The Limits of Air Power

I had meant to highlight this recent op-ed by Stephen Biddle in the Washington Post where the military analyst points out a few things about relying on air power to achieve humanitarian interests in areas of conflict. I haven't always agreed with Biddle over the last few years (in particular his defense of our involvement in Iraq) but this article makes sense.

The problem remains that warfare rarely allows big payoffs from small investments. As citizens of a superpower with an array of high-tech, standoff weaponry, Americans often assume they can impose their will on aggressors from a safe distance with limited sacrifice. As leaders of the free world, Americans often assume they can lead others who share their ideals to share the load, too, containing the cost of action. But this unwillingness to commit undermines real leverage. Locals with existential stakes often prove more stubborn than distant Americans expect, and even high-tech firepower has serious limitations against low-tech but determined enemies who control the people on the ground through close-up violence.

This script is playing out again in Libya. Western air power can easily annihilate Moammar Gaddafi’s modest air force and prevent him from using massed armor and artillery in the open. But once the dictator’s forces move into populated areas and resort to fighting among the civilian population, the utility of air power diminishes rapidly. Especially when the multilateral action is based on protecting civilians, rather than defeating one side, a dictator willing to mix ruthless fighters with innocent noncombatants poses serious challenges to limited applications of precision air power.

The result could easily be a drawn-out, grinding stalemate. Libyan geography makes this more likely than usual: Vast expanses of open desert separate its urban centers, making it difficult for either side to move force over a distance and use it to take and hold enemy territory far from one’s base. Gaddafi has the transport but cannot safely move logistical convoys over miles of exposed roadways with coalition aircraft overhead. The rebels are safe from air attack but lack the organization, equipment or logistical capacity to project such power themselves over such distances. This could produce a deadlock in which neither side can prevail — but where the West is committed to flying apparently endless, apparently fruitless sorties while Gaddafi crushes any remaining opposition in the cities he controls and the rebels cry out for assistance from their sanctuaries.

The sad thing is that many of us military analysts instantly recognized the perils of returning to a strategy that failed to achieve U.S. national interests in the 1990s. We all saw that, if the U.S. government (and its European allies) was serious about getting rid of Qaddafi, it would require more than what the air power demonstration would deliver. So we're all asking, what's next? Stalemate or deeper into the quagmire? Obama's tortured logic in his speech on Monday really didn't clear things up for me at all.

Comments

[sjponeill.wordpress.com]

I look at the current fiasco in Libya and I am reminded of the line from Top Gun "...you're ego's writing cheques that your body can't cash..." except that in this case the currency being expended, aside from national credibility which must be almost run out, is that ever most valuable resource of the blood and belief of the youth of the nation, specifically those who have opted to serve...contrary to Rumsfeldian shock and awe doctrine of winning war with pretty lights on a COP screen, every time we do something dumb like this because a. we can and b. we think we can get away with it, we are expending the nation's most vital resource. Didn't anyone learn anything from Iraq or any other attempt to ride in on the white horse and inflict 'peace' and democracy on the world...?

The US and the other members of the Tight Five nations is pretty well skint - time for a break and an opportunity for European 'allies' to ante up put their money where their bleating mouths are...