, right? No!

Sure, Crowder proposed reducing the scale of bombardment, but he was still talking about dropping munitions from the sky onto some barely-glimpsed target below, an inherently imprecise practice.

Now, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there was certainly still some utility to even imprecise air power, but four years later things have changed. These days our enemy is perceptions, attitudes and extremist philosophies. The systems are all political and cultural. But the U.S. Air Force is still talking about EBO as though it still should mean dropping bombs on things. They just want to use smaller bombs such as the 250-pound "Small Diameter Bomb." (Pictured.) See this piece in *Defense Technology International *for a whole catalogue of supposedly "civilian-friendly" aerial munitions that are all the rage in today's Air Force.

It's increasingly apparent that the only concession the Air Force is prepared to make to the evolving nature of warfare is to reduce the scale of bombardment and the size of the weapons it drops. But it's still obsessed with zooming over battlefields in super-expensive fast jets making things go boom. And that's fundamentally wrong for the kinds of fights were in. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the only precision weapon is a well-trained and courageously led 19-year-old rifleman with a sharp mind, an appreciation for local culture and a zeroed weapon. The Air Force's approach to warfare, much like the U.S. Navy's shipbuilding plan, is wrong, wrong, wrong.