Document created: 25 March 02
Aerospace
Power Journal - Spring 2002
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We encourage your comments via letters to the editor or comment cards. All correspondence should be addressed to the Editor, Aerospace Power Journal, 401 Chennault Circle, Maxwell AFB AL 36112-6428. You can also send your comments by E-mail to aspj@maxwell.af.mil. We reserve the right to edit the material for overall length.
Thanks for the great article by 1st Lt Tracey Richardson (“A CGO Look at the Commander in Chief,” posted to Air Chronicles on 18 December 2001). I know the author personally as a previous commander, and it is inspirational to see outstanding ideas and commentary coming forth, especially from someone who is very busy doing warrior’s work by keeping the C-17 fleet moving and not just sitting around in a pure academic environment. Her efforts should be commended and are from where I sit (stuck in the Pentagon). Thanks for providing an outlet for our many fine company grade officers.
Col Jay T. Denney
Arlington, Virginia
I read Col Bobby J. Wilkes’s article “Silver Flag: A Concept for Operational Warfare” (Winter 2001) with interest and proffer some comments. The reason we have attrition-model war games is that people with an Army mentality wrote them. The Army’s method of war has always focused at the line of contact (regardless of how deep the line was), and attrition of enemy equipment and forces was the order of the day. Additionally, it was easier to model, and most of the analysts who wrote the models thought in terms of destruction of the enemy in battle; also, successful battles lead to a successful conclusion called “winning the war.”
The Air Force fought hard to turn it around, but Tactical Air Command (TAC) was more interested in getting into bed with the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command and minimizing the political turmoil in Washington. Budgets were at stake, you know. Additionally, the Air Force had little understanding of warfare and the employment of airpower at the corporate level. We couldn’t articulate a viable alternative with a recent history of success. We had people who understood the employment of airplanes, but the air operations center (AOC) was still a “support” function and not seen as the medium through which you squeezed airplanes, munitions, and men to focus on a target set to achieve certain effects. Check out Haywood Hansell’s book The Air Plan That Defeated Hitler (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975). That was the first “effects-based” war plan. We had lost sight of what we were about because all that expertise was behind the green door of the intelligence mafia, and they were focused on supporting the national level and the Single Integrated Operational Plan (a national war-planning tool). Today, Maj Gen Dave Deptula has successfully articulated the Air Force way of war in a very coherent manner, but it was scripted by the efforts of Chuck Link, me, Willy Rudd, John Vickery, Jack Warden, and a captain of intel who was a targeteer. I focused on getting into NATO air doctrines because we were blocked by TAC from working it with the Army directly. The rest of the crew extracted the fundamentals of what we knew as “operational art” from the Soviet literature. That ferment was down in Checkmate. The Gulf War was the application of that “doctrinal ferment.” Worked pretty well, didn’t it? It took only 12 years to bear fruit.
At another time and place, I engaged my old director of operations, Moody Suter, in a conversation at US Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) about why we don’t network the USAFE/NATO AOCs to the Warrior Prep Center at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, and play war games from the bunkers where the European war would be fought. Even if the war-game models were attrition oriented, we would still train the staffs in how to make the apparatus work and call into question the underlying principles of war on which decisions were being made- nothing new there.
Gen Tony McPeak wanted to improve the training of his brigadiers in handling large formations of disparate aircraft and get rid of some of the tribal thinking. I suspect that he figured he would produce leaders who would think in terms of airpower instead of just airplanes. The problem is, he didn’t go far enough. The colonels should still run the wings, and the brigadiers should run the organizations through which the resources are focused. Gen John Jumper made that connection by declaring the AOC the main course, not support. Over time we have been trying to circumvent the intelligence mafia by linking the sensor to the AOC directly. We were successful with national assets- U-2s, Global Hawk, satellites, and Predators- but not at the tactical level, the one that supports the joint force air component commander. General Jumper also correctly noted that the focus of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance is to link the sensor to the shooter directly in real time and to have persistence over the battle space.
There is a picture of a night refueling of a B-2 on the cover of Armed Forces Journal International with the caption “RELENTLESS” in bold yellow letters. It sums up the nature of war: never give the enemy an even chance. It is more moral to make him die for his country than for you to die for yours. The latter part of that sentence is the principle of war known as “economy of force.” It also sums up the American way of war that we have been driving towards since Vietnam.
The organization that runs the air war, the combat air operations center (CAOC), through which airplanes become airpower, should be run by the brigadiers who will one day employ the forces as three-stars. Such an organization should have not only the command-and-control computer support, but also ownthe civil engineering and communications support that completes the hookup. That is a big package! There should be more than one or two, and they should be mobile and deployable- and exercised regularly. To me, Silver Flag is a smaller part of this entity. It is the basic-training entity from which a brigadier is graduated- or flunked- to command air forces at one of the CAOC locations. The CAOCs would keep their skills sharp under one of these brigadier-led teams for at least three years, maintaining the integrity of the unit. They would run all joint force exercises, service exercises, Green Flags, Red Flags, Blue Flags, Cope Thunders, and so forth, and be ready for a contingency operation.
I have learned that not all minds can think in terms of a command post, so not all should be selected for such duty. If a brigadier flunks the training, he or she goes into acquisition, maintenance, or something appropriate- same thing for the men and women who are below that rank and in training.
Perhaps Colonel Wilkes can flesh out his concept and get himself hired by the chief to build this necessary structure and training ground for employing airpower. Do the manpower and equipment, and you will have a real plaything. This isn’t rocket science- just hard, painful skull work and list making.
Bob Clark
Arlington, Virginia
Several articles in the Summer 2000 issue of APJ dealt with casualty aversion and its implications for national policy. By way of contrast, a curious notion in other recent military think pieces runs the other way. The counterargument goes like this: if the United States is to demonstrate its commitment in a crisis, it must do so by putting ground forces into the fray, thus risking their blood. One sees a very good example of this line of thinking in “The Plight of Joint Doctrine after Kosovo,” Joint Force Quarterly, Summer 1999, by Col Peter F. Herrly, USA, retired:
Kosovo lays bare a fundamental problem evaded by joint doctrine during the early 1990s. As French General Philippe Morillon remarked: “What good are members of an armed force who are permitted to kill but not to die?” An obsessive fear of casualties not only robs warfare of useful tools (such as infantry, tanks, and manned aircraft), but on a deeper level strips away its redeeming qualities. Conflict has always presented a terrible dual reality for soldiers: the necessity to kill and the willingness to sacrifice oneself for a greater cause. In Kosovo the cause was just. But what message was sent? That the lives of 10,000 Kosovars are not worth the life of a single American or allied soldier?
The fact that extensive combat operations could last for two and a half months without the loss of one servicemember to hostile fire is an astonishing tribute to the leadership and skill of the participants. . . . But given the horrors inflicted on the Kosovars, we must ask if the right type of campaign was conducted and if the standard of zero casualties can be justified.
Two aspects of jointness- the joint campaign and decisive force, both of which require the display of courage- appear to be jeopardized. Joint Pub 1 [Joint Warfare of the Armed Forces of the United States] must be revised. This is the moment to rethink the reasons for service to the Nation- not in terms of the price we are willing to pay, but the price that we may be allowed to pay. The effects of this reexamination, like every doctrinal pursuit, will have far-reaching implications for the Armed Forces (p. 104).
Granted, we live in interesting times, but when exactly did the death of America’s soldiers become an ennobling and worthy goal? And has anyone asked the privates and corporals how they feel about this notion? Have some Army officers become so wedded to the notion of the close battle and so wedded to the notion that it is the decisive element of combat that they have lost the ability to recognize other solutions?
The “need to bleed” arguments are the ultimate manifestation of symmetrical thinking. The underlying implication smacks of a suspicion of the morality behind the employment of aerospace power. Somehow, striking the enemy at a distance is unmanly, sneaky, and ungentlemanly. If so, what are we to make of the Army’s investment in the “deep battle”? Never mind that, if done right, it makes the soldier’s job easier and safer. Is that service ready to walk away from the Army Tactical Missile System, multiple rocket launchers, or the Comanche helicopter because they “strip away the redeeming qualities of warfare”?
Gen George Patton supposedly said, “No dumb bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won the war by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.” David did not close with Goliath; he stayed out of his reach and killed him with a standoff weapon. Nobody I know of thinks the less of David.
Lt Col Robert Poynor, USAF, Retired
Maxwell AFB, Alabama
I was gratified that your reviewer Capt Clifford E. Rich captured the essence of my book Military Assistance: An Operational Perspective so well and summarized my findings so clearly and succinctly in your Winter 2001 issue. I share Captain Rich’s feeling that an appreciation of US involvement in South Vietnam remains incomplete without a parallel appraisal of Soviet military assistance to North Vietnam. Although the early drafts of this volume included a summary of Soviet and Chinese support for Hanoi, editorial considerations led to my decision to delete these sections from this volume and expand the Soviet summary into a separate study of Soviet military assistance to both North Vietnam and Cambodia in my subsequent companion volume Soviet Military Assistance: An Empirical Perspective (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001). Captain Rich and your readers will no doubt have an interest not only in the second volume but also in the third volume United States Military Assistance: An Empirical Perspective (forthcoming from Greenwood Press, 30 July 2002), both of which apply and refine the paradigm and findings developed and presented in this first volume of the series.
Lt Col William H. Mott IV, USA, Retired
Lynnfield, Massachusetts
Every bullet has its billet. Nothing happens by chance, and no act is altogether without some effect. “There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them as we will.” Another meaning is this: an arrow or bullet is not discharged at random, but at some mark or for some deliberate purpose.
--E. Cobham Brewer
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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