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1 About no fly zones
Matters of definition
What is a no fly zone?1 In simplest terms, a no fly zone is an airspace from which the sovereign power has been excluded.2 The target country’s airspace has been seized, and its government has been denied the use of its air assets over its own land. The targeted power may have been barred or deterred, which is to say it may have been physically prevented from flying or it may have been persuaded not to fly by threats of punishment, but either way the airspace of a sovereign power has been usurped.3
Who seizes the airspace? In theory, a no fly zone can be imposed by any state on any state. In practice, the entity imposing a no fly zone has always been the United States, although the United States has never acted alone and has always been part of a coalition of some kind with international authorization of some sort. The countries that have been excluded from their own airspaces have in every case to date been dictatorships whose rulers have been in the midst of committing atrocities. This fact has put a favorable, humanitarian, law-enforcing cast on no fly zones, at least in the eyes of Americans and their coalition partners who have shared in enforcing them. In the future, other powers may very well impose no fly zones on other sorts of entities with other sorts of objectives and no fly zones may take on a different aspect and reputation. For example, China may be in the preliminary stages of imposing a no fly zone, or at least a “limited-fly zone” over parts of the western Pacific with its recently proclaimed “Air Defense Identification Zone.”4
What is new about no fly zones? Of course, every state that could do so has always defended its airspace much the way it has defended its land and its nearby seas. In time of war, one state has always attempted to deprive its opponent of the use of its airspace just as it has sought to seize its territory or to block its ports. What is new about no fly zones and what makes them different from the traditional contest for air superiority and control is a coalition possessing superior air power banning flights into, out of, or over the territory of a power that has been engaging in humanitarian atrocities. This sort of no fly zone, imposed by a coalition, authorized by a multilateral organization and, to this point at least, aimed against gross violators of human rights, is the central focus of this book, but other sorts of no fly zones could and probably will exist. That possibility is discussed in Chapter 5.
No fly zones differ from prohibited zones. Within a single state, a sort of limited no fly zone may be established for security reasons, such as the no fly zone over the White House or over certain military bases.5 For example, a no fly zone briefly was declared over the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in 2016, banning planes and drones from flying over the convention center, mostly for security reasons but perhaps also because the organizers feared the aircraft would be trailing political messages on banners. Such domestic no fly zones, better called “prohibited zones,” lie outside the scope of this book. This book is concerned with the no fly zones created by one or several states over another sovereign state.6
No fly zones compared to naval blockades
A no fly zone is the aerial cousin of a naval blockade and the two practices are in many ways parallel. Naval blockades have been a factor in war since the time of Thucydides, no fly zones only since 1991, but exploring their characteristics may shed light on both.
Both consist of establishing an exclusion zone. Both involve patrols and impose the condition that if a vessel – ship or plane – ventures into the forbidden region, it will be subject to escort, attack, seizure or destruction. Both can be imposed simply by positioning forces in such a way as to pose the threat of violence, but neither may necessarily require violence unless the promise or threat of force is followed by an act of force, triggered by an act of resistance or other form of challenge by the target state.
While the state that imposes the no fly zone creates the situation, it is an act by the target state that will trigger the act of violence. Because of the terms dictated by the powers that impose them, no fly zones and naval blockades in some degree shift the responsibility for triggering specific acts of violence onto the target state. No fly zones are certainly aggressive acts in the sense that they violate sovereignty, and they depend on the potential for immediate or near-term violence, but they do not require that the imposing state commit acts of violence at the outset.7 For this reason, they are usually the most measured and limited option available to policy makers along the spectrum of possible uses of force. If kinetic force must be used as part of the process of imposing a no fly zone, it is likely to be in response to what will appear to be a provocation by the targeted state, which is ironic since the imposition of the no fly zone is certainly a provocation in itself.
Both no fly zones and blockades typically include clear directives regarding what sorts of planes or ships may conduct what sorts of operations. For example, commercial traffic may be permitted when military missions are forbidden. Passenger planes or ships may be permitted when war planes and ships are banned from the space. In addition, clear rules of engagement typically are issued to the enforcing agents, but experience has shown that rules of engagement can be difficult to formulate in advance because of the many unforeseen circumstances and varying (and sometimes wavering) levels of commitment by the set of powers imposing the no fly zone.
Like a blockade, a no fly zone can be imposed separately from other acts of war and can be maintained for long periods. Experience shows that the powers that establish a no fly zone should be prepared to maintain it for a matter of months, years or even for the span of a decade, and the fact that no fly zones have been imposed for so long underlines the twin facts that they are neither very expensive to maintain nor very efficient in effecting change. Both a blockade and a no fly zone can in many cases be imposed without establishing a physical presence in the target state and both can usually be policed without bringing into danger the population of the target state and without subjecting the imposer’s forces to more than moderate risk.8 All this makes no fly zones very enticing to the policy makers in democracies like the United States, Britain and other countries with advanced air capabilities, political accountability and low tolerance for casualties.
No fly zones compared to ground occupations
While an occupying army is a perpetual insult and imposition on a population whose state has been invaded, a naval blockade or a no fly zone may be imposed by ships and planes that, because they are offshore or at high altitude, are rarely observed by the public. Robert Pape has demonstrated the provocativeness of ground occupations; In Dying to Win 9 he marshals evidence that suicide bombings are carried out almost always by persons in occupied lands and aimed at driving out the occupiers. No fly zones have never stimulated anything approaching such responses.
Over a decade and a half of American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown how difficult it is to preserve ground-based troops from suicide attacks and from improvised explosive devices. The experience of the USS Princeton, a guided missile cruiser damaged by a mine in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm in February 1991, demonstrates that not only land forces but also naval vessels remain vulnerable to prepositioned explosive devices. Land troops and ships can be put at risk by passive devices like mines, but planes cannot be put at risk in the same way. Apart from marginally useful barrage balloons in World War II, prepositioned static devices have never been successful ways of putting planes at risk; nor, in the past, have unmanned ground-based weapons. Putting planes patrolling at altitude at risk has only been accomplished with actively aimed and fired anti-aircraft artillery or missiles. Such weapons systems use radar-targeting systems that give away the operator’s approximate position and make the site vulnerable to a counterstrike with a high-speed, anti-radiation missile. That fundamental difference in patrolling from the air versus patrolling on the ground or patrolling at sea makes seizure of the air substantially less risky than seizure of the sea or the ground.
Two no fly zones over Iraq operated for a dozen years with no loss of life due to enemy action and at such low cost and low profile that few Americans even remarked on their existence.10 The record of media coverage of the no fly zone over Bosnia likewise suggests that from the point of view of the population of the imposing country, no fly zones may prove so easily sustainable and so completely uneventful as to pass practically unnoticed.
Instances of no fly zones
No fly zones have been imposed and sustained on only two occasions and on each occasion it was against a dictator abusing his people: the first was imposed on Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. The second was levied against Slobodan Milosevic over Bosnia and Herzegovina during his so-called “ethnic cleansing” operations in 1993. Operation Odyssey Dawn/Unified Protector, directed against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya in 2011 is often cited as a third no fly zone, but this is inaccurate. Odyssey Dawn/Unified Protector was an offensive air campaign that began with a brief interval of no fly zone enforcement. The United Nations authorized a no fly zone in UN Security Council Resolution 1973, and US Africa Command in concert with allied militaries implemented one labeled Odyssey Dawn, but within days NATO took over the operation, renamed it Operation Unified Protector, and used the fact that the Security Council had authorized “all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas … excluding a foreign occupation force”11 to convert the no fly zone into an air campaign that ended only with Qaddafi’s death and regime change.
Iraq: Operations Provide Comfort/Northern Watch and Southern Watch
The first no fly zone was implemented over Iraq immediately after the end of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. At the signing of a ceasefire and surrender on 3 March, General Norman Schwarzkopf granted the request of an Iraqi general that the defeated military be allowed to use its helicopters for transportation, since many roads and bridges had been destroyed. On the spot and without consultation with Washington, Schwarzkopf declared that fixed-wing planes would remain grounded but that helicopters could fly. In this ad hoc way, without discussion or planning, the first no fly zone was established.
Almost at once Saddam began to use his helicopters, many of which were heavily armed, not for transport but to suppress uprisings among the Kurdish and Shi’ite minorities. President Bush had expressly called for those uprisings two weeks before, but in his desire to bring home the 500,000 troops deployed in Kuwait and Iraq, chose to ignore Saddam’s brutal response. By contrast, the British responded to the crisis of the Kurds in northern Iraq by establishing Operation Haven, clearing Iraqi troops out of a safe space in northern Iraq and delivering food, tents, medicines and clothing to refugees located there. After a few weeks the British effort was supplemented by American, French and Turkish forces, the operation was renamed Provide Comfort, and the United States led the way in establishing a no fly zone to exclude Iraqi air power, both fixed-wing and rotary-wing, from the region. In that way the no fly zone that began with Schwarzkopf’s proclamation was implemented and would remain in place for a dozen years.
Sixteen months later a second no fly zone named Southern Watch was established to protect Iraq’s Shi’ite minority in the region of Basra. Northern Watch patrolled north of the 36th parallel; Southern Watch patrolled south of the 32nd parallel and later the 33rd. Northern Watch was enforced primarily out of Incirlik, Turkey. Southern Watch was enforced primarily out of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia until later, after the Khobar Towers attack, operations were relocated to Prince Sultan Air Base in a remote area near the center of the country.
Southern Watch was less effective at excluding Iraqi forces than Northern Watch, though in both cases, the Iraqis never utilized their air force to any tactical effect on the ground. It was more frequently challenged and evaded, and it required more enforcement. Northern Watch was enforced for 12 years with about 75,000 sorties. Southern Watch was enforced for a slightly shorter period with about 150,000 sorties. As the next chapter explains, a great difference between the two no fly zones was that the terrain to the north provided more protection to the Kurds, while the terrain to the south left the Shi’ites open to Iraqi ground attacks, though not from the air. In no fly zones, geography matters.
With regard to Northern and Southern Watch, several points about no fly zones in general are worth noting:
- Air defenses: Iraq’s integrated air defense systems had already been destroyed in the weeks of air bombardment that preceded the ground invasion in 1991 so that crucial first step in implementing a no fly zone – the suppression of the target country’s air defenses – had already been accomplished.
- Multilateral authorization: United Nations authorization for multilateral action against Iraq had been secured the previous November in the form of UN Security Council Resolution 678. Thus another crucial step in the creation of a no fly zone – multilateral authorization – was already in place.
- Nearby air base: As part of its participation in Operation Desert Storm, Turkey had provided access to its air base at Incirlik,12 so a nearby operating base for Operation Northern Watch had already been secured. A no fly zone can be enforced from a distance by planes launched from carriers or from distant air bases, but such a remotely enforced no fly zone requires that pilots and aircraft spend many hours in the air and take many in-flight refuelings.
- Resistance...
