Fuchs, you are distorting the facts...
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Originally Posted by
Fuchs
Most warfare is not about directly breaking will, but about doing something that has an indirect effect on the enemy leadership's will, around several corners.
OK, but Warden is arguing that we should try to focus on the ultimate object... getting the enemy to do what we want - IE, "War is politics by other means" as CvC would say.
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It's secondary quality because it requires a huge amount of effort and damage in order to reach the real goal very indirectly.
Uhhh, this may have been true before... but not anymore. While World War II did require a lot of effort, Allied Force, OEF and OIF required much less effort. The cost in lives is much less on both the friendly and enemy sides. Do you really think that a NATO ground invasion of Kosovo and Serbia would have been less effort, less cost, and less casualties than Allied Force resulted in?
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This time "indirect" does not mean "smart", it means "poorly aimed".
Uhh, Warden is arguing for the direct approach as opposed to attacking fielded forces... how is this poorly aimed?
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The meagre quality becomes more visible if you assume that the same would have been attempted with a copy of the Iraqi air force, negating the extreme disparity in resources. Hint: The Wehrmacht failed in 1940 against the British with pretty much the same as the U.S.A.A.F. attempted in 1942-1944.
You are correct, the USAAF didn't have an adequate force until early 1944, and in early 1944 it was used on France and the intended areas of landing, not for strategic attack. Once it was unleashed on Germany mid 1944 it did some real damage. The Iraqi Air Force had 700 aircraft and was (for the time) a fairly credible Soviet-style force. I'm not saying they weren't outnumbered, they were. But the real key was in training, maintenance, technology, etc. You are essentially arguing that airpower was not effective because it worked too well...
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He offers so many targets to attack that I can only conclude he failed to find the real lever.
Did you read the paper? Warden is suggesting selecting targets on the inner rings carefully so that you don't have to attack so many targets, the exact opposite of what you are saying above.
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None of this is really an argument in itself, especially not the firs ton, for his actual proposal for Desert Storm had been rejected in favour of a less fancy one - and that one produced some interesting and unanticipated effects.
Warden's initial plan was not used, but because LtGen (at the time LtCol) Deptula was kept to be one of the key planners. He ended up writing the final plan.
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There's almost always something "well established". Infantry and cavalry doctrine were "well established" in 1913.
This is just silly, Fuchs. What would you recommend airpower doctrine change to? What do you see as the major flaws in the current system?
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The actual air power in use was
- successful in Iraq 1991 with an extreme resource disparity in near-perfect terrain
- semi-successful at most with various punitive strikes during the 1990's
- successful in Yugoslavia 1999 with an extreme resource disparity, yet still thoroughly embarrassed tactically, technically and strategically.
- successful in Afghanistan 2001 with a total resource disparity that didn't even encounter noteworthy resistance
- successful in Iraq 2003 with 'beyond extreme' resource disparity in very good terrain, but still with major gaffes
- failing in Iraq 2003-2007 with total resource disparity against an elusive enemy
- failing in Afghanistan 2005-2011 with total resource disparity against an elusive enemy (probably even with a negative net effect!)
Why is airpower failing in Iraq and Afghanistan? I think it has done more to enable the land forces than anything else. OBTW the drone program has been pretty effective. How would the Army/Marines have done with no airborne ISR, airlift, CAS, AAR, etc?
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Well, if I go to a funfair and easily pling all targets there, and tomorrow I go into the wilderness with a shotgun and miss almost all the rabbits, hitting many trees, squirrels and cats instead - does this mean that my marksman skill is well established and satisfactory?
Very few targets have been missed. Warden is arguing that improvements can be made to make airpower more effective in COIN - you won't find me arguing with that. But you seem to think that past failures mean the concept is doomed. By your methodology, we should have declared failure in Iraq and withdrawn in 2007... good plan.
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The only thing that's well established is the orchestration/'synchronisation' of strike packages.
Airpower strategy of the last two decades has been a joke; I saw only a primitive application of brute force.
The whole idea of elegance is totally gone missing because too many resources were at hand for too many conflicts.
Are you serious? You seem to have no familiarity with the way air campaigns are planned now... while brute force is a part of it (I suspect Wilf would argue that it must be part of any war!), the process is very tightly controlled.
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Just an example; scenario 1999 Kosovo Air War against Yugoslavia, what I would have done:
(1) negotiate an electricity embargo against Yugoslavia by all neighbours, employ observers along the high voltage power lines.
(2) Take out all powerplant turbine rooms in Yugoslavia (save for the one of the nuclear power plant; instead cut its nodes in a safe distance) with a single B-2 sortie (JDAMs were already available).
Initially the air targets were limited to fielded forces. Only later was the political leadership of NATO finally convinced to allow the air component to target key infrastructure and the regime. It was the specific push to target Milosevic and his cronies as well as their financial concerns that finally led to the Serbs capitulating. (See RAND report) This is not an airpower strategy issue- that is a grand/political strategy issue of going to war without the will to do what is neccessary- exactly what Warden is arguing against.
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Offer a deal:
Yugoslavia re-establishes autonomy for Kosovo and accepts foreign (military) police forces of its choice (no more than 50% slavs, though) as reinforcements for a mostly prejudice-free maintenance of security in Kosovo.
NATO repairs the damage ASAP and asks the neighbours to lift the electricity embargo.
How many months would they have accepted a life with electricity restricted to hospitals, the upper class residence area of Belgrade and state buildings? In resistance to what? Basically a gift!
I guesstimate they wouldn't have accepted it for much longer than they endured the resistance-provoking bombardment.
THIS is elegant strategy.
Again, something similar to what you propose is basically what ended up happening... Oh by the way, you have just used Warden's 5 rings model to develop your "elegant" strategy. I would also submit that just being without power is unlikely to convince someone like Milosevic, especially when opposition to outsiders is the source of much of his power. But again, that's not an issue with airpower...
The problems that occured were not airpower strategy issues, but problems with NATO's internal political and military leadership. That's not an issue for airpower theory to address directly. Airpower does help mitigate these problems, however, by making the war shorter and less bloody, as Warden points out. So I guess you basically agree with Warden! :D
V/R,
Cliff
Agree with the percieved intolerance...
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Originally Posted by
Marc
The problem with Warden's theory is that public and political intolerance for destruction and civilian casualties has grown faster than the effectiveness of surgical bombings. The steep increase in bombing precision that makes Warden's strategy feasible has been followed by an even steeper decrease in public tolerance for destruction and collateral damage. The 2006 invasion of southern Lebanon by Israel proved that Dan Haloutz's application of Warden's strategy destroyed the center of ISRAEL's five-rings model rather than Hezbollah's.
I agree that Israel mis-used Wardens model in Lebanon, and certainly discrimination is important. IMHO, one of the big problems with Israel's efforts is that they didn't discriminate adequately between Lebanon and Hezbollah when they did their systems analysis... and so ended up hitting targets that were used by Lebanese civilians. I think that Warden would argue that they failed to adequately find and target the leadership ring, and ended up hitting fielded forces and infrastructure too hard.
As Warden points out, the big issue is time... the quicker a war, the less likely there is to be civilian casualties and the less likely public outrage is. Certainly the "baby milk factory" in Desert Storm and the Chinese Embassy in OAF cost us in the court of public opinion. I think that the actual effects of public outrage are somewhat overrated, however, due to the media and politicians views of them.
This raises a deeper question that goes more to Fuch's grand strategic arguements... that is, do we have the will to do what it takes to win? Warden argues we shouldn't go to war if we do not. As Ken pointed out, in our current political system, it's tough to get there... politicians like G.W. Bush (whatever you think of him otherwise) who are willing to throw away their careers to do what they think is the right thing are few and far between.
Again, I'm not arguing that Warden's model is the end-all be-all, but that he is misunderstood because people focus on the 5 rings as a prescriptive solution and ignore the other points he is trying to make.
V/R,
Cliff
Horse is in front of cart, really!
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Originally Posted by
Marc
I am afraid you put the cart before the horse. It is not the politician's job to deliver the political will needed for the application of a certain strategy. It is the strategist's job to develop a strategy within the limitations of his leadership's political will.
Marc-
I disagree. In our system of government the politicians ARE the strategists- that is the problem that Ken was pointing out.
Agree that we as the military must strive to recommend strategies that alleviate this - that is why Warden argues for airpower to make wars faster/less bloody.
V/R,
Cliff
You are making Warden's point
Warden suggests, "airpower advocates must stop trying to use airpower as a substitute for its military predecessors." Accordingly, airpower detractors will engage airpower on that level for precisely the reasons Warden cites. That's what's going on here in spades.
HERE is an example of a sublime and enduring airpower victory in an irregular environment (i.e. the Pakistan tribal regions after the earthquake) that isn't "bound to an anachronistic view of war with an anachronistic vocabulary (Warden)."
Of that airpower-centric operation, terrorfreetomorrow.org writes, "Pakistanis now hold a more favorable opinion of the United States than at any time since 9/11, while support for Al Qaeda in its home base has dropped to its lowest level since then. The direct cause for this dramatic shift in Muslim opinion is clear: American humanitarian assistance for Pakistani earthquake victims." A subsuquent study showed that the reversals in opinion were not temporary.
Along those lines, THIS article suggests one way the AF could turn that knowledge into capability. But it won't because the AF is as unlikely to internalize Warden's guidance (cited at the beginning of this post) as the AF's detractors.
To the AF, conventional war = dropping bombs from jets and irregular war = dropping smaller bombs from turboprops. They don't even really recognize strategic effects even when they are creating them. Take the training of the Afg Air Force, for example. The zeitgeist is that the AAF is necessary to allow the gov't to continue to make security gains. What is frequently lost is that in a country like Afg (where vast distances are combined with scant infrastructure is combined with the strategic vulnerability of a central gov't that is too-far-removed from the people), airpower can provide the essential connectivity of the gov't to the population in the hinterlands. I have no idea why the USAF isn't blowing that horn. Maybe it is and I'm just not plugged in enough. More likely, though, that they view it as something they have to do so that the Afghans can start dropping the small bombs...
Regardless, nice to see a well-informed discussion of airpower. Very good exchange.