The Mystique of U.S. Air Power

Eliot A. Cohen

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1994

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Summary:  The success of air power in the Persian Gulf War has led some to consider it as a "revolution" in military technology, one that holds out the possibility of war meted out in fine increments and perhaps even bloodless battles. Air power was commanding in the war and innovative in its use of rapid electronic information. But that did not, and will not, alter the Clausewitzian "fog of war" or war?s lethal, inevitable spread to noncombatants. War remains a cruel business.

Eliot A. Cohen is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University. From 1991 to 1993 he was Director of the Gulf War Air Power Survey, an independent study commissioned by the Secretary of the Air Force. This article represents the author's opinion solely, and not the views of the U.S. Air Force or any other government agency.

WAS THE GULF WAR A REVOLUTION?

Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength, in part because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment. Francis Bacon wrote of command of the sea that he who has it "is at great liberty, and may take as much and as little of the Warre as he will," and a similar belief accounts for air power's attractiveness to those who favor modest uses of force overseas. Statesmen may think that they can use air attacks to engage in hostilities by increments, something ground combat does not permit. Furthermore, it appears that the imminent arrival of so-called nonlethal or disabling technologies may offer an even more appealing prospect: war without casualties.

This rise in air power's stock comes from its success in the Persian Gulf War. In the view of some, that conflict represented the opening shot of a fundamental transformation in the nature of warfare, a "military-technical revolution" as the Russians have termed it for more than a decade. Thus the Russian military sadly read the outcome of a war that vindicated their predictions even as it sealed their profound sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the United States. Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney agreed: "This war demonstrated dramatically the new possibilities of what has been called the 'military-technological revolution in warfare.'" Others, outside the Bush administration, expressed this view no less enthusiastically. William Perry, now Deputy Secretary of Defense, wrote in Foreign Affairs that "a new class of military systems...gave American forces a revolutionary advance in military capability."1

The lopsided struggle with Iraq has already affected the way Americans understand modern war, inducing the ornithological miracle of doves becoming hawks. More than one distinguished commentator who had reservations about aerial bombardment in the Persian Gulf expressed a newfound belief in its utility as a tool of American foreign policy in the Balkans. Thus, Anthony Lewis of The New York Times wrote during the Persian Gulf War in disgust at the ruin wrought by aerial bombardment, "We should never again tolerate anyone who talks about 'surgical strikes.'" Since then he has developed a keener appreciation of air power, asserting that "a few air strikes in Dubrovnik" would have stopped the Yugoslav horrors in 1991. There is a "straightforward way to apply force" in Bosnia that involves "minimum risk" and provides a course that is not merely right but "clear and doable"--precision air attacks.2

Many of these individuals came away from the Persian Gulf War with a far healthier respect for air power, believing it had made all the difference. Indeed it had.3 Some 52,000 air-to-surface sorties delivered approximately 210,000 unguided bombs, 9,300 guided bombs, 5,400 guided air-to-surface missiles and 2,000 anti-radar missiles; American forces also hurled more than 300 cruise missiles at the enemy. To what effect? Of its 700 aircraft, the Iraqi air force lost 33 in the air; approximately 140 perished in hardened aircraft shelters and more than 120 were flown to Iran. The Iraqi air defense ...

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