Airpower in Overseas Contingency Operations: Theory Meets Reality

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, put the United States in a quandary. An elusive nonstate actor based in Afghanistan, a country very difficult for the United States to reach with conventional military power, had confronted the Nation with deadly force. When Taliban authorities in Kabul refused to arrest and extradite Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders, the Bush administration decided that the United States would use military force to impose regime change on Afghanistan and bring the terrorists to jus­tice. But that raised the question of how it could do that in a timely manner in a region of the world that was so inaccessible. After considering the options, U. S. leaders decided to conduct an air campaign against the Taliban and send paramilitary and special operations forces to fund and advise the Northern Alliance—a collection of militant factions that had for several years waged an unsuccessful civil war—and provide them air support in an effort to change the balance of power in Afghanistan.75

The campaign was a rapid success. On October 7, 2001, Operation Enduring Force began with airstrikes against air defense, command-and-con – trol, and other military targets in and around Kabul. Over the next 2 weeks the target list expanded, and on October 28, with heavy U. S. air support, the Northern Alliance launched a major offensive, which culminated on Novem­ber 13 when the Taliban was driven out of Kabul. U. S.-led military operations continued the rest of that year and into the next to mop up fleeing enemy forces and pockets of resistance, but unfortunately, bin Laden and other key al Qaeda and Taliban leaders evaded capture.76

Airpower continued its triumphal performance in conventional opera­tions. When the Bush administration later decided to impose regime change on Iraq, the successful use of airpower in support of indigenous forces in Afghan­istan prompted a debate about whether to use a similar approach against the Baathist regime. Kurdish factions in northern Iraq had challenged Baghdad authority for years, and some analysts argued that, empowered by U. S. mili­tary advisors and airpower, the Kurds could defeat Saddam’s forces just as the Northern Alliance had defeated the Taliban.77 Further study, however, con­vinced U. S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that the Iraqi army was too large and heavily armed for the Kurds to defeat by themselves, even with U. S. air support. Therefore, while he did agree to provide Kurdish forces U. S. advisors and air support to engage the Iraqi forces in the northern sector of the country, Rumsfeld ordered USCENTCOM commander General Tommy Franks to plan a conventional invasion of southern Iraq to defeat the main force of the Iraqi army and capture Baghdad.

Once again, U. S. leaders wanted to move more quickly than a typical deployment would allow. Even before September 11, Rumsfeld had reviewed Operation Plan (OPLAN) 1003-98, the standing war plan for Iraq, and found it unsatisfactory. Largely a replay of the first Gulf War, it called for a time­consuming deployment of about half a million troops. The Secretary worried that such an approach would allow Saddam time to manipulate world opin­ion against the United States and also threaten U. S. forces and regional friends with weapons of mass destruction. Therefore, his instructions to Franks called for an innovative plan employing a much smaller force focusing on speed, surprise, and shock. The objective would be to quickly decapitate Iraq—that is, either kill Saddam and other key Baathist leaders, or sever their ability to com­mand and control their forces—and so shock the regime that it would collapse, capitulate, or fall to a popular uprising.78

Sixteen months after planning began, time consumed largely in efforts to raise a coalition and get UN approval for the use of force, U. S. and coali­tion forces executed Operation Iraqi Freedom. On March 18, 2003, a day after President Bush issued a 48-hour ultimatum, U. S. leaders received intelligence that Saddam was staying at Dora Farm, one of his properties outside Bagh­dad. The President authorized a strike on that location, which was carried out with Tomahawk cruise missiles and precision-guided munitions dropped from F-117 fighters, on March 19, immediately after the ultimatum expired. Saddam was not at Dora Farm when the strike occurred. The ground invasion began on March 20, and the full-fledged air attack kicked off about 12 hours after that.79

The air strategy for Operation Iraqi Freedom supported the Army’s AirLand Battle Doctrine-based ground scheme of maneuver and also strongly reflected Warden’s theory that parallel attacks would cause strategic paralysis, the general principle of which, by then, had been accepted as U. S. Air Force doctrine. According to Bob Woodward, who interviewed White House and Pentagon officials after the war, planners organized the targets for kinetic, elec­tronic, and information attacks into nine prioritized groups according to what they believed to be Iraq’s centers of gravity. Strikingly similar to the five-ring diagram that Warden used to prioritize the COGs in his theory, the nine COG categories identified for Iraqi Freedom were:80

■ The leadership, the real inner circle of Saddam and his sons, Uday and Qusay

■ Internal security and the regime intelligence, including the close-in ring of bodyguards in the Special Security Organization (SSO); the command, control, and communications network

■ Weapons of mass destruction infrastructure

■ Missile production, maintenance, and delivery capability

■ The Republican Guard divisions and the Special Republican Guard that protected Baghdad

■ Land territory inside Iraq where pressure could be exerted such as the northern Kurdish area that was effectively autonomous

■ The regular Iraqi army

■ Iraqi commercial and economic infrastructure; and the diplomatic infrastructure abroad that included Iraqi agents working out of their embassies

■ The civilian population.

As was the case in Afghanistan, the major combat operation against Iraq in March and April 2003 was a rapid success. Although the parallel attacks nei­ther caused Iraqi leaders to capitulate in shock nor paralyzed their ability to command and control their forces, the heavy aerial bombardment in coordina­tion with the rapid mechanized advance of coalition ground forces had devastat­ing effects on Iraqi regular and paramilitary forces. With Iraqi forces destroyed from the air whenever they attempted to mass and decimated by ground attack whenever they dispersed, coalition ground forces easily overcame all resistance in their drive to Baghdad. The operations plan had projected up to 125 days of “decisive combat operations” to defeat Iraq, but U. S. Marines were helping Iraqi citizens pull down a statue of Saddam in downtown Baghdad on April 9, only 20 days after the invasion began.81 Three weeks after that, on May 1,2003, President Bush declared Operation Iraqi Freedom successfully accomplished.

Fighting amorphous groups of unconventional adversaries poses its own frustrations. One could argue that stability operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have gone almost as poorly as the major combat operations of 2001 and 2003 went well. While analyzing the many problems encountered in those efforts is a challenge beyond the reach of this paper, it is worth considering the frustrations that they have presented to the U. S. and allied air forces involved. Counterin­surgency, stability, and nation-building operations are intrinsically ground­intensive efforts, with Army and Marine forces taking the lead. But military leaders have occasionally resorted to using air strikes with precision munitions against known or suspected terrorist safe houses, sometimes in urban areas, in efforts to kill key enemy leaders. Unfortunately, such actions have often proven counterproductive, with civilian casualties publicized on CNN and al Jazeera, radicalizing sympathetic Muslims locally and abroad, thereby fueling further unrest and violence.82

Starting about 2004, as sectarian violence and insurgencies began to gain momentum in Iraq and Afghanistan, U. S. Air Force leaders became increas­ingly interested in finding ways that airpower could be used more effectively in support of efforts to stabilize those countries. After tasking the RAND Cor­poration to study the issue, they were informed that history has shown that insurgencies are rarely won by outside powers; therefore, the best roles the U. S. Air Force could play in counterinsurgency operations, in addition to provid­ing airlift and ISR support to coalition ground forces, would be in advising, training, and equipping partner air forces.83 Such advice is a hard pill to swal­low for a military institution whose doctrine has historically emphasized win­ning the Nation’s wars through the lethal application of airpower.