The thread seems to be playing itself out into some related but disparate topics so it may be time to at least review the bidding on the arguments to date as influenced by the wonderful exchange we’ve had thus far.

Going through the Warden Article, I still find the following issues bother me:
First is the debatable definition of airpower as “anything guidable that moves through air or space, manned or remotely piloted”.

What constitutes “guidable”? Does this mean “redirectable in flight” or simply something with a guidance system that corrects for error? The “remotely piloted” would seem to indicate “remotely guidable” but this is not altogether clear. This is important as the former excludes many types of ballistic missiles, GPS guided ordnance (whose guidance minimizes CEP relative to a predetermined location but are not “remotely guidable” in flight) while it includes some types of laser guided artillery shells and other traditional “ground power ordnance” that can be directed by a remote operator to alternative targets. It also defines away seapower as simply a truck for various forms of air power or ground power, since modern ships utilize guided weapons that are launched through the air almost exclusively, or carry Marines. Does Seapower therefore have no role other than as a slow, high capacity component of TRANSCOM?

The other issue with the definition is the reference to manned and remotely piloted, but not autonomous. Does this mean autonomous air vehicles are not considered airpower?

I would offer that defining “Airpower” is more than a consideration of the medium through which it passes, but the purpose to which its passage through the air is intended. “Airpower” as a form of combat power is concerned with the control of the air (or space) and with conducting operations against targets that are not related to the support of missions performed by ground or naval forces.

Airpower indeed has some fundamental capabilities that enable it to perform a distinctive form of combat operations, but to make the capabilities directly supporting ground or naval operations beholden to commanders responsible for conducting other types of operations introduces an unnecessary layer of C2, with potentially high risk effects.

Second:

…perhaps equally few understand that airpower can and should fundamentally change the very nature of war.
Regardless of airpower’s potential, it can never realize its real capability so long as it remains bound to an anachronistic view of war with an anachronistic vocabulary.

This opening salvo is elaborated on building an argument that “battle-centric’ military thinking has been made obsolete by airpower. This is only true if one considers air power to have no effective defense. If there is an effective defense to airpower, then it must be overcome to achieve the broader objective. While it may be possible to do this in a much compressed timeframe compared to ground power, even stealthy airpower is at increasing risk as more sophisticated integrated air defenses are developed. The notion that airpower can strike at will, with little regard to adversary capabilities to defend itself assumes that future adversaries will be as inept at coordinating air defenses as we saw in Iraq, or that the country has no capability to horizontally escalate the conflict in an attempt to deter us from conducting a protracted air campaign, like we did in Desert Storm.

Future adversaries are increasingly likely to have both significant IADS capability AND plans for horizontal escalation. These defenses and escalation options must be defeated in a series of battles that are conducted BEFOR and which must be successful, to enable the sort of paralyzing or coercive strikes described later in the article. They may be entirely air battles, but they still must be successfully conducted, or other operations will be conducted at potentially serious risk.

Airpower MIGHT be able to forgo battle, and directly attack strategic center’s of gravity, but only if the adversary has no capability to conduct an air defense, or unacceptably escalate the conflict to other domains or geographic regions. It may have a significant effort on its hands to defeat those capabilities before it can attack any other targets.

Thirdly, the article proposes a strategic framework for planning operations in general. It consists of 4 steps – defining the desired endstate, identifying the systems and system components we need to effect to achieve this desired endstate, identifying first the ways and only after that the means by which this change is effected, and lastly how to decide we are “done” and the implications of being “done” on the future state of the system we have affected.

That strategic framework borrows heavily from systems theory and assumes some critical analytic tasks can be accomplished. First is that we properly define and bound the system we are trying to effect. Since the global economy affects us all, affecting significant players in the global economy will feedback on us, and open us to the sort of horizontal escalation opportunities that have been assumed away together with a need to think in terms of “battles”. Thus the adversary “system” may not be as simple to define as it was in the case of a global “niche” player like Iraq, or now Libya.

The level of understanding of the way the components of the target system work together needs to be understood at a very sophisticated level to enable one to determine what the effect individual components in the system have on the system as a whole. For physically simple or “mechanical” systems – where each component has an observable role in the workings of the system this may not be hard. Electrical grids are the classic “simple” physical system. Other systems like financial or supply chain systems may not be as readily discernable in either what all the components are, or how the system will adapt to circumstances affecting individual components of the system. Social systems are the hardest of all to discern and understand in terms of the effect of partial or full loss of function of a particular component. The devil is in the details and assuming that devil can always be tamed is a dangerous one.

Opponents are complicated things with many moving and static parts, but we can simplify our analysis by seeing them as a system, which means that they function in some reasonably connected manner.
This is not universally true, at least not to the point where one can determine the knowledge required to identify key components, or the effect of the loss of key components, a priori. Systems at this level are in a constant state of dynamic adaptation to exigent circumstance. Trains break down, traffic jams occur, power substations fail. Even mechanical systems that have important purposes are not always employed in a consistent manner. “Service oriented systems” with a large human component will not always behave, or respond to a shock, in a consistent or predictable way. The “Shock” required to guarantee failure and inability to correct the failure will generally be large and carry considerable consequences into other systems – most notably the system of “observers” that make up the rest of the global community. Too big a “shock” can be considered inhumane and cause “blowback” beyond the system you are trying to affect. That tipping point where force goes from being justifiable to excessive is not one that can be predicted.

That said, the “5 rings” framework has a great deal of value when the circumstances make it the preferred type of methodology to use – when one has a considerable amount of international “top cover”, one is dealing with an adversary that has a fragile air defense capability and limited capability for horizontal escalation (i.e. it can be accounted for and measures taken to mitigate its effects to a large degree), when the underlying analytical assumptions are valid, and the centers of gravity are both discernable, and can be engaged staying well below any potential tipping point for “blowback”. These conditions do not exist in general, so the framework is not universally applicable.