Airpower Thought and Employment Since Desert Storm

The dramatic effectiveness of coalition operations in Desert Storm set off a heated debate between U. S. military professionals as to which element of the plan was most responsible for the triumph. The Air Force was ebullient, its sen­timent captured by the U. S. Air Force Historian Richard P Hallion who wrote “Simply (if boldly) stated, airpower won the Gulf war”68 Army leaders, on the other hand, argued that airpower alone had failed to achieve coalition objec­tives—after 38 days of concentrated bombing, Iraqi forces remained in Kuwait until rooted out by ground forces. Even within the Air Force, officers debated whether the war’s successful outcome resulted more from the application of air – power against strategic targets or in support of coalition ground forces before and after the ground offensive began.69 Some maintained that Desert Storm sig­naled the onset of a “military-technical revolution” or “revolution in military affairs” (later simply called, “transformation”), while others argued it was just another benchmark in the evolutionary advance of U. S. military technologi­cal capabilities. But wherever individual airmen stood in the debate, the one thing on which nearly all of them agreed was that airpower had been instru­mental in winning the Gulf War and was destined to be the decisive force in all future conflicts. Afterward, two coercive air operations in the troubled Balkans not only reinforced airmen’s conviction that airpower had become the premier expression of American military might, but also convinced some U. S. politi­cal leaders, for the first time since the Vietnam War, that airpower could be wielded as a potent and convenient instrument of political coercion.

From August 30 to September 14, 1994, NATO carried out Operation Deliberate Force, the air campaign against Serbian forces in the Bosnian civil war. This operation was NATO’s response to a series of Serbian atrocities over the preceding months, which included attacks on UN peacekeepers and the sacking of Srebrenica, and culminated with the August 28 shelling of a Sara­jevo marketplace, killing 37 civilians and wounding 85 others.70 Over the next two weeks U. S. and allied aircraft struck Serbian military positions, allowing a combined ground force of Croatians, Bosnian Croats, and Bosnian Muslims to make territorial advances against the Serbs and ultimately compelling Ser­bian leaders to accept a NATO-brokered partition plan and enter formal peace negotiations in Dayton, Ohio.71 In this case, airpower was applied against oper­ational military forces in a way that created strategic effects.

Four and a half years later, NATO carried out another coercive air cam­paign, Operation Allied Force, in response to Serbia’s refusal to accept UN accords regarding the treatment of Albanian Muslim citizens in Kosovo. In this operation, running from March 24 to June 10, 1999, NATO air forces began by bombing Serbian army units in the province of Kosovo and then, as more strike aircraft arrived in theater, escalated the campaign in intensity and target selec­tion, moving to industrial and infrastructure targets in Serbia proper. After 78 days of bombing, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic withdrew his army and paramilitary forces from Kosovo and agreed to NATO terms. Although Milosevic’s capitulation was undoubtedly influenced by factors in addition to the bombing, airmen were quick to point out that, unlike prior cases, in this episode, conventional airpower had brought an adversary to terms before ground forces were engaged in the fight.72 Here, airpower was applied as an independent instrument, and it only achieved its effect after being redirected from tactical military targets to those historically categorized as “strategic.”

The consistency with which U. S. airpower was successfully employed in the 1990s only added to a growing confidence fostered by advances in technol­ogy during that period, resulting in acceleration in the development of war­fighting theory. The dramatic outcome of the Gulf War had already convinced many analysts that the combined effects of stealth technology and precision weapons had placed the United States on the cusp of a military transforma­tion. In the several years following the Gulf War, the United States crossed additional technological thresholds, adding even more to its military capabili­ties. The global positioning system (GPS) satellite constellation achieved full operational capability in 1995, providing precise position, navigation, and tim­ing data everywhere in the world and empowering a new generation of all­weather precision-guided munitions. Conventional forces were granted much more access to near real-time intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) data, providing them greater situational awareness than most adversar­ies they expected to encounter in future wars. And advances in computer net­working, supported by a worldwide, omni-present backbone of satellite com­munications, enabled an ever-increasing ability to network operational forces together to share situational awareness and coordinate their actions in high­speed maneuver warfare. All of this fed a new generation of transformation theory based on concepts of network-centric warfare (later called net-centric warfare or NCW) in which every platform would be a sensor and all operators would share information in near real-time.

Network-centric warfare marked a further convergence of airpower thought. It was theorized that command-and-control hierarchies would flat­ten to accelerate decisionmaking and flexibility, thereby maximizing the abil­ity to respond to rapid changes in the operational environment.73 Whether this is so, advocates and critics alike have since argued that such flattening would also effectively erase the lines between the operational and strategic levels of war. Strike aircraft directly supporting surface forces would create strate­gic effects. Aircraft striking strategic targets, such as command-and-control nodes, would often do so to inhibit the enemy’s ability to coordinate its mili­tary forces, thereby creating operational effects. All the while, networked sen­sors and communications would empower command authorities to monitor tactical operations in real-time and govern them directly whenever they chose to do so.74

These ideas had profound implications for the concept of airpower. As airpower is the most flexible, responsive, and far-ranging means of applying kinetic force, it would constitute the primary strike element of NCW in all applications across the breadth and depth of the battlespace. Airpower is fun­gible in target selection—strike assets tasked to service operational targets can be re-tasked against high-priority strategic targets en route when network sen­sors detect perishable intelligence on their whereabouts. In fact, strikers can be tasked against operational and strategic targets in the same sortie and can even launch before tasking and take target direction en route or while loitering in the battlespace. In the NCW concept, operational and strategic applications of airpower converge as one. Airpower as a concept was finally approaching unity… at least in theory.