The Warden Collection (merged thread)

[Fuchs]

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?

The resources applied were in all the 1991-2011 examples out of proportion with the target. Show me contemporary air war strategy defeating a peer enemy in less than a half year anywhere and I'll buy that it's efficient enough.

Btw, the record for most rapid defeat of a Yugoslav government is an astonishing 11 days. The most powerful alliance ever took 78 days to force very limited demands.

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.

The problem is merely that the whole 'rings' stuff is nonsense. The whole approach is just a bad idea. His writing is full of cluelessness with minimal inspiration. You need to get to the core if you want to break will, you need to look at psychology and preferences, not against an organisation complex.

Here's a problem, though.
Let's assume I think I have a better concept that the world-famous five rings crap.
Would you expect me to publish it in an internet forum?

I wouldn't even publish it in my blog.

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.

... which was what he was told to propose, not what he proposed. There are certain people from that episode who do not hold him in high regard at all.

Why is airpower failing in Iraq and Afghanistan?

It has been a failure because it was no success, especially in regard to strategy. Doing this and doing that does not count much when the real idea was to win, not to keep doing things.

By your methodology, we should have declared failure in Iraq and withdrawn in 2007... good plan.

By my methodology, Iraq would have been left alone since '97, for it had been disarmed as demanded in '96 and was no real-world problem any more.

Are you serious? (...), the process is very tightly controlled.

Yes, and I don't care about tight control.
There's no inspiration behind what's being done, just transpiration and the standard meme of throwing resources at a problem.
The 90's and 00's air wars followed the 8th AF approach of destroying this, then that - trial and error. We need something more close to Biafra air force, Flying Tigers or Luftwaffe May '40.
We need air forces which deliver a good strategic effect on small budget, accomplish their mission against the odds and which can focus on what's decisive.

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.

I'll translate this for you:

The original strategy didn't work, a new set of targets was opened up and that strategy didn't work either, another set of targets was opened up and that strategy was still failing until finally the hero knight in shining armour arrived and rescued us all from the total strategic embarrassment: The Russian prime minister who convinced Milosevic that Russia would not intervene.

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.

Hardly. We bombed a small power for 78 days. Not elegant at all.

The problems that occurred 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.

Most of all, it leads to additional wars because
a) there were already too many hundreds of billions spent on the AF bureaucracy and its toys (and politicians never fail to hit the sunk costs fallacy!).
b) air power offers a fantasy of a war (or bullying) on the cheap, without much negative effects of relevance

The Kosovo air war remains a strategic disaster on too many levels - it's astonishing how well this has been kept out of the public perception.
* technical failure of DEAD attempts
* technical failure of F-117
* tactical failure of way too inept mission planning (such as no variance in French UAV routing and predictable Tomahawk flight routes)
* tactical/technical failure of BDA from the air
* intelligence failure on colossal scope before the war
* political failure: lies about the reasons for war
* intelligence failure: BDA
* top HQ failure to teach politicians about what air power can achieve
* top HQ failure to understand that the short bombing around Sarajevo is NOT a good analogy
* political failure: opposition instead of cooperation with Russia
* logistical failure: Race to Pristina airport
* readiness and deployability failure: TF Hawk
* strategic failure: poor understanding of the purpose of destruction
* PR failure: slowed down train bombing video was a lie
* reconnaissance failure: aerial imagery misinterpretation on colossal scale
* reconnaissance and targeting failure: way too many decoys were engaged
* reconnaissance and targeting failure: deployed ground forces were barely scratched despite being targeted
* strategic failure: way too long campaign in light of the disparity between NATO and Yugoslavia
* political failure: Greece was not convinced to make bases available
* logistical failure: use of North Italian instead of South Italian bases was idiotic
* political failure: many countries provided small packages of combat aircraft instead of the alliance tailoring a force of only the best for the job
* political failure: no gains for us
* political failure: we're stills tuck in there with blue helmets
* political failure: a few thousand criminal insurgents fooled us into fighting their war
* political failure: said thugs are now operating the organised crime hub of Europe under our protection
* political failure: we came to end an ethnic cleansing campaign against Kosovars that did not really exist and then we didn't really keep the Kosovars from cleaning most of Kosovo ethnically from Serbs


The whole thing was a huge embarrassment, and the air war component contributed a lot to the embarrassment. Only so-called "victory" prevented that the whole world laughed about us.


Last but not least: Always keep in mind RAND is writing for its customers; the air force, the navy ...
Any paper that quotes Michael O'Hanlon is by default already at least 50% disqualified in my opinion.