The National Interest
Fall 2001

Sky High: Illusions of Air Power

by Conrad C. Crane

 

. . . The 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review season is hard upon us, but this year's energies are being expended in a new context. Previous exercises were mainly about preserving Service resource shares in a mostly stagnant intellectual and budgetary environment. This year there is, first and foremost, the major review undertaken by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a review that promises—or threatens, depending on one's point of view—a significant reallocation of resources among the Services. Additionally, the defense dollars available to the Services for existing missions are being squeezed from two sides: by a large bill for national missile defense, and by a large tax cut. What has not changed is the art of special pleading. Thus have some commentators claimed anew that the NATO bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia in 1995 and 1999 herald a new era of warfare in which precision weapons and airpower alone promise swift and decisive results with little loss of life or collateral damage. As historian John Keegan has put it, not only did the Kosovo campaign demonstrate that "war can be won by airpower alone", it also provided a showcase for the Western world's "superior technology and higher public morality."

It’s just not so. On the one hand, the weapons themselves are still hardly free of major glitches, as the failure in February of Navy Joint Standoff Weapons used in attacking Iraqi air defenses showed. Even the newest technology is susceptible to inclement weather, enemy countermeasures or, in this case, just wind. More important than technical problems with the weapons are misconceptions about how tactics accumulate into a strategy for their use. A close examination of the 1999 Kosovo air campaign demonstrates that, talk of humane warfare notwithstanding, air bombardment remains an extremely destructive action that is most effective in achieving strategic goals when targeted against the civilian elements of a society. . . .

Instead of demonstrating how airpower in limited war allows "righteous" states to restrain transgressors with a minimum of bloodshed on both sides, the Kosovo and Chechen conflicts show how aggressive belligerents with advanced technology can inflict massive destruction on others at low cost to themselves. They also show how modern technology has inclined to merge the civilian and military sectors of society to an unprecedented degree, creating a broader target spectrum that can be justified for attack. Instead of making war less likely and destructive, the power of new "precision strike" technology has done the opposite. It is now much easier to get domestic support to use force when all it requires is to launch a cruise missile or drop a precision bomb, for the expectation is that results will be clean, decisive and above all safe for the attacking side. When the results are neither clean nor decisive, it is easier to escalate a conflict as impatience grows, especially when there is a considerable technological mismatch between belligerents. So instead of heading for the sort of future envisioned by modern American airpower theorists, in which paralyzing attacks on military structures end wars quickly and with relatively little impact on the civilian sphere, we may be headed for that foreseen by Douhet, in which new weapons decide wars by inflicting maximum distress on civilian populations, which are inherently more vulnerable to the destructive power of modern technology than are military capabilities. . . .