Before reflecting yet again on the brilliant success of NATO's air campaign against Yugoslavia, think back to a campaign of almost 30 years ago. The 1973 Arab-Israeli War produced very different tactical results—if similarly ambiguous political ones. Between 6 and 22 October 1973, the Israeli Air Force lost 102 of its 350 jet fighters—50 in the first three days. Those sharp losses reportedly scared the Israelis to the point of readying nuclear weapons for launch. On reflection a decade later, Chaim Herzog, a retired Israeli major general and later President of Israel, wrote about the future of air power doctrine in light of that experience:
The bulk of the Israeli losses were caused by missiles and conventional anti-aircraft fire, with honours roughly even between the two, particularly during close-support missions .... Despite the manner in which the Israeli Air Force acquitted itself in the face of the missiles, there was no doubt that many of the accepted concepts about air war would have to be re-evaluated .... Obviously, the whole new generation of stand-off air-launched weapons and tactical surface-to-surface missiles, enabling anti-missile battery operations to be mounted out of the range of the enemy missiles, would change considerably the conditions in the field of battle, while surface-to-air missilery would be based to an increasing degree on highly mobile platforms, such as the SAM-6. To a degree, air power would not be as influential as it had been, and would affect the immediate battlefield less than hitherto. The proliferation of light, portable missile launchers in the front-lines meant that close support would be the exception to the rule in the future, with the air force being obliged to concentrate on isolating the field of battle, maintaining supremacy in the air, and destroying the forces in and near the field of battle.
The lethality of ground-based, relocatable missile batteries has thus been a prevalent theme with many services for some years. In 1982, Herzog thought the penetrating conventional bomber was a costly proposition, because advances in missile-based air defenses were catching up with it, and resources would need to be diverted to the defense of rear areas because ballistic missiles would pose an increasing threat. Part of his prediction has come true. Mobile 2K12 Kvadrats (SA-6 in the West) remain the weapon that concerns NATO aviators and air campaign planners because intelligence cannot predict their positions reliably. In 1991, SCUD missiles posed an enormous political threat—even if their tactical efficacy was dubious—and ballistic missiles continue to absorb considerable military and political attention around the world.
What has not happened is the decline of air power that Herzog predicted. NATO's air forces (and the Israelis') are flying with impunity wherever they want these days, and this has led enthusiasts to start arguing that surface forces border on irrelevancy. To recall the words of Stanley Baldwin, the bombers are getting through. The problem is that some of the loudest "air-power-is-everything" enthusiasts are falling into an old intellectual trap. Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan may have started this a century ago when he argued that naval tactics depended on technology, but that naval strategy largely was independent of it. This idea sells books to the officers of one's own service, and earns one a spot in the pantheon of the military sages, but it is false. Strategy depends inexorably on technology because technology determines what is and is not possible. General Charles Donnelly (who was Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Air Force, Europe, from 1984 to 1987) fell into this snare in his introduction to John Warden's book The Air Campaign:
Enemy ground-based air defenses are targets that will be defeated at times and places of our choosing. Any ground-based air defense system has vulnerabilities that reduce its strength. For example, it is never equally strong throughout its length and breadth, it has flanks, it is immobile compared with air power, and it is normally oriented toward a specific threat. These vulnerabilities can be exploited in a well-planned air campaign. And because the vulnerabilities are not technological, but inherent in the concept [emphasis added], a ground-based system never will be able to stand alone against the unpredictable shock and violence of concentrated air attacks.
This has the sound of Marxian certitude. Donnelly's observations about the relative lack of mobility of air defenses are reasonably accurate—but plenty of sweeping generalizations can be made about aviation as well. Jet aircraft drive about by thrusting a plume of hot, missile—attracting gas out their tailpipes, and they cannot hide under trees while they are airborne. Harriers can hide under trees while they are on the ground, but they comprise a small portion of NATO's combined inventories. Even when presented with the opportunity to procure short take-off/vertical landing (STO/VL) Joint Strike Fighters, the U.S. Air Force has chosen a version for concrete runway use only.
Donnelly's comments are symptomatic of an unfounded exuberance in some quarters over the eternal efficacy of air power. It is true that NATO's air forces are defeating at least some of their opponents with ease. The important question, however, is why? The reasons tell us much about future doctrinal directions and procurement choices. A close examination of the facts does not indicate that military aviation is irreversibly ascendant. Rather, the current ascendancy is the result of a combination of causal factors that are more situational than deterministic.
Take the Balkans wars as our most recent case study: In Bosnia and Kosovo, the Serbs' and Yugoslavs' radar-guided weapons were not exactly top of the line. The Bosnian Serbs probably had only six SAM-6 launchers, which, in Yugoslav practice, means at most two autonomous batteries, since they tended to assign multiple launchers to a single "Straight Flush" radar vehicle. In 1999, the Yugoslav Air Defense Force had only 25 SAM-6 launchers and six radar vehicles. In 1973, the SAM-6 was a lethal weapon and the leading killer of Israeli aircraft: the Egyptians are reported to have downed 64 fighters with only 95 shots. By 1995, however, NATO technology had more than caught up. Electronic countermeasures and reactive high-speed anti-radiation missile (HARM) strikes kept the radars either baffled or just plain off. No doubt, sharp engineers at Raytheon, British Aerospace, and elsewhere did a great job of building the jammers, and the operators were skilled. However, they were fighting against the same systems that the Israelis were in 1973. The Israelis went in without jamming pods, while NATO went into Kosovo with several dozen radar jammers (including 25 EA-6B Prowlers), two different types of stealth bombers (F-117s and B-2s), and several hundred conventional fighter jets.
Infrared weapons (IR) could render the investment in radar-defeating measures pointless, but so far the missiles do not have the altitude to deal with a fighter-bomber dropping a laser-guided bomb from 15,000 feet, or the range to deal with one launching a stand-off missile from 40 miles. The seekers are not effective over the wide field of view and long distance they would need to search for such a high-altitude shot. However, infrared weapons are demonstrably more survivable, and did a good job of keeping NATO aircraft above 10,000 feet over both provinces of the Balkans. Two NATO aircraft losses over Bosnia—a French Mirage 2000D in 1995 and a British Harrier GR7 in 1994—were attributable to low-altitude operations. Unsurprisingly, with the hard deck raised to 15,000 feet in 1999, these losses never materialized. In 1999, the Yugoslavs reportedly had only 17 tracked Strela-10 (SAM-13) launchers, and only 75 shoulder-fired Iglas (SAM-16/18s). They had a huge number of Strela-2Ms (SAM-7s), but those weapons are notoriously easy to deceive with flares. Worse, most of these missiles were years past their warranty expirations, and the complicated seekers on IR-guided weapons are not endlessly shelf-stable.
Raising the hard deck so high, however, interfered with targeting, leaving the Yugoslav Army relatively safe from bombing, and leaving the Albanian Kosovars to deal with the inevitable misidentification of a line of farm tractors for a tank column. On the other hand, in 1991, Iraqi losses of armor and artillery escalated sharply after then-Lieutenant General Chuck Homer lowered the hard deck to as low as 4,000 feet. In 1999, NATO used stealth bombers and modern electronics from altitudes at which the Yugoslavs were outmatched, and managed to destroy a predictably small quantity of armor and artillery. The Yugoslavs fought back with technology that the North Vietnamese had used against the Linebacker II campaign of 1972. The Yugoslavs shot off 700 missiles, and downed two aircraft. No one should be shocked about the score. Had the attrition rates from North Vietnam been applicable, the score would have been close to 14 or 15 aircraft. The Coalition endured much worse in the Gulf War, but that involved a ground invasion and a clear threat to the national interest of the United States, the United Kingdom, and quite a few other Coalition partners. If the Yugoslavs had downed 15 fighters over the same time frame—and had NATO been unable to eject the Yugoslav Third Army from Kosovo with bombing alone—the Rambouillet diktat might have had to have been revised to something more palatable.
Next time could indeed be different. Some observers suspect that the Yugoslav Air Defense Force downed that F-117 with a 1960s-vintage S-125 Pechora (SAM-3) using an ad hoc cooperative engagement scheme. The scenario generally goes like this: a spotter in Italy saw the thing take off. He radioed Belgrade, and the stopwatches started clocking. The air space was restricted, so they knew the approach route. One radar illuminated, while another behind the target watched. The radar-evading aircraft may also have been tracked with a thermal imaging camera and a laser range finder. A SAM-3 was launched from a third axis, and the pilot did not quite know what to look for. The missile was simply told the direction in which to fly, and the tracking radar did not light up until the last moment. No time was left for a HARM shot, and the missile found its target. The achievement constitutes an impressive adaptation of old technology, so it is anyone's guess what could be accomplished with more modern tools.
It is difficult to predict what the next 20 years of military and technical advances will bring. Still, consider how NATO air forces would fare against someone who really invested in air defenses.
To assemble such a force, follow three steps:
- Buy a large number of Russian-built S-300PMUs (SAM-10s) and S-300Vs (SAM-12s) for high-altitude air defense. These are the latest phased-array weapons-which means that the beams do not dwell painfully on the targets, and the missiles do their own tracking until the last minute. Almost no one—other than Greece, India, Finland, and China—is buying them, but they reputedly are formidable weapons.
- Acquire a large stock of Iglas and Strela-IOs for low-altitude air defense, and back them up with a force of Counter-Combat Search and Rescue (counter-CSAR) troops. If the S-300s can bring down a few aircraft, the counter-CSAR force can snatch the pilots and lure down helicopters and ground support aircraft for targeting by modern IR missiles. The American public was well trained by the Clinton Administration to think that wars are supposed to be fought without casualties. Their interest in the downing of Captain Scott O'Grady in June 1995 was touching, but it garnered more minutes of news coverage per day than did the actual fighting in August and September of that year. This could be taken by the political leadership for a low tolerance for aircraft and crew loss rates on the part of the electorate. How's that for driving strategy? The relatively affordable technology of modern, man-portable IR missiles could interfere with the best-laid plans of air planners.
- Net the whole thing together with a redundant fiber-optic and packet-switched radio network. Integrated air-defense systems are nowhere close to as easily degraded as some of the more chauvinistic air marshals think: redundant telecommunications systems are extremely difficult to take down. Deploy a packet-switched radio network and the traffic just bounces from wireless phone to wireless phone like TCP/IP traffic wanders from Internet server to Internet server. Taking such a network down would require bombing every infantryman with a wireless phone on his belt. At the same time, the services have not articulated a compelling strategy for the future of defense suppression. In Europe and Canada, only self-protection systems are receiving attention—not active, defense-suppression systems.
I would hate to be the fighter pilot who first comes up against an opponent who has brought a directed-energy weapon to maturity. Suppress the giggle factor for a moment by remembering that the U.S. Air Force is trying to create just such a weapon with its AirBorne Laser (ABL) program. Then, think about what this would mean: an air defense weapon against which there would be no reactive countermeasures. It shoots, and either it misses or you are (literally) toast. That does not sound like "times and places of our choosing."
At the moment, the air defense lineup around the world does not look very impressive. The generally depressed levels of military spending worldwide, and possibly the examples of the two wars in the Balkans, have led to a significant shift in the pattern of air defense procurement. Sales of surface-to-air missiles are about 25% (in unit terms) of what they were 15 years ago, and the bulk of these are for low-altitude, infrared weapons. These cost far less, so the market in dollar volume is even more depressed. This means that the producers have far less revenue to spend on development of more advanced systems. The Swedes, for example, came to the conclusion several decades ago that high-altitude SAMs and their considerable research-and-development investment did not pass their cost-benefit test. Consequently, they increased their investment in jet fighters (having more than 500 at one point, in a country of eight million people) and bought only automatic cannons and low-altitude IR missiles for ground-based air defenses.
The next logical question is why anyone who might fight NATO would want to spend a great deal of money on jet fighters. U.S. fighters alone have racked up a impressive number of kills—against only a single air-to-air loss in 1991—and the Air Force is still thinking about spending tens of billions of dollars on several hundred F-22 Raptors over the next decade. Assembling a comparable force that could challenge these aircraft for control of the skies is a daunting and expensive task. Adding armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and cruise missiles to those air defenses makes more sense. UAV and missile units are easier to train, easier to maintain, and the operators do not refuse to launch when the skies are filled with enemy fighters. It is true that UAVs have suffered high loss rates in recent combat: NATO lost at least 25 (16 of them U.S.) against Yugoslavia. However, in a war such as that, a higher loss rate may be reasonable for an opponent who merely needs to complicate enemy operations to achieve his strategic objectives.
Meanwhile, most land-based air forces in NATO are still ignoring the vulnerability of their base structures. Hitting the Aviano air base in Italy—with more than 100 aircraft parked around its periphery—with cruise missiles undoubtedly would have been easier than finding a Yugoslav spotter and his cell phone on some hill in the Sanjak. This would likely not have shut down the air campaign: Italy has plenty of airfields. But wars fought on the cheap for less-than-essential political objectives may be particularly susceptible to casualty sensitivity. If Aviano had been pummeled, the reliability of the Italian government might have come into question. Thus, NATO's air forces are preeminent today, but their recent successes are still not grounds for a radical rebalancing of the armed forces.
Whatever the current state of air defenses around the world, I cannot sympathize with the idea that jet aircraft are somehow destined for a permanent place as the decisive arm of battle. One certainly cannot assume that this will be true against enemies who pursue asymmetric strategies that seek to nullify these otherwise impressive technical advantages. Thus, I get very uncomfortable when air power zealots hint that we should sharply reduce spending on tanks and ships because stealth aircraft can destroy anything we want to zap. Too much of today's dominance by air power is based on situational factors that may not hold indefinitely. A large shift in spending patterns away from ground and naval forces may not be so wise, because air forces may not always and everywhere be able to penetrate any air defense system that anyone could ever deploy.
James Hasik is the author (together with Michael Rip of Michigan State University) of The Precision Revolutions: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfare, to be published this month by the Naval Institute Press. He is a former U.S. Navy officer, serving on board the USS Saipan (LHA-2) from 1990 to 1993. He would like to thank Professor Rip for his contributions to this article.