Routledge Handbook of Air Power

John Andreas Olsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138632608
• eBook ISBN: 9781351802734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The Routledge Handbook of Air Power offers a comprehensive overview of the political purposes and military importance of air power.

Despite its increasing significance in international relations, statecraft and war, the phenomenon of air power remains controversial and little understood beyond its tactical and technological prominence. This volume provides a comprehensive survey designed to contribute to a deep and sophisticated understanding of air power. Containing contributions from academics and service personnel, the book comprises five sections:

- Part I Foundation: the essence of air power

- Part II Roles and functions: delivering air power

- Part III Cross-domain integration: applying air power

- Part IV Political–social–economic environment: air power in its strategic context

- Part V Case studies: air power in its national context

Examining a series of themes and factors that contribute to an understanding of the utility and applicability of air power, this Handbook focuses on the essence of air power, identifies its roles and functions, and places air power in its wider strategic and national contexts.

The Routledge Handbook of Air Power will be of great interest to students of air power, strategic studies, defence studies, security studies and IR, as well as to military professionals and policy-makers.

PART I
Foundation

The essence of air power

1
AIR POWER ANATOMY

Benjamin S. Lambeth

Armed conflict on land and at sea has been a part of the human condition almost since time immemorial, with the notion of sea power having finally entered the lexicon of warfare in 1890 via the seminal book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History by the American naval historian Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan (1890). In contrast, combat operations in the third dimension have been a far more recent phenomenon, reflecting a fundamentally new form of force employment that arose only after the start of the twentieth century with the first use of military aircraft in the First World War from 1914 to 1918.

From those earliest beginnings, however, the ensuing emergence and refinement of the analogous notion of air power were not long in coming, with its casual mention first heard as early as 1918 and with its formal introduction into the vocabulary of warfare first recorded in 1925 in the pioneering treatise by the US Army Air Service’s Brigadier General William ‘Billy’ Mitchell titled Winged Defense: The Development and Possibilities of Modern Air Power – Economic and Military (Mitchell 1925). By the 1930s, the respected American reporter Hanson Baldwin was routinely alluding to ‘air power’ in his New York Times articles on military matters, and the aviation pioneer Alexander de Seversky, in the early aftermath of Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, further formalised it in 1942 in his advocacy volume Victory through Air Power (de Seversky 1942). By the time Congress established the United States Air Force as an independent service five years later in 1947, the now-familiar construct of air power had finally been ratified in the public’s mind and was in the vernacular of warfare to stay (Boyne 1997).

The chapters that follow will offer a thorough canvass of the idea and reality of air power, including its history, its provisions for command and control, its associated doctrine and concepts of operations, its technological dimensions, its wartime roles and missions, its diverse operating modes and strategic potential, and its manifestation in the armed services of the world’s leading non-Western countries. This introductory chapter, for its part, offers a foundation-laying perspective on the overall essence of air power, with a principal focus on its back ground and early evolution, on the nature and significance of the later developments that have so greatly improved its capabilities since the mid-1970s, and on its singular and enduring distin guishing characteristics that have made it such an effective and often outcome-determining tool of modern warfare.

Background and early evolution

The first use of the airplane as an instrument of war occurred during the Battle of Tripoli in 1911 when an Italian army pilot, Captain Carlo Piazza, overflew Turkish lines in Libya to conduct the world’s first aerial reconnaissance mission. A week later, another Italian army pilot dropped the first bomb ever delivered in anger from the air – on a Turkish troop concentration positioned just outside the Libyan capital. The following year, Great Britain’s Royal Flying Corps was established as a precursor to what would soon thereafter become the world’s first independent air arm, the since-renowned and redoubtable Royal Air Force. Not long thereafter, the still-embryonic flying machines of that early era saw their first sustained combat use in the First World War, in what the late historian Lee Kennett years later would aptly call ‘the first air war’ (Kennett 1991).

In the early aftermath of the First World War, the progenitors of air doctrine maintained that the airplane embodied such advantages over all other weapon types as to be able to destroy all assets of any value on the Earth’s surface while itself remaining comparatively protected from an effective response from the ground. Those platforms and munitions, however, were at best primitive when compared to today’s capabilities, and they offered but the faintest hint of what air power would eventually become a century later as a truly decisive means of warfare.

As for the first concepts of operations for aerial force employment, serious theorising about the uses of air power began with the pioneering work of an Italian artillery officer, General Giulio Douhet, who wrote the first published exposition on the subject entitled The Command of the Air in 1921 (Douhet 1942 [1921]). In that path-breaking volume, Douhet argued that civilian morale would be shattered by aerial bombardment and that the main targets of air warfare should accordingly be not the enemy’s fielded forces but rather his cities. In Douhet’s view, if an enemy’s cities could be repeatedly struck from the air, something that land and naval forces were incapable of accomplishing, enemy populations would eventually become demoralised and would pressure their leaders to capitulate (Meilinger 1997).

It bears stressing here that Douhet was driven to that ultimately unfounded and erroneous conclusion because the rudimentary aerial munitions and aiming devices of his time were so inaccurate that they were incapable of effectively doing much else but cause large-scale harm to civilians. Largely for that reason, the indiscriminate attacks on enemy populations, in what today would be rightly ruled out as an unpardonable infliction of unwarranted harm on innocent civilians, became the actual overarching goal of allied bombing strategy, and it remained so both in Europe and in the Pacific throughout the Second World War (MacIsaac 1976).

For most of the West’s ensuing Cold War against Soviet communism from the late 1940s through the 1980s, ‘strategic’ air power tended to be associated exclusively with long-range bombers and nuclear weapons and was generally regarded as an instrument of deterrence whose sole reason for existence was never to be used. Everything else short of ‘strategic’ air power, so narrowly defined and understood, was relegated to the subordinate category of ‘tactical’ or ‘theatre’ air power, whose only presumed purpose was to support US and allied ground forces in combined-arms conventional land warfare. Virtually no consideration was given in US and allied defence planning throughout most of the Cold War years to the potential ability of conventional air power to achieve combat effects that might, in and of themselves, determine the ultimate course and outcome of a campaign. To be sure, Western observers marvelled at Israel’s bold use of its fighter aircraft during the opening hours of the Six-Day War in June 1967 to destroy Egypt’s and Syria’s air forces on the ground by surprise, thereby ensuring that the remainder of Israel’s pre-emptive campaign would play itself out unmolested by enemy air action (Yonay 1993). By and large, however, despite that remarkable performance by Israel’s air force in what was clearly an outcome-determining role, ‘strategic’ air power throughout most of the Cold War was thought of almost entirely in nuclear terms, with the rest of American and allied combat aviation having been consigned to little more than a supporting role in a traditional combined-arms approach to warfare in which infantry and armour were taken to constitute the cutting edge of the alliance’s non-nuclear power.

The capability and potential of conventional air power did not improve much throughout most of America’s long combat involvement in Vietnam. Especially during that war’s first three years, beginning in August 1965, the use of American air power was hampered by significant short comings in equipment and aircrew proficiency. Although the eventual US defeat in Vietnam was mainly the result of a bankrupt strategy and scant leadership seriousness of purpose, shortcomings in the nation’s air posture also played a non-trivial role in accounting for it. Until the intensive American bombing campaign in support of Operation Linebacker II in December 1972 finally overcame North Vietnam’s heavily echeloned air defences, enemy surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery posed an ever-present threat to US air operations. Early night and all-weather air combat missions were also rendered extremely challenging as a result of technology limitations. The later and more effective American air operations in 1972, in contrast, exploited newly emergent technologies, such as laser-guided bombs and improved means of electronic warfare, that would eventually form the basis for air power’s subsequent gains in capability (Thompson 2000).

In the end, American air assets by 1972 were substantially improved over those that had been available between 1965 and 1968. As a result, American aircrews finally learned how to operate in the sort of heavy air defence environment that they might encounter in a future conventional war against the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact in Central Europe. That experience, in turn, eventually put the United States and, later, its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies on a course to perfect their capabilities in both the air superiority and ground-attack mission areas throughout the eighteen years that separated Vietnam and the first Persian Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 (Lambeth 2000).

Virtually all of those innovations in air warfare capability were inspired by American airmen armed with a ‘never-again’ mindset from their sobering experiences in Southeast Asia between 1965 and 1973 (Kitfield 1995). Those airmen later rose to senior leadership positions in the US Air Force and US Navy, determined to correct the many shortcomings that had been unmasked during the course of the Vietnam War. Perhaps more than any other single causal factor, the legacy of Vietnam was the principal instigator behind air power’s final coming of age during the ensuing decade and a half that preceded Operation Desert Storm. The resulting innovations that were set in motion during those years put the American air services and, event ually, NATO’s air arms as well on a path towards gaining a winning combination of cutting-edge equipment, improved aircrew prowess and smarter ways of fighting. In that respect, America’s failure in Vietnam was a defining experience for air power’s subsequent maturation throughout the remainder of the twentieth century.

Air power’s post-Vietnam transformation

By any measure, the role of US and allied air power in shaping the course and outcome of the 1991 Persian Gulf War reflected a major breakthrough in the effectiveness of the air weapon after a promising start in the Second World War and more than three years of costly misuse in the overly gradualist American bombing effort against North Vietnam from 1965 to 1968. During its epochal use against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, coalition air power was the only significant contributor to combat operations against the Iraqi army for thirty-eight straight days until a four-day air-enabled allied land offensive was finally unleashed at the very end to complete the job against by then badly degraded Iraqi ground troops (Keaney and Cohen 1995).

After it was over, the Desert Storm experience confirmed that in the years after Vietnam, American air power had undergone a non-linear improvement in its ability to contribute to the outcome of joint campaigns at the operational and strategic levels, thanks to a convergence of low observability to enemy radar in the stealthy F-117, the newly acquired ability of combat aircraft to attack fixed targets consistently with high accuracy from relatively safe stand-off distances using laser-guided munitions, and the expanded battlespace awareness that had been made possible by recent innovations in air- and space-based platforms for providing accurate and timely intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR).

The first decade after Vietnam also saw a surge of long-overdue attention in all American air services towards the unglamorous but essential needs of resource management and operational support. After all, satisfactory combat results require not just adequate weapons stocks and aircrew proficiency, but also an adequate sortie-generation capability. It soon dawned on airmen that the mere doubling of a combat aircraft force’s sortie rate could nearly double the force’s overall productivity, all other things being equal. More sorties per aircraft per day promised substantially increased leverage if those sorties were more uniformly combat effective.

Towards that end, designers devoted major efforts to make the latest generation of fighters less dependent on an elaborate logistics infrastructure by reducing the number of parts, increasing the accessibility of critical components, using line-replaceable avionics modules, and providing on-board systems that reduced the need for constant ground servicing. As a result of such efforts, besides increased concentration of fire, the new platforms promised to offer more sustained force application as a result of improved reliability and maintainability. The generation of fighters represented by the US Air Force’s F-15 and F-16 and by the US Navy’s and Marine Corps’ F/A-18 offered far better in-commission rates than their predecessors, thanks to the increased durability of their avionics and the greater ease of repair permitted by exchanging line-replaceable modular units. Much of that heightened reliability resulted from the accompanying shift from an electromechanical era to a microelectronics era. Because it incorporated technology from the later generation, the F-16, for example, was able to fly upward of 65 per cent more sorties within a given period than could the F-4 of the previous generation, and it required only some twenty maintenance man-hours per flying hour, compared to forty-one for the F-4.

This enhanced maintainability and reliability was a truly novel design feature in modern aircraft development, and it contributed significantly to the confidence of commanders that their high-technology equipment would perform as expected when and as asked. In previous years, the reliability of an overall weapon system, defined as the mean time between failure of various essential on-board subsystems, was often shorter than the average duration of a combat sortie. That meant that a certain percentage of scheduled aircraft would never reach their assigned targets because something critical to the mission, such as the radar, would fail en route, forcing mission planners to build a margin of additional aircraft into a strike package simply to ensure that enough aircraft would make it to target to get the job done. With the reliability and maintainability improvements designed into the latest generation of fighters, in contrast, combat aircraft were typically likely to land after a mission in what is called Code One condition, namely, with all their systems in proper working order and the aircraft ready to launch again upon being refuelled and reloaded with weapons, with no repair actions needed.

As a result of these and other mutually reinforcing improvements, American air power during the decade after Vietnam finally acquired the capabilities needed to fulfil the long-standing promise of its pioneers of being able to set the conditions for winning in joint warfare. Yet it did so not through the classic imposition of brute force, as had been the case throughout most of air power’s history, but rather through the functional effects now achievable by targeting an enemy’s greatest vulnerabilities and taking away his capacity for collective action (Deptula 2001). The combination of real-time surveillance and precision target-attack capability that was applied to such telling effect by allied air power against Iraq’s fielded ground forces in particular heralded a new relationship between air- and surface-delivered firepower, in which friendly ground forces did the fixing and friendly air power, now the predominant manoeuvre element, did most of the actual killing of enemy troops rather than the other way around (Lambeth 2014).

As attested by its remarkably effective combat performance in Desert Storm, air power was transformed over the preceding two decades to a point where it had finally become truly strategic in its character and potential effects. That was not the case before the advent of stealth, highly accurate target-attack capability and substantially improved battlefield information availability. Earlier air offensives had been of limited effectiveness at the operational and strategic levels because they simply took too many ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Lieutenant General (ret.) David A. Deptula, USAF
• Introduction: the new face of war
• Part I Foundation: the essence of air power
• Part II Roles and functions: delivering air power
• Part III Cross-domain integration: applying air power
• Part IV Political–social–economic environment: air power in its strategic context
• Part V Case studies: air power in its national context
• Conclusion: The Shape of Things to Come
• Afterword by Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Hillier, RAF
• Index