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When it comes to the rationalization for strategic bombing (here, B-17s drop their bombs on Bremen in 1943), the Air Force has been misleading you—and itself— for nearly 70 years.
The Air Force has traditionally tied its fortunes to the Douhet vision of strategic air power. Despite a historical record of inefficiency and ineffectiveness, this vision was ostensibly vindicated during the Gulf War. One observer has gone so far as to declare that “after 70 years, the old promises of ‘Victory Through Air Power’ were finally redeemed.”' However, further analysis has shown the strategic bombing efforts of that conflict to have been largely irrelevant and unnecessary. Even the Gulf War Air Power Survey concluded:
. . . the recurrence in this conflict of obvious limitations to the operational-strategic efficacy of air power— notwithstanding the enormous advances in weaponry since 1918 and the near-ideal conditions in which the Desert Storm campaign was waged—argues that these limitations are neither transitory nor due to technical shortfalls that will be soon overcome.2
This conclusion is especially striking contrasted to the manifest successes of air power engaged at the operational and tactical level of Desert Storm. The failure of strategic bombing in the Gulf War was historically consistent, but the swift victory muted any contemporary review of the theory of strategic air power. In this way. Desert Storm is unique as the first U.S. conflict of this century in which the uniform failures and inefficiencies of strategic bombing have not been rationalized and dismissed.
The U.S. Air Force has distanced itself from public claims for the utility of strategic bombing, although recent doctrine and roles proposals have reaffirmed strategic air power as the service’s only comprehensive theory for the application of air power. However, throughout its own history, the Air Force has rationalized away the practical failures and inherent flaws of strategic bombing in order to keep it as the centerpiece of U.S. air power theory.
Two days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a key Army planner remarked, “Perhaps the best way to offset this initial defeat is to bomb Tokyo and Osaka. ’’ This perhaps emotional response foretold a significant shift in the theory of strategic bombing: from the destruction of “vital centers” to the apocalyptic Douhet-Mitchell vision of strategic air power. In moving away from the clinical economic values of the Allied War Plan Document-1 prewar plan, the means to strategic air power became the destruction of the will of a people through the shock of aerial bombardment. Speed and selectivity were replaced by annihilation and retribution.4
The impetus for this shift was likely based on the frustration that had arisen from the seemingly invulnerable German and Japanese economies. Strategic bombing significantly contributed to the destruction of enemy industry and supplies, but the results did not bring swift victory. The dread of mounting casualties—and in the case of Japan, an American feeling of vengeance—led to a tacit moral acceptance of the bombing of enemy civilian population centers. In Germany, bombing caused 2.2 million casualties, 900,000 of which were fatal. In Japan, civilian deaths due to strategic bombing far exceeded combat casualties.5 As a result, the names of cities such as Dresden, Tokyo, and Hamburg became abstract legacies of the destructive power of the bomber.
The employment of the atomic bomb muted any debate of the inconclusive results of strategic bombing. Moreover, atomic weapons seemed to rewrite the rules of war and to usher in an age that promised to make conventional war obsolete. The ramifications of bombing cities, however, did not change. At the end of World War II, atomic weapons gained widespread favor through their potential to eliminate the untimely effects of conventional strategic bombing and to win wars without sustained and costly land campaigns. After World War II, a public revulsion developed toward the fire bombing of enemy cities. This feeling had the effect of precluding any future conventional targeting of population centers—the very targeting method that had shown the most promise during the war. Ironically, the use of atomic weapons halted the use of conventional weapons for the same purposes.
Eventually, however, the public’s fascination with and fear of the apocalyptic qualities of atomic weapons allowed nuclear warfighting to take precedence in the national military strategy. In this sense, the longevity of strategic bombing was derived from a variety of sources, including civilian leadership and public opinion, rather than solely from Air Force doctrine, policy, and procurement.
In the Korean War, the United States faced an enemy that was not the highly industrialized, modern society that had seemed so vulnerable to atomic warfare. Consequently, the U.S. Air Force was stifled in its efforts to prove the utility of strategic bombing. The fruitless strategic air efforts were institutionally regarded as an anomaly, a failure due more to political restrictions than to the shortcomings of strategic bombing. Throughout the war, there had been various public and private complaints made by strategic-bombing advocates about civilian restrictions, unfavorable conditions, and the inability to use nuclear weapons. After a less-than-satisfying armistice to a costly war, the nation returned its focus to the monolithic challenge presented by the Soviet Union and to the nuclear weapons and doctrine that would be required to meet it. Within a few short years after the Korean War, the Air Force essentially had dismissed the conflict as irrelevant to the principal role of nuclear weapons and strategic bombers, a role that had by then been codified in the basic doctrinal manuals.
Air power theorists felt that this nuclear warfighting strategy would contain the most serious of threats and could be modulated to fit any conflict of lesser intensity. Nuclear weapons were seen to be so potent as to obviate the need for a debate over the role and utility of conventional strategic air power. This failure to identify critical differences between nuclear and conventional warfighting ensured that strategic bombing would survive—essentially unchallenged—for another generation and remain at the forefront of national military strategy. There were those outside the Air Force, such as Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson and Chief of Staff of the Army General Maxwell
Taylor, who called for a better conventional capability and a strategy more suited to wars short of nuclear exchanges. However, with the country’s growing involvement in Vietnam, the Air Force once again found itself thrust into a conflict for which it was unprepared.
The failure of strategic bombing in the Vietnam War was treated much as it had been in the Korean War, with civilian restraints and an agrarian economy used as fundamental excuses. In Vietnam, however, there was a new phenomenon: incrementalism. The National Command Authorities turned up the tempo of the war piecemeal, leading the Air Force to conclude that the requirement for strategic bombing to be "intense, continuous, and focused" had been denied. No matter that Rolling Thunder was the longest single bombardment campaign in the history of aerial warfare and one of three significant bombing efforts in the war. When Linebacker II eventually was able to buy the United States an "honorable” retreat from Vietnam, the Air Force claimed a vindication of strategic bombing. As a warfighting policy, however, the strategic bombing campaign against the North was not domestically distracting enough to threaten the building of the Great Society. Although strategic bombing satisfied the needs of the Nixon administration in late 1972, in no real sense did it win the war. Nevertheless, after 1973, the mere ability to threaten renewed strategic bombing and provided a veneer of support for South Vietnam as the United States pulled out its own troops—while continuing to attempt to cripple North Vietnam's economy.6
Despite the post-war perception that Linebacker II had won the war, there was an inexorable shift of emphasis and priority in the Air Force toward tactical aviation during the 1980s. This diversion was not a repudiation of the theory of strategic bombing per se, as much as it was a recognition of the greater practical utility in tactical air power. Despite this shift, the persistence of the Cold War and a strategy of nuclear warfighting ensured a continued place for the strategic bomber. There remained little in the way of a significant institutional challenge to the efficacy and utility of strategic bombing, and the Douhet view remained the Air Force’s only coherent theory of air power. For this reason, the Air Force quickly embraced the opportunity to create an independent strategic air phase for Desert Storm. The same specious argument that had supported strategic bombing in 1941 tantalized the civilian and military leadership in 1990. In Desert Storm, the lure of technology and scientific war was no less significant than it had been in the 1920s, when J. M. Spaight had remarked of the bomber that "its mystery is half its power.”
In a cultural context, the modern dressing of strategic bombing included neither direct attacks on civilians nor the political “signals” of incrementalism. Instead, it promised to use demonstrated precision against command- and-control and economic targets. Despite a social disdain for the excesses of World War II—which had in turn precluded morally repugnant targeting and the proposal of cleaner targets—the intent of the strategic bombing campaign in Desert Storm remained remarkably consistent with the historical precedent. Also consistent was the way that the strategic bombing effort was predicated on objectives that were independent of the operational objec-
tives. Those relatively insignificant differences between the vital centers of 1941 and those of 1990 were determined by the march of technology and by changed political and social sensibilities.
In each war since World War II, there have been at least two persistent and underlying themes that have affected the perception of conventional strategic bombing. First is the control of targeting by higher military and civil authorities—what Michael Sherry calls the “bureaucratization” of war. Strategic bombing is, by its very nature, dependent on centralized command and control, enabling distant political players to direct its conduct. It is, in fact, a fundamental characteristic of strategic air power that it has been controlled by the highest levels of civilian and military leadership, for example, Roosevelt’s approving of the fire bombing of cities, Johnson’s weekly screening of target lists, and Bush’s being briefed of specific targets in Iraq.7
As much as any other singular factor, civilian control has clearly benefited the longevity of strategic air power. This does, however, point out a proverbial double-edged sword. On the one hand, the Air Force clearly has benefited from the appeal that strategic bombing presents to civilian leaders. On the other hand, civilian meddling can provoke resentment at least and needless casualties at worst. The clearest instance was President Johnson’s use of his own civilian aides to decide “how many bombs of what exact type might be dropped at which end of what particular bridge in Vietnam.” Air crews were killed or captured because those decisions routinely disregarded expert advice by air staffs and commanders.8
Second is an institutional obsession with service independence.
Since the late 1920s shift to an independent Air Corps, the Air Force’s drive for independence has become sacrosanct, to the detriment of a constructive debate of the best use of air power. More disturbing, however, is the cavalier dismissal of the historical record of strategic air power by strategic-air-power proponents. The question goes beyond any possible tradition of ahistoricism or philosophical myopia; the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of strategic bombing is too consistent to be disregarded. As Caroline Ziemke observed, the Air Force’s uncritical approach to its own past means that it has declared strategic bombing decisive when it was not, claimed victory when there was none, and neglected those operations that have proved to be indispensable and potentially decisive.9
Why would an organization promote a doctrine with such zeal as to invite suspicion of its institutional intellectual integrity? Perhaps the attempt to create a science of war had the most deleterious effect on the intellectual health of the Air Force. After Desert Storm, Air Force
Major General Buster Glosson argued that, instead of adopting and understanding a Clausewitzian view of war, much of the senior Air Force leadership traditionally had taken a Jominian view—a formulaic perception and understanding of war.10 Clausewitz himself had dismissed Jomini with the comment that “to reduce the whole secret of the art of war to the formula of numerical superiority at a certain time and place was an oversimplification that would not have stood up for a moment against the realities of life.”" He might well have been addressing the theory of strategic bombing and its mechanistic approach to war, declaring that weaponeering and targeting does not equate to warfighting.
General Glosson argued further that Air Force leaders rarely have understood the operational art and that there had been no consistent, institutional effort to explore and debate the higher levels of war. In too many cases, he felt, the Air Force’s leadership had become managers instead of warriors.12This managerial ethos may be seen as a concomitant effect of the attempt to view war as a science that might be considered in strict terms of sorties and tonnage.
The recent release of an updated Air Force Manual (AFM)l-l restates the service’s predominantly scientific view of war and emphasizes the traditional tenets of strategic air-power centralization and service independence. AFM 1-1 is unable, however, to present any new overarching concept for the employment of air power, although in clinging to the Douhet vision, it reasserts strategic air power’s exemption from the grammar of war.
The Air Force’s proposal to the present Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces further manifests the tendency to promote service independence and centralized control. The service has conveniently come to believe that the battlefield can be divided effectively into separate battles within clearly defined layers and blocks. In future wars, the Air Force proposes that it assume responsibility for the deep “strategic” battle, beyond the areas that require any coordination with ground forces (see chart). By extension, then, the service would play little or no role in the ground battle.
The latest Air Force position also holds Douhet as relevant and strategic air power to be an effective and efficient tool of war. A more skeptical analysis of this view, however, might conclude that the staking out of the distant battlefield and the abdication of the role of close air support are intended primarily to ensure continued service independence and centralized control of air assets. In this case, the Air Force’s roles-and-missions proposal rests on an empirically and theoretically flawed argument that seeks to isolate air power from the battlefield. The desire to maintain service independence and centralized control
BATTLE OVER ARMED SERVICES’ ROLES
A perennial question /Aof defense reform —the expensive redundancies among the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—has resurfaced in squabbling among the Joint Chiefs. A look at some of the flash points set against a mock military operation:
Air Defense | |
Defense against enemy aircraft a ■ Navy: Surface-to-air missiles ■ Air Force: Intercept aircraft ■ Army: Patriot missiles | nd incoming missiles All three services are developing theater ballistic missile defense systems. |
Close Battle
I All four branches have space commands and use communications and navigation satellites.
Deep Battle
Attacking Strategic targets
■ Navy: F/A-18, F-14, A-6, sea-launched cruise missiles
■ Air Force: F15E, F-16, F-111, B-52, F-l 17 air- launched cruise missiles
■ Army: Apaches, Cobras, ATACMS artillery
REPRODUCED FROM THE WASHINGTON POST. 24 OCTOBER 1994
seems to have overcome any view that would fully invest air power in an operational and tactical role.
The historical excuses for the failure of strategic air power—whether an enemy’s economy is agrarian, or it receives help from outside its borders, or its people show great resourcefulness—address specious causes, rather than fundamental flaws. The failure of strategic air power comes not because it fails to account for the nature of a particular conflict. It is in the attempt to independently influence the strategic level of war that the Air Force fails to understand the very nature of war itself.
Ironically, technology may finally liberate air power from the tyranny of strategic bombing and allow it to fulfill its potential. As the means become available to identify and attack armies in the field, air campaigns may be implemented as complementary efforts at the tactical and operational level of war, rather than exercises of service independence. By accepting that the employment of aircraft is not exempt from the grammar of war, U.S. air power may remain focused on true centers of gravity, "the hub of all power and movement on which everything depends.” Clausewitz saw this as a matter of moral responsibility: “the capacity of the commander to maintain his determination, in spite of all temptations to the contrary, to concentrate his forces against that decisive point."1
More important, the United States must better match its military means to its political ends. Strategic bombing is ultimately intended to break the will of an enemy, yet in doing so imposes a great deal of suffering upon that enemy’s civilian populace. Even in Desert Storm, the most antiseptic of strategic campaigns, possibly tens of thousand of civilian deaths were the indirect result of the bombing of strategic targets.14
The United States can no longer afford those means that stain its precious moral capital. It is time to recognize the theory of strategic bombing as a failed myth and to reorient U.S. air power doctrine and priorities accordingly. Then, a proper synthesis of air, ground, and sea power might be established—with the ultimate potential of air power realized and the moral costs of war abated.
'Edward N. Luttwak, “Victory Through Air Power,” Commentary, August 1991, p. 30.
:Eliot Cohen and Thomas A. Keaney, Gulf War Air Power Survey, Vol. II (Washington: GPO, 1993), p. 369. -
’Michael S. Sherry, The Rise Of American Air Power: The Creation Of Armageddon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 116.
4Ibid., p. 117.
'Robert A. Pate, “Why Japan Surrendered," International Security, Fall 1993, p. 165
' Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military’ Strategy and Policy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973), pp. 469-70.
7Lee Kennett, A History of Strategic Bombing (New York: Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1982), p. 184.
"Edward N. Luttwak. "Washington’s Biggest Scandal,” Commentary', May 1994, pp. 29-33.
‘'Earl H. Tilford, Crosswinds: The Air Force's Setup In Vietnam (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1993), p. IX.
,0Eliot Cohen and Thomas A. Keaney, Gulf War Air Power Suney, Vol. II (Washington: GPO, 1993), p. 28.
"Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 135.
,:Eliot Cohen and Thomas A. Keaney, Gulf War Air Power Survey, Vol. II (Washington: GPO, 1993), p. 28.
"Michael Howard. Clausewitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 41. "Eliot Cohen and Thomas A. Keaney, Gulf War Air Power Survey, Vol. II (Washington: GPO, 1993), p. 28.
Major Ganyard. an F/A-18 pilot, is currently attending the School of Advanced Warfighting at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College.