The True Worth of Air Power

Robert A. Pape

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004

Article preview: first 500 of 4,904 words total.

Summary:  Precision air weapons have revolutionized modern warfare, but not by making it easier to kill enemy leaders. Decapitation alone still doesn't work; wars are still won by pummeling troops in the field. The new weaponry makes it easier to hammer the enemy's forces from the air--but only when they are kept in place by ground forces.

Robert A. Pape is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and author of Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War.

THE WRONG REVOLUTION

For more than a decade, advocates of precision air weapons have argued that wars can be won by selectively taking out an enemy's leaders, its communication systems, and the economic infrastructure of its major cities. Before the Persian Gulf War, Air Force Chief of Staff General Michael Dugan promised to end the war in days by targeting Saddam Hussein directly. Later, in Kosovo, General Michael Short, commander of allied air forces in Europe, ordered air power to "go for the head of the snake." And last year, in the Iraq war, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sponsored a "shock and awe" air campaign against the Iraqi leadership. Whether it helps kill enemy leaders, isolate them from their troops, or make them vulnerable to overthrow by local groups, precision air power is advertised as a force that can win wars on its own.

Decapitating the enemy has a seductive logic. It exploits the United States' advantage in precision air power; it promises to win wars in just days, with few casualties among friendly forces and enemy civilians; and it delays committing large numbers of ground troops until they can be welcomed as liberators rather than as conquerors. But decapitation strategies have never been effective, and the advent of precision air weaponry has not made them any more so.

No doubt, precision technology has increased the accuracy of bombing. Today, 70 to 80 percent of guided munitions fall within 10 meters of their targets, even at night, with overcast skies, or in moderate winds. This is a remarkable improvement compared to World War II, when only about 18 percent of U.S. bombs fell within 1,000 feet of their targets, and only 20 percent of British bombs dropped at night fell within 5 miles of theirs.

Yet greater accuracy has not enabled air operations alone to win major wars any more than they did before the precision age. Independent air operations have rarely been decisive. From World War I until the 1980s, they were most effective in support of ground power, serving as the "hammer" to ground power's "anvil," with the anvil usually doing most of the work. Thanks to precision weapons, air power has become a far more effective complement to ground power; the hammer now does much more work for the anvil.

Precision air weapons have fundamentally changed military power, but they have not brought about the revolution often proclaimed by many air power advocates. Despite precision bombing, enemy decapitation has not become "the new American way of war." Rather, precision weaponry has revolutionized contemporary warfare by multiplying the effectiveness of using air and ground power together. The United States, in other words, still wins its wars the old-fashioned way. But with new precision air weapons, it now does so better than ever.

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS?

The strategy of enemy decapitation has inherent shortcomings, which precision technology, for all its advantages, cannot overcome. U.S. forces have tried the strategy on six occasions in the past ...

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