Slap,

Here is a very astute critique of the 5 rings from Airpower Journal - agrees with Wiif and my viewpoint to some extent. What do you think?

As an Operational framework for the employment of strategic airpower, the air campaign has sought and attracted much attention in recent years. Its champions have been tireless in promoting a commanding position for it among the US Air Force's many roles and missions. Such zeal gives the impression that winning acceptance for this particular form of using the air weapon may be the real campaign in question.

In establishing the value of the air campaign, its advocates assert that the enemy is a system on which they base the claim to have constructed a model of the conflictual environment. This essay scrutinizes the logic of that assumption. It examines its analytical and conceptual content so as better to assess how well this assumption explains the environment of future conflicts in which the armed forces will be expected to operate.

My purpose is not to challenge the need for the kind of airpower that the air campaign represents. Clearly, we need a rational template for the application of airpower against enemies organized as states. Nor is it my purpose to question the ways the air campaign employs airpower operationally to its best advantage against such enemies. A rational template helps identify critical targets, and it is far better to engage critical targets than those that have less significance for the course and outcome of fighting. My purpose is simply to underscore the problem that occurs when enthusiasm for an idea outstrips the logic marshaled in its support.
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Advocates assert that the enemy is organized in five concentric rings and that inasmuch as the five rings represent the enemy's basic architecture, they therefore constitute a system. The rings descend in order of importance from the innermost to the outermost—namely, from leadership, organic essentials, infrastructure, and population to fielded forces. Imbedded within these rings, we find centers of gravity (COG), viewed as the points of maximum utility to attack. The destruction of these COGs is most likely to hurt the enemy the worst and produce decisive results. Furthermore, these COGs may be divided into sub COGs and nodes of pressure.5 By virtue of the airplane's ability to transcend the limitations of natural topography, it remains the weapon of choice to render the enemy strategically powerless under the conditions of the five ring analysis.

Nevertheless, the five ring analysis begs the question of who and what the enemy is, what circumstances he operates under, and what qualifies him as a “system.” War is not an act of individuals but a social activity. This statement is not social science double talk; it is an issue critical to our understanding of warfare. Hence, we are obliged to ask in what way this view of the enemy resembles a social construct. However we may choose to define the component elements of a social construct called “the enemy,” there can be little argument that, through the interaction of its individual parts, a social construct represents people organized according to patterns which provide for enduring cooperation and collective expression. One important manifestation of such collective expression is in the manner and means by which people conceive and make concrete the idea of violent conflict. To grasp such manifestations in their most unambiguous form requires more than superficial analysis.
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It is worth repeating that the model which advocates propose for the air campaign can operate successfully only in an international environment where the enemy's form of sociopolitical and economic organization is the “state” and where he has the industrial capacity to produce and field the conventional forces amenable to the dissection of the five ring analysis. Unfortunately, the present day international environment has been changing in ways that no longer make the state the sole focus and arbiter of violent conflict. To this end, RAND analyst Carl Builder has argued in his book The Icarus Syndrome that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Air Force has, indeed, lost all sense of its mission.20 The formulations that have resulted in the flawed concepts of the air campaign, with its seductive appeal to simplistic reasoning, speak emotionally to a military culture in mourning for the loss of its historical roots and in search of a new purpose. Be that as it may, we must also say that the five ring analysis of the enemy as a system is the newest contribution to thought regarding the employment of airpower—however flawed the concepts of the air campaign may prove to be. What we should always strive for in the end is a better understanding of the contribution that airpower makes to war fighting and the means by which that contribution adds value to the military endeavor. The five ring analysis of the enemy as a system is a start in that direction, but it is not the end.