Quote Originally Posted by pvebber View Post
Affecting CoGs in series vice parallel is dramatically more expensive.

Only if you are inept at operational art. How do you know that the cost of firing 1000 cruise missiles all at once to achieve your objective is going to be more successful than firing 100 on 9 consecutive days. or 8 or 7? Boyd discusses this problem in relation to OODA loops.
I think Col Warden is making a generality here... but it is supportable. Take your example - the cost of deploying troops to the field for 9 days is going to be 9 times the cost of deploying them for 1 day. Not as big an issue for you Navy folks, but everyone else pays...

Maybe urban legend, but supposedly he tells the story of a dogfight with a new pilot where he makes a complicated series of maneuvers, the response to which would lead to Boyd being on the youngsters 6. After completing the maneuvers Boyd is horrified to find the younster behind HIM. He asks the youngster how he figured out how to turn the tables. The youngster said "I had no clue what to do, I was gonna go left, then thought maybe right and all of a sudden there you were in front of me!"
Having been that guy once (OK, it might have happened twice), I will submit that one of the hardest opponents in BFM can be someone who is new and thus has no clue... because sometimes they will do something completely dumb, but if you take a second to ask "why did he do that? that was dumb..." it might just work!

You can make the OODA loop so much faster than your opponent that you end up outsmarting yourself, or paralyze him so much that he can't even surrender. With tipping point phenomena, you can't predict how much effect you need to effect the tip, or how much excess you applied after the fact. Sometimes incrementalism is also a political requirement.
Hmmm... agree on the political. If you've properly analyzed your opponent, then the inability to surrender should be immaterial, because you'll know when he's there and leave him a way to let you know he's done.

Again Warden's argument requires a very determinsitic world view to be correct. There are parts of an adversary "system" that operate that way, but on the whole they do not, and the parts that do may not always be politically acceptable because of collateral effects.
Again, Warden is not arguing that we're there now - only that we are getting closer, and should keep trying - and that we will not get closer if we give up because ground and seapower folks tell us it'll never work.

Now these criticisms should NOT be extended to "well, then you must mean we shouldn't even try". Criticism is not condemnation - it is the seemingly obvious caution that we should not try to apply a theory that indeed works against some parts of the some problems, to ALL parts of ALL problems.
Which is why Warden says we should see if we can make airpower work in a quick/less costly way, and if not, consider if we really want to go to war.

Some systems we have to try to understand in their holistic, complete, complex entirety, because simplification introduces errors that render overly simplistic models useless. Just because we want there to be an easy answer that we can apply airpower to simply, quickly and relatively bloodlessly doesn't mean that is possible. Everything we have learned from the last 10 years of war has demonstrated that the heady days of Joint Vision 2010, eliminating the Fog of war and mechanically applying combat power to centers of gravity win wars is folly. Either that or our best and brightest fighting these wars are criminally incompetent for not having achieved our desired endstate quickly and cheaply.
This goes back to the same point above.

When all is said and done, lets assume Warden is 100% correct. Then what? What changes?

How do we change Joint doctrine to use a language that "enables unconstrained use of airpower"? What things would a Warden designed Air Force do that todays Air Force doesn't do? How does our concept of war change if we assume airpower is a "strategic end-sate generating machine"? How does it harmonize our future growth with China so the rising tide floats all boats? How does it convince Iran to abandon its desire for nuclear power? How does it reduce the strategic risk of our excessive debt? In a multi-polar world what are the end-states we can achieve by compelling, coercing, or denying? Can airpower be a carrot instead of a stick? (other than by giving away!)
My thoughts on what Warden would answer: We focus on the endstate. Our concept changes to focus more on the desired ends and the quickest way to get there vs. a force/battle centric way of thinking. On China, fully funding a robust airpower capability would potentially allow you to deter Chinese military action, confining the competition to the economic realm- which after all is what US grand strategy has been about since World War II. As for Iran, it either deters them or gives you the capability to affect their regime leaders in a way that convinces them it's too painful to continue. Rather than focusing on hitting their nuclear program, how about we target the president, mullahs, and revolutionary guards through their extensive financial holdings? That's the difference Warden would promote. The debt issue is not a military one, so I agree that airpower can't solve that - although if Warden's ideal was realized, we could probably cut a lot of folks. I think that airpower can be a carrot - reference our current strategy of outsourcing containment of Iran by improving other folks' Air Forces in the gulf.

Probably the biggest lesson I have learned over the last year of hanging with the Army is that the Army doesn't like strategy. I'm not trying to attack- there's good reason for this. And this is not something I came up with - this is what the Army folks have told me (one of them is going to be a FA-59, or strategist). Again, the Army drives most joint doctrine and planning because it is the biggest service and normally the JFC. This is a big part of why Warden is saying we have a hard time thinking about airpower. This is what Warden is arguing against - again, he's not saying we're there now, but that we (airpower advocates) should keep trying to get there. He is not advocating bombing everything in sight- or even that bombing is always necessary - in fact, he wants to reduce the amount of direct kinetic damage.

Good discussion pvebber.

V/R,

Cliff