Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing

Conclusion

Airpower is a tool with many limitations, but in its short history it has profoundly transformed the nature of war. As a navy can move across oceans to strike without warning at a hostile shore, so too aircraft can appear over the very heart of a country on the first day — or in the first minutes — of hostilities, bringing the war instantly to people and places which in the past could only be reached after years of campaigning and the loss of countless lives. At the same time defenses against air attack — interceptors, ground-based anti-aircraft guns, and surface-to-air missiles — have also improved rapidly, in testimony to the threat of this new military capability. But the race in military history between offensive and defensive technologies generally works in favor of the offense.

America has recently developed two revolutionary offensive capabilities. The first, stealth, denies an enemy the ability to detect, and therefore protect against, a deep and damaging strike. Stealth is not black magic; it is a technical fact. When used properly in the design of an aircraft, missile, ship, or even submarine, stealth gives the attacker a decisive advantage over almost any kind of sensor from radars to sonars. The second capability, precision-guided munitions (PGMs), gives the attacker the means not so much to do explosive "surgery" as to use his weapons with a far higher degree of efficiency. No longer is laying down a carpet of bombs on a target a viable political or military option. Given the worldwide abhorrence of collateral damage from air strikes, use of PGMs is not only desirable, but may become required in the future. The combination of these two technological capabilities offers our national leadership opportunities unknown since the demise of a small and vicious sovereignty in the Middle East whose name has come into the English lexicon as a curse — Assassin. During the Middle Ages, from their mountain fortress in Lebanon, the military-religious Order of the Hashishin preserved their independence by killing any caliph, khan, sultan, emperor, or shah who dared to threaten them.

War is, after all, nothing more than organized murder, sanctioned by a government. And while war might sometimes be necessary, the more quickly and efficiently it can be concluded, the less harm is done to innocent people in the process. The very horror of war has, in recent times, sometimes deterred its necessity. This is a source of hope for the future survival of our species. The first sign of that hope was the inability of "civilized" nations to bring themselves to use their most potent weapons — thermonuclear arms — during the Cold War.

Despite deep and fundamental differences in philosophy that throughout history were the basis for major conflict, the balance of terror that thermonuclear weapons imposed (known euphemistically as Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD) kept the peace, such as it was. The weapons and the military units designed to use them, we ought to remember, were in place for two generations, always ready for a push of the button. Yet the button wasn't pushed, because rationality somehow took precedence over ideology. Thank God.

Part of that rationality was motivated by the advance of airpower (if we may include strategic missiles and orbital satellites in the definition), and the immediate future could well see a further application of the same principle. Thus, the mating of stealth technology and PGMs today means that the decision-makers who send young men off to die can now be targeted directly. No one is truly safe from such a precision attack, and personal vulnerability might well make a dictator think twice and then again before committing his country to war — if, that is, America develops the doctrine and installs the capability to target those who instigate war. Clausewitz liked to talk about an enemy's "center of gravity," meaning those things which a nation had to protect in order to survive. But the real center of gravity of any nation is its decision-makers, be they presidents, prime ministers, dictators, or juntas. No person becomes a chief of state, or group a leadership team, in order to suffer. The exercise of power, especially for despots, is heady wine indeed. Hiding in deep bunkers (which may no longer be safe in any case) cannot be fun. Nor is traveling about with the constant knowledge that a single enemy intelligence officer, or a domestic traitor, needs to finger the target only one time. What has emerged, then, is the ability to apply the well-named MAD principle of nuclear arms to conventional weapons, to fight a war with ultimate efficiency.

This idea is still what some might call "blue-sky"; but it is a fact that the capability now exists (even though we never quite managed to turn off Saddam Hussein's personal radio transceiver). The ability to strike deep and strike accurately could well become the best excuse for people to find something other than war as an instrument of international policy.

To use airpower effectively one must understand its limits, as well as it capabilities:

• Airpower Is Costly. It is easy to be appalled by the notion of a twenty million dollar fighter, a fifty million dollar fighter bomber, or a five hundred million dollar stealth bomber. But the dollar cost of an aircraft does not even begin to measure the true cost of airpower. It costs thousands of dollars an hour to keep even the simplest jet trainer in the air. An effective air force requires a vast infrastructure of training, maintenance, and administrative support. It requires a whole range of specialized industries that draw talent and productive resources away from other sectors of the economy.

• Airpower Is Fragile. On June 22nd, 1941, most of the Soviet "Frontal Aviation" tactical aircraft were caught on the ground and destroyed by the German Luftwaffe. Six months later, on December 8th, virtually the entire U.S. Army air force in the Philippines was caught on the ground and destroyed by Japanese air attacks on Clark Field. On June 5th, 1967, most of the offensive power of the Egyptian Air Force was caught on the ground and destroyed in a single morning's work by Israeli Air Force attacks. Even more fragile than the airplanes themselves is the network of radars, command centers, communications facilities, fuel systems, and munitions depots that make airpower possible. An entire air force can be wiped out in a few hours. As the Iraqis learned in the Gulf War, even the most strongly built shelters cannot protect an air force that has lost control of the air space above them.

• Airpower Is Not a Substitute for Clear Military Objectives. Especially when it is used piecemeal, for limited political purposes. This was the clear lesson of Vietnam, where hundreds of American and South Vietnamese aircraft were shot down between 1964 and 1972 without inflicting strategically significant damage on the elusive enemy. Years earlier, political limitations on the use of airpower helped to turn the Korean War from a decisive Allied military victory into a protracted stalemate. Even the Israelis, so skillful in the political employment of airpower, have conducted hundreds of air strikes on "terrorist bases" without significant impact on the political base of the terrorist threat to the Israeli people. The "limited punitive air strike" may play well on the evening news to a domestic audience, but it generally only serves to solidify the enemy's will to resist. All too often, it also serves as a "hostage delivery system," leaving hapless downed aircrews as bargaining chips in the hands of the enemy. A good example was the 1983 raid by U.S. Navy aircraft on Syrian anti-aircraft positions in Lebanon. The result was two aircraft lost, another damaged, one pilot killed, and another captured by the Syrians, requiring the intervention of the Reverend Jesse Jackson to obtain his release. A lousy trade for a few AAA guns!

Ironically, naval and land power can serve as limited political tools where airpower cannot, because an airplane does not establish presence. For decades, the presence of the U.S. Army in Europe and Korea deterred Communist attack, even when that Army turned into a hollow shell in the post-Vietnam period. The presence of the U.S. Navy in the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean has a similar stabilizing geopolitical influence.

Consider the current attempts of the Western powers to influence events in the former Yugoslavia. NATO combat air patrols (Operation Deny Flight), airstrikes on Bosnian Serb military positions, and a multinational naval blockade in the Adriatic have failed to change the behavior of the Bosnian Serbs in any significant way, because they do not reach the Serbian center of gravity in Belgrade. But the token presence of a few hundred U.S. paratroops as a UN peacekeeping force in Macedonia has preserved the existence of that fragile republic. Even Serbs are not crazy enough to directly challenge United States ground forces. Symbolically speaking, when you shoot down my airplane, that is an unfortunate incident, but when you kill my soldiers or sink my ship, that is an act of war.

Perhaps airpower will never conquer ground. Perhaps airpower cannot linger in place as long as ships. But airpower can take the fight to the enemy's heart and brain in a way and with a speed impossible for the more traditional fighting arms. It is, moreover, almost entirely an American invention which, like democracy, has changed the face of the world, and, as shown in Operation Iraqi Freedom, continues to shape and define the tactics and execution of modern warfare.