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That’s Haiphong down there, and the target °f the carrier Kitty Hawk’s aircraft was a Power plant. The pilots must have thought they were moving us a step closer to victory ltl Vietnam. Much of the time, however, TacAir was unwittingly conducting damage control training for the enemy by tying to destroy at least one type of target before eventually attacking all the targets of 0 given type.
Tactical air works any way you want it to—in peacetime. Then, everyone is training for and planning how to fight a new war—one with ctlaracteristics quite unlike the last war (or so most a^sume). The new and unknown permeate most im- P,lcit and explicit mental images of this new war. It J^gs with it new targets, new defenses of unknown high) effectiveness, and new weapons and air- £raft on both sides. There isn’t much consensus on °w we’ll fight, except that it won’t be the way we °ught last time.
You can get this picture in any ready room, at anY officers’ club, and on any staff. Old fogeys who hark back to the last war are accused of being vic- (■ris of a “Vietnam syndrome” and subside into S|Ience. Even so, it is not hard to find critics who Suggest that our changing military concepts are inadequately responsive to change.
. ^1 this certainty about the inevitability of change quite remarkable in the light of history. It is true hat we never seem to get the war for which we Prepare, either tactically or strategically. Before ^orld War II, we prepared for a Pacific War and ®nded up giving priority to Europe. Among other .h'ngs, a bomber designed to attack ships approach- !ng the United States was used to bomb German lr>dustry. The Korean conflict was an unexpected VVar in an unexpected place with unexpected weapons. Although everyone could see something coming in Vietnam, almost every air tactic and weapon designed in anticipation of a limited conventional war either proved a failure or was used other than originally envisaged. (Who remembers VX-5’s low- and-slow dive-bombing tactic, CBU-1 and CBU-2, Bullpup, and the Mark-4 gun pod—to name a few prominent prewar panaceas with short-lived combat employment?)
Based on the historical record, there is every reason to be uncertain about the nature of the next war and our way of fighting it. Nevertheless, history also tells us that our past wars resembled closely their predecessors. Had we prepared for a recurrence of World War II, we would have been better prepared for Korea; had we prepared for another Korea, we would have been better prepared for Vietnam, at least as far as the Navy—and tactical air in particular—was concerned.
Some critics have argued that these experiences merely reflect military institutional rigidity: the Navy fought the same because it didn’t change its weaponry enough. This is a remarkable charge to level at an institution which designed and built ships and aircraft that abandoned guns and relied exclusively on missiles. When the Navy did get involved in Vietnam, the most modern ships needed to be escorted by “obsolete” World War II destroyers, and aircraft reverted to complex variations on World War I and II fighter tactics.
It is closer to the truth to hold that the military (and the country as a whole) overreacted to technological change (both our own and that of potential enemies) and forgot much which remained valid. If the history of our preparations for the last three wars is any guide, we’re doing the same thing right now.
Whether or not you agree with that assessment, there are patterns in those last three air wars* which *The discussions which follow deliberately omit reference to the Israelis' experiences. Their wars have been quite short. However, a more important limitation is that our information on their operations is second-hand and selective. A clear lesson from Vietnam is that this type of information misleads as often as it helps.
recurred regularly and which seem almost independent of technology. Look for them in our thinking today and our conduct tomorrow. Perhaps we can avoid the bad and capitalize on the good. These patterns can be classified into three categories:
► Behavior—what we do
► Tactics—how we do it
► Effectiveness—the impact behavior and tactics have on the enemy
Behavior: The way we (and others) have fought air wars has been repeatedly characterized by overestimated technical effectiveness, inadequate intelligence, improper targeting, and shortages. In our last air war, there was also something that is possibly a new behavioral constant: command direction from afar. All of these behavioral patterns seem to go away as a war progresses, but they are usually present at some point, frequently at the early stages of combat.
Overestimated technical effectiveness applies primarily to the technical aspects of our offensive efforts—and to our evaluation of the effectiveness of enemy weapons. Overestimated offensive effectiveness goes back to the days of two air power advocates, the Italian Giulio Douhet and the American Billy Mitchell. Overestimating our own power increases in proportion to the distance of the estimator from a cockpit. This behavioral pattern stems from a variety of sources.
First, there is the optimism endemic in “selling” a new weapon—or, equivalently, the sales brochure-like estimates of enemy effectiveness produced by the intelligence types. Then, there is the combat veteran who proudly (and correctly) remembers how well he and his air wing performed after their first dozen sorties over enemy territory and who is now reacting to a civilian analyst. The civilian analyst can in no way visualize the euphoria of mastering your fear of the unknown (something aircrews start experiencing in the training command and then experience again and again) and the cold and calculating efficiency under that particular stress which follows. The civilian analyst, in turn, has more faith in the (supposedly) predictable and testable performance of hardware and tends to see aircrew human factors under stress as a source of degradation rather than one of improved performance and flexibility. And it is true that aircrew inexperience can be a cause of overestimating effectiveness during the early stages of combat. Finally, nobody—civilian or military—can fully foresee the operational limitations and degradations which an uncooperative enemy and environment will impose on a new, unfamiliar weapon, or the extent to which aircrew members (if they are in the hardware loop at all) can learn to circumvent or compensate for these limitations.
Inadequate intelligence is also a source of reduced effectiveness. I vividly remember watching a major strike on a heavily defended target being briefed in May 1965 using year-old U-2 photography. The same sort of thing happened when we returned to North Vietnam in 1972, in the same war, and most avail' able photography dated to 1967-68. In 1968, a survey of targeting materials for a different target system in a different area found that three-quarters of the photographs in them were at least two years old.
This sort of thing is a distribution problem. Up' to-date photographs are available somewhere in the system; unfortunately, peacetime distribution systems are geared to intelligence agencies and staffs-' not to aircrews. And in peacetime, people forge* that, during wartime, flak and surface-to-air missile sites move, targets are harder to acquire when you’ve never seen them (or they’ve changed in appearance since the photograph), and they forget other things quite obvious to aircrews briefing for a strike.
The intelligence types work very hard and really do quite well, but they aren’t flying or commanding and their perspective suffers from specialization and security. They routinely (usually quite innocently! withhold information aircrews would find of inestimable value or, more often, mistakenly edit the key fact of highest value to the tactician. The problem is reduced on operational staffs, because some people have the right clearances and sooner or later start looking at raw intelligence with some insight- However, it took us years in Vietnam before we broke all the bureaucratic barriers to giving aircrews all the great help our intelligence was capable ot giving them.
There are other sources and types of inadequate intelligence, but this is not the place to discuss therm However, one of them, an incomplete understanding of the enemy, his problems, and his intentions- combines with misestimated (not always overestimated) effectiveness to lead to inappropriate targeting. A list of the most glaring examples includes:
► In 1940, the Germans stopped bombing British radars—just as the strikes were causing real concern for the British—because they thought they were ineffective. German bombers switched to airfields and then—again on the verge of success—switched to London.
► In 1941, the Japanese failed to attack the fuel storage facilities at Pearl Harbor.
► In 1942, the principal British science advisor produced, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill approved, an estimate that Royal Air Force night bombing would destroy 50% of the housing in Germany in 18 months. This wildly optimistic and oversimplified analysis focused the entire British war effort on a dubious target system.
► In 1943, U. S. Army air forces, bombing in Europe concentrated successively on at least three different target systems; each proved indecisive.
In the Korean War, we attacked dams piecemeal, blowing the enemy to draw down the impounded Water and neutralize subsequent attacks.
In North Vietnam, we conducted damage control Gaining for the enemy, destroying at least one of each type of target before eventually attacking all •ne targets of any given type.
As for shortages, we started World War 11 and Korea with woefully inadequate forces—not so in •etnarn. (Poor management by the Office of the Secretary of Defense eventually produced an ord- aance shortage, followed by a Navy aircraft short- a8e> but these were both transient and unnecessary.) Vietnam was different. Or was it? One can argue hat the piecemeal gradualism which so marked and ■barred the early air war in Vietnam stemmed as a^uch from delays in building up land-based tactical a,r force levels and logistics as from civilian over- Spntrol of the military. At least increases in Rolling Ihunder sortie authorizations from Washington closely paralleled the buildup of Air Force strength °j} Thai bases in 1965. In any event, a further source °* the ineffective targeting which seems to have ocCUrred in the early stages of prior wars was the combination of inadequate resources and the presSUre to do something.
Command direction from afar in Vietnam has been eaten to death as a subject. Suffice it to say that Cven instant communications do not provide enough information to permit people in Washington or at a meater headquarters to play God intelligently. Tell a commander what to do, not how to do it. Failure 0 observe this cardinal rule reduces effectiveness Jnd, in some cases, leads directly to unnecessary
aircraft losses, dead aircrewmcn, and prisoners of war.
None of the above is really about how tactical air works; it is about how we misuse it—at least initially—in war. How it works is explicit in those cases where air power was brilliantly successful:
► The Battle of France, 1940
► Operation “Strangle,” the 1944 interdiction campaign behind a moving front in Italy
► The 1944-45 day bombing of the German oil industry and transportation networks
► Defense of Quang Tri and An Loc in 1972
These successes had three things in common: They
were closely connected to a military objective, they were concentrated, and they were overwhelming. This is how tactical air power, like any military arm, works best—just apply the principles of war.
Tactics: The pattern of the past contains many lessons, most of which are relevant to detail how we operate, rather than the more general picture of what can be expected from tactical air. However, two generalizations can be made from our combat experiences: new technology hasn’t changed tactical air warfare very much; and people have performed better than we expected.
It is a common expectation that new technology will significantly change the shape of warfare. Often- cited examples are the demise of cavalry and battleships. Well, cavalry no sooner became tactically obsolete than armor appeared to become a potentially decisive arm, and we’ve used battleships to good effect in every one of our last three wars. Similar cases exist in the tactics of tactical air.
The classic case is that hardy weed of air combat: the dogfight. It has perennially been predicted to be dead, a victim of new technology. Before World War II, the prediction was based on increased aircraft speed. Before Korea, jet fighter characteristics were held to be incompatible with air combat maneuvering. Before Vietnam, many people thought missiles and radar would decide aerial engagements without close-in visual combat. Such expectations were not restricted to amateurs. As previously noted, we adopted a fighter (the F-4) whose characteristics were sufficiently unsuitable for dogfighting that its effective use required tactics of previously unparalleled intelligence and complexity. And sometimes overzealous commanders even managed to stamp
In Vietnam, a photo intelligence officer briefing a pilot before an airstrike, routinely (usually quite innocently) withheld information aircrews would find of inestimable value or, more often, mistakenly edited the key fact of highest value to the tactician.
out systematic air combat maneuver training, an action not appreciated by most of the fighter aircrews they commanded. Yet, aided by the peacetime evasion of many aircrews and the wartime realities of combat, this pinnacle of aviation experience has survived all the predictions of its demise to become the hardy perennial of air war and flourishes even today. Despite this track record, we do not now lack for those who are renewing the prediction that there will be no dogfights next time.
Another similar example is the failure of guided air-to-surface missiles to change the tactical air picture radically. We went through three or four generations of guided ordnance (in current jargon, PGMs—precision guided munitions) during the Vietnam War. First there was Bullpup. I remember clearly how popular this weapon was with systems analysts in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 1963-64 and how the Navy came under fire for not buying enough of them. The Bullpup had a short and undistinguished combat record in 1965-66.
The next panacea was Walleye, which removed man from the loop after launch (before development of a data link). The Walleye proved to be useful and effective against contrasty, well-defined soft targets given the right sun angle, but all-in-all played a limited and specialized role in Vietnam.
The Air Force employed laser-guided bombs with effect but, in strikes against heavily defended targets, used so many aircraft to protect the small number of bombers that it is debatable whether or not effectiveness per total effort was increased over that achievable with iron bombs.
Finally, we fired thousands of antiradiation missiles at guidance radars for surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). The most obvious result in high-threat areas was that equal or greater numbers of SAMs were fired back at the shooters, a useful result from the point of the strike group but not one testifying to great antiradar effectiveness. Indeed, the North Vietnamese demonstrated greater respect for electronic countermeasures than they did for antiradar missiles. They mounted a man with high-powered optics atop their SAM guidance radar, the target of our antiradiation missiles: a rather blunt comment on our effectiveness.
Some would argue these results were limited to the peculiar environment of the Vietnam War. Well, the environment wasn’t always peculiar. In 1972, we had something akin to many mental images of a “real” war. Just about every kind of target (including armor) was present in respectable quantities; close support aircraft near the demilitarized zone operated under the threat of SAM defenses; the weather was predominantly good and the tactical situation urgent. During this period, tactical aircraft operating over North Vietnam dropped 60 unguided weapons for every “smart bomb” delivered.
Factors that constrained the use of guided weapons were many, varied, sometimes subtle, and hard to describe—much less document. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the burden of proof rests with those who claim that some new weapon system will radically change offensive strike tactics and effectiveness. It is difficult, indeed, to foresee the operational difficulties which will be encountered by new weapons—especially those which have their flexibility reduced by removing man from real-time control.
Perhaps these past—possibly future—errors occurred because reasoning ignored or downplayed the influence of those highly tuned, nonlinear feedback servomechanisms: the aircrews. People stubbornly refuse to be passive and, in many respects, their performance has been—unlike that of machinery—better than predicted.
One illustration of this is the tempo of carrier operations, a discretionary tactical input to a war which is sensitive to human performance or commanders’ perceptions of human limits. This temp0 has increased, seemingly without visible limit. In Korea, carriers typically flew for two or three days* then had a nonflying day. In Vietnam, the norm early became 20- to 30-day line periods (sometimes longer) with maybe one nonflying day. Today, ofl the Persian Gulf, the norm is flying four days out ot six, while staying at sea continuously for 100 or more days.
Paralleling this trend, and also stemming directly from increased human performance, has been the level of flying effort per carrier day. During the Korean War, fast carriers averaged 90 sorties per day; in Vietnam, the average was 120 sorties. Ordnance delivery tripled from 30 kilotons a year in Korea to about 100 kilotons per year in Southeast Asia. Before the Vietnam War, the Operations Evaluation Group (OEG) made some highly respected studies of sortie rates; none of their estimates even remotely approached the levels we saw in combat. During 1965-66, while senior OEG representative at Pacific Fleet headquarters, I directed three studies of sortie rates. Three times, I had to retrieve them from the printer. Just as they were about to be published, the sortie rate allocations were raised significantly, and our carriers and their air wings promptly exceeded what our latest study had predicted to be their maximum capability.
1
Such examples abound. In 1965, Rear Admiral Edward C. Outlaw, then Commander Task Force 77, raised the required aircraft load for carriers— 10% in the case of Hancock-class ships—and vigorously policed compliance. Everyone, especially the aircraft handlers, protested vehemently—but they complied without apparent trouble. Even a much- maligned aspect of performance—pilot ability to find and hit small, obscure targets—improved to a de-
§ree inconceivable before the war.
Finally, attrition decreased markedly as the war Progressed. This was clearly the result of an aircrew •earning process. At the beginning of the war, the Process was fairly dramatic and readily observable. Many peacetime tactics and weapons rapidly fell into disuse; the chief victims were those involving •ow-altitude exposure. Then our aircrewmen gin- 8prly learned that they could cope with surface-to- a,r missiles without the benefit of electronic countermeasures. Thereafter, the learning process be- carne subtle and complex. We could only note that there were significant decreases in loss rates, both Navy and Air Force. The most striking case involved the Hai Duong Bridge and nearby targets. ”e never made a strike there in 1965 without losing at least one aircraft. That year, we lost aircraft at a rate of 39 per 1,000 attack sorties. By 1967, we had reduced attrition around Hai Duong by a factor of V- In a randomly selected 30-day period, the attri- h°n rate was 3 per 1,000 attack sorties. Improved hardware made a contribution and, probably more Important, we were striking two or three times a day lr) J967 instead of once or twice a fortnight as we did in 1965. But the defenses had also improved in finality and substantially increased in quantity. The bottom line was that our aircrews had learned how to live within a dense SAM and flak environment, atld they learned faster than the defenders.
These last two examples of unexpectedly good human performance illustrate the point well, but they j^ay apply to only the Vietnam experience. The sta- hfiity of geographical assignments and the repeated e*posure of aircrews to what became a familiar en- Vlronment were conducive to an unprecedented sharpening of skills. The point is that we can expect ^•facies of well-trained people, but not the machinerY they operate.
Effectiveness: Since the end of World War II, no d>rect, objective, complete data have been compiled °n what air attack has accomplished. Moreover, we are unable to visualize the impact of massive air affitck. We have not experienced such a thing ashore since 1942, and afloat since 1945. Theoretical analysis isn’t of much help, either. In the absence of •Jata, you can’t make a theoretical model of something you can’t visualize. This has led to many schools °f thought about the most effective way to use tactual air.
One —once widespread among systems analysts-—in the Office of the Secretary of Defense was that any air effort beyond the battlefield was inherently ineffective or too costly. This reflects the other side of our lack of experience in being attacked from the air: We only dimly comprehend all of the benefits °f operating under air supremacy. Moreover, we ‘°rget that our offensive air effort provided air supremacy over our troops by taking the air war to the enemy and tying up his air force over its own territory. Whatever else our tactical air effort accomplished, it did that in all three wars. Offensive tactical air power is in the same position as the U. S. Navy. It has been so uniformly successful in achieving its primary mission that it is in danger of being taken for granted.
For indirect evidence of the effectiveness of tactical air in accomplishing other tasks, consider the changes in Soviet force structures over the past decade. Because we were fighting their allies, the Soviets presumably have a better picture than we do of what we did or did not accomplish with tactical air in Korea and Vietnam. Perhaps this is the reason their tactical air is now emphasizing longer range offensive aircraft rather than sophisticated air-to-air fighters, and has even put to sea.
Future effectiveness is harder to assess. The fact that the Soviet Union, in addition to making a massive investment in air defenses, is attempting to mimic our tactical air capabilities ashore and afloat is enough to guarantee this. Any detailed predictions are likely to be wrong, or at best misleading. It is better to generalize on the key ways in which tactical air worked in the past. Whether the target is an air force, a tank army, or a navy, whether the enemy is Soviet or not, whether the strategic situation is offensive or defensive, the following will probably apply:
► The tactical offense is easier and more effective than the tactical defense. It may be costly in aircraft and aircrews, but it will probably be more cost- effective in terms of the whole campaign or war.
► The offense must attack an important target system and pulverize it.
► The offensive planning should not rely heavily upon new weapons as sources of revolutionary effectiveness to make the attack overwhelming.
► Double and triple check your intelligence. Don’t take anything for granted.
► If you want an initial learning period, or have inadequate force, don't alert the enemy by attacking a fragment of a decisive target system.
Above all, in the future as in the past, tactical air will work best when it capitalizes on people—on the flight deck, in shops and magazines, and in aircraft— tapping capabilities even they aren't sure they possess. Remember that aircrews are highly motivated to be effective and stay alive. They are the only ones with firsthand information on what’s happening, and their intuition on how best to operate becomes very sharp. Aircrews, not hardware, are what make tactical air work well. Don’t get in their way.
Mr. Haering is head of the Strike Warfare Branch for the Chief of Naval Operations' Systems Analysis Division. In 1980. he was named a Meritorious Executive by then-President Jimmy Carter.