Airpower Thought in the Early Cold War Era

By the end of World War II, the concept of airpower as an independent strategic weapon was firmly established. Although the CBO’s ultimate effect on the outcome of the war in Europe was indeterminate and military analysts and scholars have since debated what factors were most instrumental in forc­ing Japan’s capitulation, conventional wisdom immediately presumed that stra­tegic bombing had won the war—the atomic bombs had forced Japanese lead­ers to accept unconditional surrender.38 This appeared to be a harbinger of how future wars would unfold. Atomic weapons could only be delivered from the air, and only heavy bombers were large enough to carry them. Consequently, the emerging concept of atomic warfare seemed indistinguishable from strate­gic bombing, and airpower became widely accepted as the independent war­winning weapon that theorists had long claimed it to be.

It is ironic that at a time when the concept of strategic airpower seemed most transcendent, further development of airpower thought would grind to a halt. But that is what happened, largely as a result of the impact on thinking caused by the dramatic advance in destructiveness made possible by atomic and later nuclear weapons. Military and political leaders first saw atomic bombs simply as more powerful ordnance, weapons to be used in future wars to achieve military and political objectives more efficiently. But as USSBS investigators learned more about the extent of destruction wrought on the cit­ies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it became increasingly apparent that atomic bombs were weapons in a totally different class from anything used before. The following year, RAND analyst Bernard Brodie published his now classic book, The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order, in which he argued that atomic weapons were so potentially devastating that they would change the very nature of war.39 Thirteen years later, with the United States and Soviet Union both possessing growing stockpiles of nuclear arms, Brodie would write:

Perhaps the most elementary, the most truistic, and yet the most impor­tant point one can make is that the kind of sudden and overwhelming calamity that one is talking about today in any reference to all-out or total war would be an utterly different and immeasurably worse phenomenon from war as we have known it in the past.40

Much had changed by the time Brodie wrote those words. Soon after the end of World War II, America’s erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union, had emerged as its rival in the long-term ideological struggle for geopolitical dominance that came to be known as the Cold War. The United States’ monopoly on atomic weapons was curtailed sooner than expected when the Soviets exploded their own atom bomb in 1949, and U. S. leaders were further distressed when the Soviets tested their first thermonuclear device in August 1953, less than a year after the United States had crossed that threshold. Even so, U. S. nuclear capabilities, both in terms of numbers of bombs and of long-range bombers needed to deliver them, suffi­ciently outstripped those of the Soviet Union that the Eisenhower administration opted for a “New Look” policy in which the United States would save money by reducing expenditures on conventional armaments, relying instead on the threat of massive nuclear retaliation to deter Soviet aggression in Western Europe. That meant that defense budgets would be slashed, and most of the remaining money would go into nuclear weapons, heavy bombers, and defenses against Soviet bombers, versus Army and Navy personnel and equipment.

As a result, between 1954 and 1961 almost half of the entire defense bud­get was allocated to the Air Force, with the remaining half divided among the other three services.41 Roughly half of the Air Force budget was, in turn, allo­cated to the Strategic Air Command (SAC), the early Cold War proprietor of the nuclear bombardment mission. Army and Navy leaders protested vehe­mently, of course, but to no avail. Despite the Korean War experience—one in which U. S.-led United Nations (UN) forces helped defend the Republic of Korea in a major conventional war against North Korean and Chinese efforts to unite the peninsula under communist rule—U. S. and British defense plan­ners argued that all future wars would likely swiftly “go nuclear,” and planned their force-structure and defense investment accordingly.

These decisions had dramatic effects on force structure and strategic thinking. The service made heavy investments in long-range strategic bomb­ers and tankers, and crew training and exercises for the units receiving them focused almost exclusively on skills needed to scramble the strategic force, get the bombers across the Arctic, penetrate Soviet airspace, and deliver nuclear ordnance. Conversely, as Air Force planners believed the threat of nuclear retaliation would deter Soviet aggression in Europe, the greatest threat to U. S. national security was a nuclear attack on the homeland by Soviet bombers. Con­sequently, the U. S. Air Force procured a series of fighter interceptors designed to maximize speed for bomber interception in lieu of designs that would have balanced speed, maneuverability, and armament—capabilities needed to make them effective weapons for winning air superiority against other fighters.42 Not even Tactical Air Command (TAC), the organization responsible for provid­ing air support to ground operations, was immune to the prevailing nuclear dogma. Starved of funding and support by an Air Force dominated by SAC bomber generals, TAC procured the F-105 Thunderchief, an extremely fast (Mach 2 capable) fighter-bomber designed to deliver a single tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield.43

More serious, though, was the effect that this thinking had on Air Force doctrine and strategy. Secure in the conviction that strategic bombing had won World War II and the belief that the next great war, if it occurred, would be won by nuclear bombardment, Air Force strategic thought and doctrine stagnated to the point of virtual paralysis. Air Force education focused on the history of strategic bombardment and largely neglected the other vital lessons learned regarding the use of airpower for CAS and interdiction. At the same time, due to the potential for catastrophic destruction entailed in nuclear war, political leaders concluded that strategy had now become too important an issue to be left in the hands of military professionals. Consequently, the next generation of relevant theories, those addressing such topics as nuclear warfighting, deter­rence, escalation management, and crisis stability, came not from the intellec­tual center at Maxwell Field or anywhere else within the Air Force, but from a group of civilian “strategy intellectuals” at the RAND Corporation and in aca­demia.44 Meanwhile, as political scientist Karl Mueller has noted, SAC planners occupied themselves compiling notional target lists and “continued in general to approach strategic airpower much as their wartime predecessors had during the Combined Bomber Offensive” largely oblivious to the theories and strate­gies debated by prominent intellectuals and political leaders.45

The impacts of these decisions manifested themselves when the United States found itself at war with both conventional and unconventional adver­saries in Vietnam, forcing hard-learned lessons on the national military estab­lishment in general and the Air Force in particular. Although not designed for conventional warfare, the F-105 Thunderchief became the workhorse of the Air Force conventional deep-strike and interdiction missions during the first several years of the war, completing over 20,000 sorties. From a combination of restrictive rules of engagement, poor operational concepts, and inadequate protection of its vulnerable flight control system, almost half of the 833 F-105s produced were lost in the skies over North Vietnam, mostly due to surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and conventional antiaircraft fire. Air-to-air combat also brought some rude surprises. The North Viet­namese air force sought-out U. S. bombers and strike aircraft, but generally avoided combat whenever confronted by Air Force and Navy fighters. When they did confront their American counterparts, however, they often proved more of a challenge than anticipated, particularly early in the war. With U. S. aircrews inadequately trained for air combat, constrained by unrealistic rules of engagement and doctrine, and flying aircraft designed principally for intercepting bombers or conducting nuclear strike missions, they often found themselves at a disadvantage against more maneuverable Soviet-built fighters.

Over time the Air Force reacquired the skills needed for air superior­ity and developed tactics for drawing the North Vietnamese out to fight, ulti­mately achieving a kill ratio of 2-to-1 over their adversaries. That was certainly better than the negative ratio suffered in the first months of the war, but unim­pressive when compared to the 10-to-1 kill ratio achieved in the Korean War. Complicating matters, U. S. air commanders were unable to achieve unity of command, having divided the airspace over Vietnam into six separate “route packages” and parceled out control over them to the Army, Navy, and Air Force, respectively.46

The most serious problems, however, stemmed from the overall con­cept in which airpower was employed to obtain U. S. political objectives in the war. Seeing the conflict as a war of aggression by communist North Viet­nam against a democratic South Vietnam and the southern insurgency purely as a product of northern subversion, U. S. political leaders believed the solu­tion to the challenge lay in compelling Hanoi to cease its aggression against South Vietnam. Air Force leaders, in turn, steeped in a heritage of strategic bombing against industrialized countries, concluded that the most reasonable course of action would be to execute an intense bombing campaign to destroy 94 industrial and transportation targets that they believed would break Hanoi’s will and capability to continue the war. They argued for such a campaign throughout the summer and fall of 1964 and again in February 1965 follow­ing a Viet Cong attack on the U. S. air base at Pleiku. But President Johnson was concerned about the political risks of too forceful an approach and opted, instead, for a more measured strategy.47

In March 1965, under President Johnson’s orders and direct supervision, Air Force and Navy aircraft began Operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing cam­paign designed to gradually escalate in intensity and move progressively north­ward in an effort to interdict supplies headed southward and compel Hanoi to agree to peace. It was an abject failure. By the spring of 1968, U. S. aircraft had flown over 300,000 sorties and dropped over 860,000 tons of bombs, but had failed to interdict enough supplies to prevent communist forces from launch­ing a major offensive during the Tet holiday.48 More importantly, after 3 years of bombing, communist leaders in Hanoi remained as intractable as ever, vow­ing to continue the war until the United States left and Vietnam was reunified. Before the end of the year, Johnson announced that Rolling Thunder would soon end and he would not seek reelection as president.

Despite the discouragements encountered in Vietnam, the Air Force learned a great deal there that would make it much more effective in future conflicts. Old lessons were relearned, such as the need for skills and tactics for winning air superiority and the vital importance of unity of command. And while the Air Force continued to believe that the key to victory in war against an industrialized state would be the independent application of airpower, Air Force doctrine came to acknowledge that close air support and interdiction would also be important missions in future wars.

All of these insights had implications for force structure. Painfully aware of its technical inadequacies at the beginning of the war, the Air Force learned lessons in combat that informed designs for new, much more capable fighters, such as the F-15 Eagle, F-16 Fighting Falcon, and a plane specifically devel­oped for supporting ground operations, the A-10 Thunderbolt II (nicknamed the “Warthog”). By the end of the Vietnam War, the Air Force was fielding its first laser-guided munitions, making interdiction strikes against bridges and railroads much more effective and far less costly in planes lost and aircrew killed or captured. And as North Vietnam, with the Soviet Union’s material and technical support, developed what was then the world’s most sophisticated air defense system integrating fighter defenses with radar-cued, antiaircraft artil­lery and SAMs, the U. S. Air Force developed suppression of enemy air defense (SEAD) systems and tactics to defeat the new threat.

Many of these emerging concepts and capabilities came to bear when the North Vietnamese army launched a major conventional invasion of South Vietnam in the spring of 1972. By then the bulk of U. S. ground forces had been withdrawn from the conflict under President Richard Nixon’s “Vietnamiza – tion” program, but U. S. airpower was still available, and the President ordered it to support the badly battered Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Operation Linebacker, an interdiction campaign put together to carry out that order, imposed a terrible toll on the communist invasion force.

Over the next several months, with U. S. and South Vietnamese air sup­port, the ARVN withstood the initial onslaught, fought the communists to a standstill, and began pushing the invaders back until Hanoi finally called for a halt and agreed to negotiate an end to the war. When those negotiations broke down, President Nixon ordered the Air Force to conduct Operation Linebacker II, the heavy bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong using B-52 Stratofortresses. The Air Force did so from December 18 to December 29, with a 36-hour break for Christmas, flying 741 B-52 sorties, along with 769 sorties flown by other Air Force and Navy aircraft, dropping a total of more than 20,000 tons of bombs.49 The cost was high, with 15 B-52s and 12 other planes lost, but the opera­tion was successful. When the integrated air defense system (IADS) protect­ing Hanoi lost the ability to coordinate its operations and then exhausted its supply of SAMS, North Vietnamese leaders agreed to return to the bargain­ing table and a final agreement was struck a few weeks later. Analysts debate whether that agreement resulted more from the coercive leverage of airpower or the concessions that U. S. leaders made during negotiations, but either way, the United States was out of the Vietnam War.50