I would agree that the misapplication of any weapons system is wasteful and can cause more harm than good to the war effort. However to classify air power assets as counterproductive is going too far. The current application of air power may be flawed, I for one have trouble understanding how sending in a PGM to a residential area for a “surgical” strike can be considered a good idea, but to dismiss air power as irrelevant to modern war just puts one in the same camp, though on the opposite side of the camp, as the adherents of the Douhet Model. They believed, some still do, in the flawed assumption that modern air power made ground combat forces irrelevant. To dismiss virtually all air delivered munitions as strategically irrelevant is an equally flawed position. Air power is just as versatile as a rifle. Remember the old saying about rifle fire accuracy, it is not the dope on the rifle, but the dope behind that is the problem.
While the enemy keeps on talking about how unmanly air strikes are, they fear them. Air strikes alone will not win any conventional or COIN conflict. But as part of a combined arms approach they are very helpful. The challenge is to think of air power in its combined arms role in a non-traditional way that benefits the guys on the ground.
A SF team in Afghanistan was having a disagreement with a group of armed men, who said they were Pakistani para-military border guards. The disagreement was that the border guards were about 500 meters west of where the border was the day before and they were pointing their weapons at our guys and telling them to leave or they would open fire.
The combat air controller put out a call to find out if there were any friendly aircraft in the area and found a B-52. The B-52 went into a holding pattern over the area. All our guys had to do then was to ask the self proclaimed border guards to go home for the day and then look up in the sky. The border guards looked up, saw the little spot in the sky that was the B-52, and decided that the border was about 500 meters to the east and that it was indeed time to call it a day. Interestingly, the folks on the Pakistani side of the border no longer pointed their weapons at US and Afghan forces, and there was no more confusion as to where the border was in that area
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