Spring Edition 99

It was most gratifying to read Dr. James Corum’s article “The Air War in El Salvador” in the Summer 1998 issue of the Airpower Journal. Dr. Corum, a member of the faculty at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies at Maxwell AFB, Alabama, has made a commendable effort to describe the role played by the Salvadoran air force (Fuerza Aérea Salvadoreña [FAS, in its Spanish acronym]) during that costly 12-year insurgency that plagued our nation. As I see it, his article closely reflects the sequence of events that took place during that time frame.

Most authors who have shared their insights on the conflict are not native Salvadorans. So, as Dr. Corum correctly points out, although airpower played a significant role, there isn’t much literature on the history of FAS, which has done very little to disseminate its version of the events.

The author’s excellent article is detailed, objective, and balanced. This letter seeks to enrich that article—not to generate controversy. (Also, the opinions expressed here are solely mine and not those of either the Salvadoran air force or Air University.) I believe, however, that Dr. Corum should have interviewed FAS officers who were attending Air War College (AWC)/Air Command and Staff College (ACSC) at Maxwell to glean some valuable firsthand insights for his article, whose endnotes clearly show a lack of direct contact with FAS representatives. All Salvadoran officers who attended AWC/ACSC either during or after the conflict could have been of great assistance. I, for one, would have been honored to have met with him. Having been an active participant in that conflict, I still have a vivid memory of most of what he discusses. After joining the El Salvadoran armed forces in 1983, I attended undergraduate pilot training under the international military education and training program, to which Dr. Corum alludes on page 34 of his article. I also flew over two hundred combat missions on the AC-47 (page 33) and helped reorganize the FAS intelligence section (page 38).

There are a few details that would not have gone unnoticed by a Salvadoran. San Miguel, the country’s third most important city, is located in the eastern, not southern, part of the country. FAS never had Super Mystère fighters in its inventory. All FAS T-34s and T-6s had already been retired a few years before the outbreak of the conflict. The attack helicopter used during the insurgency was the UH-1M, not the UH-1H (page 29). Also, 1983 ended badly with the destruction of the 4th Brigade headquarters during the night of 29 December and early hours of the morning of 30 December (not on 31 December, as Dr. Corum asserts on page 33). What did take place on 31 December was the bombing of the Cuzcatlán bridge over the Lempa River, the country’s largest. I believe that Dr. Corum may have been confused about these two events.

Additionally, some important insights should be shared with anyone who studies the Salvadoran conflict for the first time. First, El Salvador is a small country (approximately the size of Massachusetts). With only 20,000 square kilometers, it is smaller than some of Brazil’s farms. Also, it is the most densely populated country in the Western Hemisphere, with more than two hundred inhabitants per square kilometer.

Second, in 1969 El Salvador waged a brief but violent war against Honduras, its neighbor to the north. That conflict was not resolved until the early 1990s. Although the chances for renewed fighting with Honduras were very slim, FAS remained ready for action if called upon.

Third, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) was no doubt the most organized insurgent force in the Western Hemisphere. It was able to fight in rural and urban areas as a guerrilla force or as urban cells. The FMLN was comprised of five factions based on different ideologies—Maoist, Leninist, Castroist, and so forth. Each of those organizations had its own version as to how to prosecute the war and nurtured the goal of being the “revolutionary front” in its struggle for power. Popular support for these organizations was widespread. As a matter of fact, by the end of the 1970s, they could mobilize up to 250,000 people.

Fourth, the Salvadoran conflict certainly had its roots in the population’s poor economic conditions and the lack of a real democracy, but it was also a part of the East-West conflict characteristic of the cold war. The role played by pressure groups within US and European societies against the Salvadoran government is undeniable as well, thus making it difficult to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys.

In my view Dr. Corum could have provided additional balance to the article by considering the following factors:

RESPONSE TO COLONEL PARRINGTON

I thank Col Alan Parrington for his gracious answer to the critiques Lt Col Dave Howard and I wrote in response to his Winter 1997 article, “Mutually Assured Destruction Revisited.” Nonetheless, I find his answers to our criticism somewhat disturbing. I for one believe that he is “100 percent Air Force” (which, he said, we seemed to doubt). Were he otherwise, I would not have written a letter in response to his article. It concerns me that representatives of academia and the other services misunderstand airpower, but I expect misunderstanding from these sources. But when a prominent senior Air Force officer fundamentally misapprehends airpower’s role, it disturbs me enough to warrant a response.

Colonel Parrington states that we think the Air Force cannot justify its separate existence without an independent “strategic” mission. This is not true. Just the specialization required to gain and maintain aerospace superiority is, as Colonel Parrington rightly points out, enough to justify an independent air arm. In fact, when he mentions that the Army flies more aircraft than the Air Force does, he fails to take his own argument to its logical conclusion. Army helicopters, although able to employ air mobility, are still essentially a surface maneuver element, as tied to the linear battle space as tanks are. Indeed, they are more vulnerable to enemy airpower than tanks and infantry are. They require a force devoted to keeping enemy airpower away from them to enable their operations, just as tanks and infantry do. This alone justifies a separate air force having the specialized role of aerospace superiority as one of its missions. The issue at hand is not the independence of the Air Force, but rather a proper understanding of the nature of war and aerospace power’s role within it.

Colonel Parrington is right to say that “airpower has proven itself the decisive factor in warfare in the twentieth century.” He is wrong, however, in his understanding of why this is so. He implies that this happened because airpower was used exclusively to accomplish what he seems to think is its one true mission: air superiority. Paraphrasing Alfred Thayer Mahan in his response in the Fall 1998 issue, Colonel Parrington writes, “‘The principal mission of a navy in war is the destruction of the enemy navy just as the principal mission of an army is the destruction of the enemy’s army.’ It follows that the principal mission of an air force . . . is destruction of the enemy’s air forces . . . and the establishment of air . . . supremacy.” Ignoring for the moment the confusion of supremacy with superiority, the basic contention is just plain wrong. The principal mission of any instrument of national power, military or otherwise, is to achieve objectives that shape a desirable end state to a conflict; that compel an adversary to do our will. Mahan may have made the statement within this quote, but Colonel Parrington took it out of context. The body of Mahan’s writings emphasizes that “more almost than armies . . . navies are instruments of international relations” (see Alfred Thayer Mahan, “Navies as International Factors,” in Armaments and Arbitration [New York: Harper Brothers, 1912], 66). In wartime, control of an enemy’s “strategic or vital centres” is the ultimate aim: “Only by military command of the sea by prolonged control of the strategic centres of commerce can . . . an attack [on a nation] be fatal” (Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 [Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1918], 539). Such control, Mahan said, was facilitated by destruction of enemy navies, but the latter by itself was not the ultimate aim. Mahan was his era’s greatest proponent of the independent strategic role of sea power.

To use an example from history, the greatest test of the US Navy of the nineteenth century was its use in blockading Confederate ports during the Civil War. While this effort required a substantial degree of sea superiority (supremacy—the total absence of resistance—was never achieved), its aim was economic strangulation and the crippling of war industry. Destruction of the Confederate Navy was incidental to this aim. Indeed, the aim could theoretically have been achieved without firing a single shot (had the Confederates chosen not to contest the blockade). Similarly, on land, Grant’s closing of the Mississippi, Sherman’s march to the sea, and Sheridan’s campaign in the Shenandoah were undertaken with the neutralization of Confederate economic centers of gravity in mind. Destruction of the armies standing in the way was necessary to enable these operations, but was not an end unto itself.

In fairness, armed forces are, more often than not, also strategic or operational centers of gravity. They enable an enemy to act against us, just as do the war industries that support them. Grant’s aim in the Civil War’s main eastern theater in 1864–65 was the destruction of the Army of Northern Virginia. That army’s defense of Richmond was ultimately of secondary importance. Mahan criticized the French and their allies in the mid-eighteenth century for sniping at British commerce and not taking on the Royal Navy itself (a strategic center of gravity) while they had a superior fleet. We should not overlook the importance of disabling armed forces—including air forces—as an end unto itself in many conflicts.

The point is that this is just one of the things the various instruments of national power are called upon to do. The nature of a conflict and its intended end state drive the choice of which centers of gravity to affect and which tools should be used to affect them. Sometimes, realization of the end state will require destruction of the enemy’s armed forces; other times perhaps not. Even if such destruction is an aim, the best tool for the work may not require direct attack upon the targeted armed force. For instance, the Royal Navy’s blockade of Germany in World War I arguably had more effect on Germany’s army by 1918 than had all the shelling and assaults of the previous four years. Air forces, armies, and even economic sanctions may be the tools of choice in other conflicts. In almost all cases, a synergistic blend of all the tools, properly integrated and orchestrated, is better than any one or several used in isolation.

By artificially limiting airpower to the role of destroying other air forces, we risk missing many options airpower’s other capabilities give us. Airpower requires some degree of superiority to enable all the things listed below so that air superiority cannot be stinted. But airpower has also been used very effectively to shock, dislocate, and destroy maneuvering surface forces directly; to immobilize land forces behind enemy lines; to destroy surface forces assembling or in port; to deny enemy forces vital supplies; to cripple war industries that fielded forces depend on; and to directly disable economic centers. (The latter two were finally accomplished in World War II, despite missteps like Schweinfurt and Nuremberg, with attacks on the German transportation system.) It also moves, supports, and sustains forces, furnishes commanders with vital intelligence, and (of late) has been used to directly isolate and induce shock on enemy command structures. Armies and navies can also do most of these things, but they must usually plow through enemy forces or maneuver to positions of decisive advantage before they can do so. Air forces have the unique ability to accomplish many deep effects without first having to defeat or outmaneuver enemy surface forces. All of these effects can be accomplished without directly attacking enemy populations (a straw man Colonel Parrington sets up to stand for “strategic” use of airpower). And yes, airpower can (with or without nuclear weapons) help deter war, just as armies and navies can.

Colonel Parrington speaks of maneuver warfare, but I’m not certain from his comments that he understands it fully. Current maneuver warfare doctrine, an extension of the blitzkrieg concept, uses fire and maneuver to induce shock, confusion, and dislocation in an enemy faster than he can adapt, and to then exploit his disorder before he can react. This is the way the Army and Marine Corps think and fight, and it is the right way to think about land warfare. Its only limitation is that it encompasses only three dimensions (two horizontal and time). Extend the concept into a fourth dimension (the vertical) and you open a whole new range of effects and a whole new arena of decisive maneuver. You can impose shock and dislocation on an entire enemy system, including—but not limited to—its armed forces. Maneuver warfare extended into four dimensions is the soul of air warfare properly understood. Fighting this way requires close cooperation with surface forces throughout the spectrum of conflict but also entails using aerospace forces for much more than just defeating enemy airpower.

Colonel Parrington says that failure to emphasize air superiority might lead to more Pearl Harbors. True, as far as it goes, but artificially constraining the role of air led directly to the original Pearl Harbor by blinding the Navy to the potential of the aircraft carrier. I’m sure Colonel Parrington does not intend that we return to industrial meat-grinder, force-on-force conflicts, but an unintended consequence of his limiting ideas might be a return to such warfare were these ideas to lead to artificial constraints on airpower. Prominent and distinguished officers like him should be advocates for all of aerospace power’s capabilities.

RESPONSE TO “A FAILURE OF VISION”

Captains Fred Kennedy, Rory Welch, and Bryon Fessler’s article, “A Failure of Vision: Retrospective” (Summer 1998), misses the mark. Sure, the United States—as a free and open society—is vulnerable to chemical and biological attack from within our own borders. And yes, our telecommunications infrastructure is equally vulnerable to attack by a dedicated and competent foe.

But while the targets in “A Failure of Vision” may be strategic centers of gravity, they are not utterly essential to our national health and well-being. A common misconception when discussing information operations is to believe that the constituent elements of a network are incapable of operating independently of the network itself.

So, all that the cabal of adversaries in “A Failure of Vision” accomplished was a derailment of the most centralized elements of our strategic command apparatus—and not a decapitation of the industrial-age forces in the Republic of Korea, on the surface of the oceans, or elsewhere on the globe. Since the three captains are serving time inside the beltway, their seeming disregard for our operational forces’ ability to think for themselves is forgivable. However, their implication that “a few simple systems” could avert such a disaster raises both incredulity and suspicion. Are they simply trying to sell more technocentric solutions in the guise of espousing the need for “more complex doctrine”?

America derives its strength not from the impermeability of “Fortress America,” but from the resilience of the notion of a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

SPEECH RIGHTS

I read “The Speech Rights of Air Professionals” (Fall 1998) by Col Lloyd J. Matthews, USA, Retired, with some interest, given the current climate of unprecedented commentary coming from within the Air Force. The Air Force corporately, and its senior leadership in particular, tries to sit on the fence on controversial issues such as free speech. It’s my opinion as a junior officer that this lack of leadership leads to confusion in the ranks, and at times open dissension. This is inherently detrimental to the mission and to good order and discipline.

It is only at the end of Colonel Matthews’s article that we finally see the type of guidance the Air Force needs to make clear. He discusses something I think is glossed over in all Air Force training, in all leadership symposia, and, frankly, in most articles on the subject: Air Force members voluntarily give up some of their constitutional rights when they join the service. Freedom of speech is one area that is constrained, both to keep order and discipline and to protect operational security and classified information. But this is not a unique case. For instance, freedom of the press is infringed on even in base newspapers and Army and Air Force Exchange Service stores when the government of the United States establishes clear guidelines on what can and cannot be published and sold on military installations. Ever tried to carry a gun onto a military installation? Your right to bear arms is infringed on for security reasons. Ever heard of the Fourth Amendment (unlawful search and seizure)? Once you step on a military installation, you give implied consent to search and seizure, and there is no requirement for the security police to obtain a warrant. The examples of infringements on our civil rights are countless.

But the real message of Colonel Matthews’s article, and why I am so glad it was written, is that these things are appropriate. It is necessary to limit the speech of military members (not just airmen). We must keep good order and discipline in the ranks. We must protect information that is essential to our operations. It is good for discipline that the restrictions on publishing exist. You can’t really secure an installation where firearms are carried, perhaps covertly at will and without restriction. It is too easy to get into a deadly situation where lives and security are in jeopardy. The bottom line is, that without these necessary and appropriate measures, we as an Air Force, as the United States military, cannot accomplish our mission.

I’d like to see more Air Force leaders in the pulpit preaching the virtues of adherence to military codes of ethics, justice, and yes, free speech. I’m tired of seeing so many outspoken and unprofessional commentaries on the doings of senior civilian leaders, congressional decisions, and so on, regardless of the validity of those commentaries. What happened to the days when military members raised their right hands and swore to obey the lawful orders of their superiors and comply with the Uniform Code of Military Justice? Whatever happened to integrity, doing that which was right, even if it was hard or unfair? We all stood there and swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and should have understood that there were sacrifices required to do so. The bottom line is we volunteered to give up these rights for the good of the nation. If you have second thoughts at this point in your career, it’s time to get out and move on with your life.

THE ARMY WEIGHS IN

I gather from the somewhat shrill response that I touched a nerve in my article “Into the Storm: A Review Essay” in the Summer 1998 issue. In a rebuttal (“Ricochets,” [Winter 1998]) to my article, an Army representative took me to task for (1) branding Gen Fred Franks a coward, (2) failing to properly credit VII Corps with its legitimate achievements in the Gulf War, (3) failing to understand the mind-crushing complexity of wielding an Army heavy corps as a weapon, and (4) being generally ignorant of history and the operational art. I beg to differ.

Let me dispense with one matter up front: I was not accusing General Franks of personal cowardice or of being a man of timid character. On the contrary, General Franks proved his mettle and superior character in everything he did before, during, and after Desert Storm. The strength and personal courage he exhibited in rebuilding his life after losing a leg in combat during Vietnam should be an inspiration to every American. This is the strongest part of Clancy’s book (Into the Storm: A Study in Command), coauthored by General Franks. He shows us Franks’s struggle as a paradigm of the Army’s effort to rebuild itself and renew its self-esteem in the shadow of Vietnam.

In the larger sense, overly cautious command does not equal personal timidity. Personal bravery is usually a predicate for bold field command, but the converse is not always true. Personally brave leaders are not always good field commanders. I would like to think that General Franks’s caution stemmed from a very noble source: his care for the men he had trained and led in VII Corps. Similar feelings have instilled caution before; it’s nothing new.

History often forgets such men, but a few stand out whose undeniable personal bravery was overcome by caution in battle. A few examples: the commanders who faced Napoléon during the 1796–97 Italian campaigns (Count Dagobert Siegmund von Wurmser, Gen Josef Alvintzy, Gen Paul David-ovich, and Archduke Charles of Austria) who squandered several opportunities to crush the outnumbered and over-extended French. (Seldom have so many such commanders been assembled at one place and time, but their generalship suffers more than it might otherwise in comparison with their opponent.) There was also French admiral Pierre Villeneuve, whose failures of will sealed his fleet’s fate against Lord Horatio Nelson at Trafalgar. In American history, Union general George B. McClellan consistently lost battles and opportunities because his innate caution always led him to overestimate the enemy and delay action. In our own century, British field marshal Bernard Law Montgomery likewise squandered opportunities before Palermo, at Falaise, and in the attempted relief of the Remagen bridgehead due to his cautious nature as a commander. (The victory at Alamein was, of course, as much the result of the Germans running themselves out of fuel as it was of anything Montgomery did.) Unfortunately, despite Clancy’s attempt at exculpation, history will probably place General Franks in company with such men.

Now to the meat of the issue: I may not have as thorough an understanding of operational art as I or others might wish, but I understand enough to realize that the objective is the first and most important principle that guides planning and execution of US military operations. VII Corps was given a clear, decisive, measurable, and attainable primary objective: destroy the Iraqi Republican Guard (RG). This objective was central to the war effort. Its achievement carried profound implications at the strategic level for the conflict’s political end state. This objective was not couched in terms of destroying a certain number of enemy divisions, attriting a proportion of enemy equipment, taking certain ground, or proving the capabilities of an Army corps. It meant exactly this: destroy the Republican Guard.

In every aspect short of that objective, VII Corps’s achievements were impressive. It’s true (as stated in the rebuttal) that “VII Corps, under the able command of General Franks, proved with numbers of destroyed Iraqi combat equipment alone, the capabilities of a most effective armored corps.” That may be true—to paraphrase Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, one of the century’s great commanders—but it’s also irrelevant. A US Army officer should not have to be reminded that body counts do not equal victory. We killed nearly a million of the enemy in Vietnam and still lost the war. In the end, VII Corps’s battle was a lot like Antietam: The enemy lost tactically and quit the field but lived to fight another day. The fact that our cost did not run to a myriad dead does not change a thing. Once again, body counts (large or small) do not win wars. Slice VII Corps’s achievements any way you wish, but this underlying fact remains: VII Corps and General Franks failed to achieve their primary objective.

I also know the operational art just well enough to know that the offensive is “the most effective and decisive way to attain a clearly defined objective” (Joint Pub 3-0, Doctrine for Joint Operations, February 1995, A-1). It is disingenuous to say, “Political decisions ended the war early before VII Corps was able to fully dispatch the Republican Guards.” Certainly, the war ended too soon for specious reasons, but this excuse sounds “McClellanesque”: (“I can win the war, Mr. President, if I can only have more time; if I can only have one more division; if only I can wait until all my siege guns are in place; if only I can wait until my divisions are properly rested or synchronized; if only. . . .”) Force protection, synchronization, and logistical coordination are all very important, but they only protect or enable; they do not win. Decisive action wins, and VII Corps had ample time and resources to act decisively against the Republican Guard. General Franks spent nearly 48 hours of the hundred-hour ground war “dressing his lines,” concerned that his divisions were not properly synchronized or that bypassed enemy units would rise up in his rear. As it was, the 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment sliced through a brigade of the Tawakalna RG Division like a knife through butter. This unit, and lead elements of the 1st and 3d Armored Divisions, could probably have driven to the area south of Basra in that 48 hours, in time to prevent escape of the RG and the rest of the Iraqi army. Had General Franks thought more in terms of France 1940 than France 1916, he might have pulled his logistical “tail” (things like his heavy expanded mobility tactical truck [HEMTT] fuel trucks) closer to his front-end units and might have used air and slower surface units to screen his flanks and rear. The British 1st Armoured Division, which screened VII Corps’s right flank against the bulk of Iraqi regular forces in the corps area, felt as if it was just “holding the door open for the U.S. Army” (Gen Bernard Trainor and Michael Gordon, The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf [Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1995], 398). There were more than enough air and surface resources for General Franks to screen his rear from the immobilized and dislocated Iraqi units left behind by his main thrust.

Franks’s concerns seem to reveal a philosophy of war steeped more in the methodical, set-piece mentality of the eighteenth or early twentieth centuries than in the more decisive strategies of the early nineteenth or later twentieth centuries. He seemed to draw his inspiration more from Leopold von Daun, Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban, and Helmuth von Moltke (the younger) than from Napoléon, Erwin Rommel, or George Patton. Here’s the heart of the issue: Franks’s battle in the desert should not have been siege or set-piece warfare writ large; it should have been a blitzkrieg. It should have been dislocation and exploitation warfare; as it was, the dislocation was achieved well beyond expectation (largely by airpower before the surface battle began), but the exploitation did not take place.

However you list the career achievements of General Franks and Gen H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the most important difference between the two was philosophical. The latter intuitively understood maneuver warfare, and the former did not. What’s more, General Schwarzkopf appreciated the concept of the blitzkrieg in its truly joint sense: in four dimensions (two horizontal, the vertical, and time), not just the Army’s traditional three (minus the vertical). General Schwarzkopf’s coup d’oeil enabled him to use airpower to impose dislocation effects and create opportunities for exploitation over the entire Iraqi system, not just on the field of battle. However the two came to their differing understandings of the nature of war, General Schwarzkopf’s was the more correct. This may seem “highly tendentious” and “lacking the virtues of statesmanship or objectivity” to elements of the Army (so characterized in Richard M. Swain, Lucky War: Third Army in Desert Storm [Fort Leavenworth, Kans.: US Army Command and General Staff College, 1994]), but it has been borne out by history.

Perhaps the problem is that the heavy surface corps is just too cumbersome and complex a thing for any present-day American commander to wield, especially since we don’t practice wielding it often enough to become proficient. Perhaps—just perhaps—we need a different paradigm of the operational art for the future. Perhaps it should be based on lighter, leaner, more flexible surface units acting in closer cooperation with the air arm. Perhaps it should recognize that many forms of airpower (not just Army helicopters) are maneuver forces—that air does more than just provide fire support. Perhaps there should be one scheme of maneuver in a campaign, with air sometimes the dominant—and ground sometimes the subordinate—arm. History has shown this to work on a number of occasions. During the blitzkriegs in France and Russia, the Luftwaffe routinely acted as an integral maneuver force, providing the driving wedge (as at Abbeville in 1940), screening flanks, and so forth. Our own tactical air forces performed similar functions in the drive across France in 1944. At Mortain during the Cobra breakout (1944) and at Khafji in Desert Storm, token ground elements served to fix vastly superior enemy forces while airpower destroyed them. None of this, of course, takes into account the systemwide dislocation effects afforded by modern “strategic” uses of airpower.

As former defense secretary James Schlesinger said recently, “It remains true that airpower ‘cannot do the job alone.’ That is right—but irrelevant. In most military operations, it can do a substantial job in obtaining quick victory with low casualties. While that is crucial to America’s international mission, some Army officers have been reluctant to accept the altered role that airpower can play” (James R. Schlesinger, “Raise the Anchor or Lower the Ship,” The National Interest, Fall 1998, p. 2). Balance is not a virtue if it’s used to defend an idea that is wrong; similarly, bias is not necessarily a bad thing if you happen to be right.

GREAT SOLDIERS ON AIRPOWER—AN LOC AND FACS

I would like to comment on Col Jeff Barnett’s excellent article “Great Soldiers on Airpower” in your Winter 1998 edition. He has correctly identified the great debate which rages and will continue to rage concerning the role of airpower in modern war. But his comments on the use of American airpower against the North Vietnamese invasions of South Vietnam in 1972 and 1975 are, in my opinion, somewhat misleading. Specifically, he quotes Jeffrey Clarke’s Advice and Support: The Final Years, 1965–1973 (US Army Center of Military History) when he says that “An Loc would never have held without the handful of American [Army] advisors directing the airstrikes and shoring up the local leadership.”

An Loc certainly was one of the key battles of the war. The army of South Vietnam stopped the enemy offensive there. That effort was, of course, buttressed by significant US air support. I cannot comment on whether or not the American advisors shored up the South Vietnamese commanders. But the remark about their “directing” the air strikes is incorrect. The air strikes were directed and controlled by USAF forward air controllers (FAC). I know that because I was one of them. Flying over the battlefields of that great campaign, and patrolling over the enemy’s interdiction routes, we were the extension of the Seventh Air Force commander and directed the weight of USAF, USN, and USMC airpower against the enemy.

However, when working directly with ARVN and VNMC ground forces, we routinely talked with the US Army and USMC advisors with those units. They would pass us targets which they wanted struck. We did our best to honor their needs and requests. We also received targets from Seventh Air Force intelligence and our own visual reconnaissance, and then attacked the targets. But we—the US Air Force—directed and controlled the air support. Col Barnett reinforces this claim when he further states: “By 1975 American airpower was completely gone (along with the American advisors who would direct the airstrikes).”

Again, the American advisors were not the key to the direction of American airpower. In this case, USAF FACs were still in-theater, as were some USAF strike assets and USN aircraft carriers. Those FACs could easily have worked with the ARVN commanders to direct and control those assets. What was missing was American will to use them once again. By this late date, President Nixon had resigned, and the power of the president to use military force had been severely restricted by the War Powers Act. Additionally, the South Vietnamese air force had been fatally weakened by restrictions on spare parts, ordnance, fuel, SA-7 countermeasures equipment, and anything capable of counteracting the North Viet-namese radar-controlled AAA or SAMs.

Even with all of that, however, the North Vietnamese did not launch their final offensive until they were sure that the United States would not launch air strikes, especially B-52s, against them. They had well learned to fear and respect American airpower. So, perhaps it can be argued that American airpower was decisive in the negative in the Vietnam War—for the enemy only decided to finally commit its forces to the climactic campaign when its leaders concluded that American airpower would not be there.

COMMAND OF THE AIR IN KOREA

“In the end, the judgment was that the superior combat experience among the American flyers was the decisive thing in generating the overwhelming kill ratios against the MiGs. . . . So there is little left but combat experience to explain it.” It is remarkable that Dr. David Mets’s quest for the reason of the superiority of the F-86 Sabres did not come up with a somewhat different answer (“To Kill a Stalking Bird: Fodder for Your Professional Reading on Air and Space Superiority,” Fall 1998). If one reads between the lines, the author already seems puzzled that experience could make up for all the disadvantages the allied pilot had to face. Let us first stress the differences even more by comparing both aircraft. The author does not mention it, but the MiG-15 outperformed the Sabre in speed, acceleration, ceiling, sustained turn rate and so on. So, how was the allies’ stunning 9-to-1 kill ratio against aircraft with such capabilities really possible? If the writer had discussed the matter with somebody who knew the late Col John Boyd, Korean ace and ace in strategic thinking as well, he may have concurred that the answer was not (merely) experience but definitely “agility” also.

One of the reasons for the MiG’s superiority in performance numbers was its low weight, the Sabre being far heavier. This was mainly due to the hydraulic flight control system that the MiG did not have. As a result, however, the Sabre was flyable with fingertips and could transit quickly and easily from one maneuver into another. In the turning fights, the MiG pilot struggled with the controls and needed all his physical strength to fight with the aerodynamic pressures on the control surfaces. Meanwhile, the Sabre would dance around the enemy effortlessly, rendering the MiG pilot’s attempts to maneuver futile or even counterproductive. This is what made the real difference and also formed the base of John Boyd’s famous control loop or OODA (observe-orient-decide-act) loop doctrine, which stated that he who has the fastest and most accurate action/reaction cycle to influence the fight will win—even against the numbers.

It is remarkable that this lesson was not learned at that time, the F-86 being the last fighter pilot’s fighter for a long time. Agility was sacrificed for speed and altitude with the next generation of winged and rocket-like combat aircraft until the appearance of the F-16, designed as John Boyd personally directed, for optimal agility and “energy maneuverability.”

A SPACE SANCTUARY?

In arguing that space should be maintained as a weapon-free sanctuary (“Space Sanctuary: A Viable National Strategy,” Winter 1998), Lt Col Bruce DeBlois usefully promotes and broadens the debate of an important issue. Whatever one believes about the near-term requirements for space control and force-application capabilities, space weaponization is one of the major holes in the Air Force’s case for “aerospace” as a single operational medium. If we believe in the aerospace construct, we acknowledge the physical differences between air and space but emphasize the similarity and complementary nature of the roles and missions conducted there. We must therefore argue that air and space should be treated as much alike as possible in the legal and policy realms. As Colonel DeBlois points out, this is not the case today and the Air Force has often been reluctant to aggressively make such an argument for fear that even the limited technology development and strategic conceptualizing we do might be curtailed by Congress or the admin-istration. The only way out of this corner is through informed debate.

Colonel DeBlois makes a number of good points, not the least of which is that military strategists must objectively address all arguments both for and against space weapons. Nevertheless, many of his conclusions seem more emotional than logical. I believe this stems from building the sanctuary case around the fundamentally flawed analogy between space and nuclear weapons. This comparison has always seemed fantastic and rather paranoid to me, since all the space-related weapons (exclusive of the nuclear-tipped antisatellite missiles described in the article and the phantom orbiting nuclear bomb threat of the 1960s) ever seriously proposed do not, together, add up to the explosive force of a single nuclear weapon or to the lethality of a pound of anthrax spores. In terms of effects, the proper comparisons are things like advanced medium-range, air-to-air missiles and conventional air-launched cruise missiles. That space weapons might be near-instantaneous and “next to impossible” to defend against certainly makes them more formidable (though it dismisses countermeasures too easily), but to assert that they are inherently destabilizing to a degree that is “militarily self-defeating” and “will inevitably incite military coalitions against the United States” is quite a stretch! In fact, space weapons need not be any more destabilizing than F-117s, B-2s, or any of many other unmatched weapons the US fields.

Nor will space be a sanctuary one day and massively weaponized the next, as is implied. The first line of the article had it right: “Space ‘militarization/weaponization’ is not an ‘all-or-nothing’ affair.” The real path to the future will be highly evolutionary. The United States will not embark on a strategy to “weaponize space.” Rather, we (and other nations) will evolve systems that fall under Colonel DeBlois’s definition of space weapons as has always been done—on a system-by-system basis in response to operational requirements and as technology and policy permit. If there is an arms race, it will be rooted in a geopolitical context and will neither be limited to nor exclude space. It will be nation to nation or block to block.

A better analogy, even if the United States were to weaponize space to the degree Colonel DeBlois implies, is the US Navy. We are today a “sea hegemon” in the way he describes a destabilizing “space hegemon.” No other nation in the world fields a blue-water navy that can remotely compete with ours. It is far and away the preeminent sea-control and sea-based force application force today, the exact functional equivalent of the space-control and space-based force application force that space sanctuary advocates fear. Is this destabilizing? Just the opposite; every regional commander in chief today would argue that it’s one of the most stabilizing tools in his bag.

Geopolitical stability is a complex brew, and care is always needed when changing the recipe. Space weapons have historically been avoided and now carry a lot of baggage regardless of one’s position. Nevertheless, we ought not mistake a tractable problem for an intractable one. One space weapon is not like another any more than one air or sea weapon is like another, and one weapon system does not result in or lead to wholesale “space weaponization.” Let’s banish the bogeymen and conduct the space weapons debate from the perspective of national security requirements and exploiting aerospace power to meet them.

One of the marvelous things about life is that any gaps in your education can be filled, whatever your age or situation, by reading and thinking about what you read.

—Warren Bennis

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.