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Success in modern war: A response to Robert Pape's bombing to win

John A. Warden IIIa a President of Venturist, Inc.,

To cite this Article Warden III, John A.(1997) 'Success in modern war: A response to Robert Pape's bombing to win',

Security Studies, 7: 2, 172 190 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09636419708429345 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09636419708429345

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SUCCESS IN MODERN WAR

A RESPONSE TO ROBERT PAPE'S BOMBING TO WIN
JOHN A. WARDEN III

W
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HEN I WORKED in the White House as a special assistant to the vice-president, I once visited a friend with a splendid office in the Old Executive Office Building. The office looked directly down on the West Wing and had die high ceilings, fireplace, and ornate woodwork which put the building in a class by itself. I commented to my friend diat it would be fun to know who else had occupied die office. He had already checked, and one of die most interesting was Herman Melville's brodier, who was a captain in die navy in die 1890s. Not only did he know diat Captain Melville had owned die office in die last decade of die last century, he also knew what his primary job had been at die time: to keep die navy from returning to die sail so beloved by die admirals of diat day. I feel like Melville (take your pick as to which one): it is really time to move on beyond sail, to seize die opportunities inherent in air power and strategic attack, and to stop trying to resurrect a world diat perhaps never was. My dirust in diis short article is not a point-for-point rebuttal of my friend Robert Pape's new book, but radier it is an attempt to make die case for a strategy and tools which match well die needs of die United States in die twenty-first century. As Pape suggested, it is very important diat diose associated widi national security understand what modern airpower can and cannot do to achieve political objectives. How to arrive at an increased level of understanding is die problem. Pape chose to do it by assuming diat mid-cold war nuclear war dieories accurately describe war, concluding diat only one of die major dieoriesdenialwas valid, and dien showing how airpower could play a role in achieving denial, while very carefully repeating die conventional wisdom diat airpower alone cannot win wars and diat strategic

John A. Warden III is the president of Venturist, Inc., and former commandant of the Air Command and Staff College. From 1988 to 1991 he was deputy director for warfighting on the Air Staff. SECURITY STUDIES 7, no. 2 (winter 1997/98): 172-90 Published by Frank Cass, London.

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attack did not work. Although his intentions and effort were good, I fear that he missed the mark considerably, and in the process perpetuated old myths that are daily becoming more dysfunctional. The number of old myths is astounding. One of the first is that strategic attack does not work. The concept of strategic attack is very simple: preservation of the homeland is the most important function of a state, and states have historically done whatever was necessary to ensure survival. In addition, states throughout history have recognized that a secure home front was a prerequisite to external military operations. Examples of states and leaders doing unusual things to. preserve themselves and leaders ensuring the security of their home fronts abound. Thucydides relates clearly that the Athenians accepted the demands of Sparta when Sparta put herself in a position to cut off grain supplies from the Black Sea area and Alexander the Great made unity in Greece a prerequisite to his operations against Persia. Throughout history, walled cities have surrendered when food or water ran out even though they were secure militarily. Britain emasculated Spain by blocking the flow of vital financing from the New World, and Germany signed the Versailles Peace Treaty because the post-war blockade had become unbearable. In that same conflict the Ottoman government had apparently made the decision to drop out of the war if the British fleet appeared before Constantinople. In the past, strategic attack was slow, sometimes difficult to execute, and normally done through indirect means. The advent of airpower, however, has made it fast and direct. In the Gulf War, the pace quickened by a factor of three orders of magnitude over what it had been against Germany in the first year of air attacks against the German homeland. The purpose of war is not to defeat the enemy's armed forces. Paradoxically, it may not even be to win the war itself! The only reasonable purpose of war ought to be to win the peace which follows, and all planning and operations should be directly connected with the final objective. We pay lip service to this idea, but in policy, military, and academic circles, we easily get lost in a Clausewitzian world in which defeat of the enemy military forces becomes a end in itself rather than merely one of a number of possible means to a higher end. In this sense, Pape's war categorizations of punishment, risk, denial, and decapitation merely put labels (and misleading labels at that) on tactical employment of war tools. General Schwartzkopf well understood the real purpose of the war against Iraq. The proposals we put to him on 8 August 1990 flowed from a very specific view of the peace that should follow a war with Iraq, and from

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THE FIVE RINGS SYSTEM

LEADERSHIP

\ \
FIELDED FORCES

KEY PRODUCTION

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an understanding that attainment of our peace objectives depended on our recognition that Iraq was and is a complex system. The plan we put forward was to attack Iraq in order to change Iraq, the system, so that it would be compatible with the envisioned postwar peace. In the simplest of terms, the postwar peace had to contain these two major elements: Iraq out of Kuwait, and an Iraq that would not be a threatening regional superpower for an extended period of time (a decade was what I had in mind). We could achieve the latter by destroying Iraq as a state, but it was clear that the resultant power vacuum might be even more of a threat to regional stability than a powerful, belligerent Iraq.
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THE FIVE RINGS SYSTEM

UR PLAN TO produce this postwar peace began with an analysis of Iraq O based on the Five Rings system we had developed and debated in the Air Staff during the two years prior to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The underlying assumption of this approach is that all organizations are put together in about the same way. Thus, every organization has a leadership function to give it direction and help it respond to change in its external and internal environments; each has an energy conversion function to take one form of energy and convert it into a different kind of energy; each has an infrastructure to hold it togedier; each has a population; and each has fielded forces to protect and project the organization. To make it easy to visualize the concept, we laid it out in graphical form as follows: By putting the five rings together graphically, we immediately grasp the idea that we are dealing with a system, that the militaryor fielded forcesare but one part of the system, and that the leadership ring is of central importance. In the case of Iraq, our goal was to reduce the energy level of the entire system enough to reach our peace objectives. With this approach to strategic analysis, we always begin our thinking in the center; only at the center can a single input of energy (an entreaty from the president of the United States, or something physical like a bomb) result in a significant change in the system. On occasion, the single input of energy has led to the collapse of empiresfor example, the departure of Darius III from the fields of Arbela led almost instantly to the transfer of Persia to Alexander. For the most part, however, this does not happen and it would be a poor strategist who bet everything on it. Remembering that our goal was to affect the entire Iraqi systemand fully understanding that it would be silly to depend on "decapitation" as Pape erroneously called our proposalwe identified

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additional centers of gravity progressing from the inside to the outside. The version we presented to General Schwartzkopf at our second meeting with him, a week after the first one, looked roughly like this (I have combined and simplified slighdy for space purposes):
IRAQI TARGET SYSTEMS

Leadership
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Key production Electricity

Infrastructure Roads

Population Military elites

Fielded forces Strategic air defenses Strategic offensive (air and missile)

Saddam Hussein's government National command and control Internal security forces

Retail petroleum Weapons of mass destruction

Foreign workers Ba'athists

Middle class

It is important to understand that the five rings and the table of Iraqi centers of gravity are describing a system. With die understanding of Iraq as a system, our task becomes one of converting it into something that will be in consonance with our postwar objectives. The faster we can force the conversion, die more likely we are to succeed, because the slower we proceed and the more serially we approach die problem, die more likely it is that the enemy will find ways to counter our operations. Thus, our goal was to bring die Iraqi system under rapidor parallelattack. For the first time in the history of nonnuclear warfare, we had the concepts, aircraft, and weapons to make parallel attack possible. With die new technologies (new in the sense that they were available togedier in quantity for the first time), we were able to think about attacking Iraq as a system, in parallel instead of in the serial fashion, which old era weapons would have dictated. The difference between serial and parallel, between system war and military war,1 are crucial but hard for many to 1. I am using military war to denote an approach to war where the most important thing becomes the Clausewkzianfixationon the dash of armiesthe approach Pape espouses.

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grasp. In fact, the differences are so extreme that many of the terms which were reasonable with serial and military war are utterly dysfunctional when applied to parallel and system war. A quick comparison with the Second World War will be illustrative. In the Second World War, the United States began the daylight bombing of Germany in January of 1943. Over the course of the war, the U.S. principal bomber, the B-17, had about a one-thousand-yard Circular Error Probableor CEP.2 To put this in perspective: if you want to hit something about a third the size of a football field, and you want a 90 percent probability of at least one bomb falling into the described area, you must drop over nine thousand bombs. In Second World War terms that meant flying a thousand B-17 sorties and putting about ten-thousand men at risk over the target Because of the relative inaccuracy of weapons, it was necessary to attack large complexes instead of the important parts of these complexes. Likewise, it was necessary to group large numbers of airplanes together for two reasons: first, they had to have sufficient mass to penetrate enemy defenses; second, it was necessary to drop a very large number of bombs in order to have any chance of hitting anything. When the United States began its daylight operations against Germany, it could only put relatively small numbers of bombers in the air at any time and, for the reasons noted, could only attack one target. The result was a serial attack to which the Germans responded by repairing damage and improving their defense schemes. For the latter, the Germans put an enormous amount of resources into building and manning antiaircraft guns and they also withdrew dangerously large numbers of fighters form the tactical fronts. The strategic base of Germany was so important that Hitler and his high command recognized that they had to defend it regardless of the cost. This historical fact, which has repeated itself in every instance where a state has found itself under strategic attack of any kind, shows that government and military leaders understand the importance of a secure strategic base far more than a disconcertingly large number of academic commentators. In the German case, Albert Speer recognized in 1943 that strategic bombing would doom his country, even though he was able through heroic efforts to push pack the final collapse of the transportation and energy systems until early 1945, when there were so many bombers attacking Germany's strategic centers that the damage accumulated faster than the Germans could deal with it.

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2. CEP: the radius beyond which half the bombs dropped will fall. For simplicity, think of it as average miss distance.

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If our tools in the Iraq case had been similar to those available in the Second World War, we would have been compelled to attack Iraq serially and we would have started with some small part of its air defense system. If we were very lucky, after a long period of time we might have been able to start the reduction of the key inner rings, but that would have been far into the future. Likewise, it would have been chancy; Iraq in the summer of 1990 had perhaps the most modern air defense system in the world. Fortunately, we had completely different tools to use against the Iraq system. We had an information system which allowed us to coordinate operations ranging from Colorado Springs to Great Britain to Baghdad itself. We had stealth aircraft which penetrated by themselves and thus brought many targets under simultaneous attack. We had unmanned missiles. Most important of all, we had bombs which had a very high probability of hitting that against which they were aimed. Precision has changed warfare. To update our Second World War example: in the Iraq war, if we wanted a high (90 percent) probability of hitting a target a third the size of a football field, we could confidendy dispatch one F-117 stealth fighter manned by one pilot who would drop one bomb. This represents an incredible four orders of magnitude improvement in accuracy and personal productivity over the Second World War. It also does something else of great interest. In the Second World War, conventional bombing seemed to do a lot of damage, and indeed it leveled entire cities. Despite the apparent damage, however, vital functions continued in many cases. In 1945 Berlin, for example, the telephone and teletype systems continued to work until the very end as did die water system and even much of die electrical system. This in a city which from the air looked badly hurt. The reason for diis anomaly is simple: die important things tend to be small and die odds are good that they will not be hit directly. In odier words, even diough die strategic target base is relatively small (several hundred targets for even large nations), it is very difficult and time-consuming to affect widi inaccurate weapons and serial operations. Contrast 1945 Berlin widi 1991 Baghdad: widiin minutes of die war's start, electricity went off in Baghdad, and returned only after die war's end. Similarly, die ability to communicate plummeted. Pape failed to grasp die revolutionary impact of precision weapons and dius significandy undermined his already shaky arguments against strategic airpower. In die old inaccurate world, we evaluated die effects of bombing or artillery barraging in terms of die physical damage done to die target. In die Gulf War, intelligence analystsand subsequent commentatorswould note diat only 10 percent of die electric facilities were destroyed, or only 15 percent of die road surface between Baghdad and Basra, or only 25 percent

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of the communications facilities. They would then extrapolate their damage observations to equation with function and say that the Iraqis still had 75 percent of their capacity available, which was more than enough.. The world, however, is different in the era of precision and parallelism. With the two, the targets become the important parts of the electric, communications, or transportation system. In the case of the latter, destruction of some thirty bridges (a small portion of the road surface) between Baghdad and Basra reduced movement by nearly a 100 percent and dropped the flow of critical supplies into Kuwait below the survival level in the first three weeks of the warwhich meant that Iraqis in Kuwait were quickly depleting what they had stockpiled. The electrical and communication systems were similar: by hitting the key facilities in each, the output levels dropped precipitatelyeven though physical damage was relatively minor. In the past, war efforts tended to be aimed at physical structures and success measured accordingly. Today, war efforts aim at function and we are successful when function stops, regardless of physical damage. Failure to understand the shift from the physical to the function has significantly obfuscated analysis of the Gulf War and has led writers such as Pape to erroneous conclusions. The overall thrust of operations in the first hours of the war was to begin inducing a strategic paralysis in Iraq which would simultaneously start the process of cutting Iraq down to an acceptable postwar size and making it impossible for Iraq to do anything about it. The operations were parallel, but the limitations of the printed page force us to explain what we did and why in a serial way. For convenience, we will start at the center of the five rings and work to the outside.

THE FIRST RING: LEADERSHIP

A T THE VERY center was Saddam Hussein's government which, of course, ./jLincluded Saddam himself. In our first meeting with General Schwartzkopf we stressed the importance of making clear to the Iraqis and to the rest of the world that our problem existed because of Saddam Hussein's policiesnot because we hated Iraq or Iraqis. By presenting the war in this way, we wanted also to make clear to the Iraqis that they would fare well in a postwar world that did not include Saddam. Indeed, not to make this case, would have been naive and would have caused us to lose our focus. Likewise, we discussed with General Schwartzkopf what would happen in the event that Saddam was not displaced. Our view, with which

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the General agreed, was that it would be far better for Iraq if Saddam was no longer in power, but as long as we had taken away from Saddam the tools he needed to be a regional superpower threat, his disposition was not of overwhelming importance. The consensus of the intelligence community in August 1990 was that Iraq was on its current course of conquest primarily because of the ambitions of Saddam Hussein, and that, if he were gone, Iraq's policies, at least in the short term, would be less bellicose. Further, the majority of analysts with whom we consulted (inside and outside of government) were of the opinion that no one who might replace Saddam would be as bad as he simply because they would lack the power base it had taken him almost two brutal decades to build. Thus, if we could create a situation which led direcdy or indirecdy to Saddam's departure from office, we would have contributed to our postwar peace objectives of creating an Iraq less direatening to its neighbors. In addition to the geostrategic rationale, there was a second reason that we needed to attack the Saddam government: to decrease its ability to oppose our operations against Iraq. Contrary to Pape's postulations, strategic direction and coordination of combat, psychological, and support operations above a tactical or medium operational level come from national capitals, regardless of the type of government. Furdiermore, when damage is accreting rapidlyas it does in parallel wardecisions must come much faster than in peacetime. We could picture Saddam's government organization die same way we could picture Iraq as a whole; the five rings approach recogni2es fractal relationships which repeat diemselves from die very large to die very small. In odier words, each part of die system is defined by its own five rings structure right down to die level of an individual. Widi diis picture of die government, we could think about attacking it in parallel. We clearly did not know where all die major offices were, but we were able to discover die locations of many and to attack each widi a single bomb. We expected to hit most of die command centers of die government related to running the country in war. We knew diat each one of diese facilities had a backup. We also knew mat die backups in general would not be quite as well equipped and manned as die primaries. Here die reader should begin to get a sense of die effect of massive parallel attack. In our everyday experience, we know how much our efficiency falls off when we lose our telephones for a day, or when we change our office location or telephone number. Despite our best efforts, people do not find us, we cannot put our fingers on die important paper we had yesterday, and so on. In normal affairs we accept diese problems knowing diey will eventu-

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ally go away. Imagine what happens, however, when die majority of a government's senior leaders and dieir key staffs change tfieir office addresses and phone numbers widiout notice in the midst of a very stressful situation. Does anyone really believe mat die efficiency of die government must not decrease significandy and rapidly? In the days of inaccurate weapons, forcing a major change on the physical manifestations of government was simply not possible; in the Gulf War it was possible and it happened. Attacks on government command facilities had anodier effect; senior officials had to become more mobile in order to reduce dieir chances of being killed. As Pape pointed out in a contradictory footnote, Saddam Hussein himself was reluctant to use even a cellular phone for fear diat he would be targeted. Picture die president of die United States and most of his key advisors incommunicado for extended periods each day, and ask yourself how well and quickly die government will make critical decisions. All this happens despite an apparendy low level of physical destruction. Attacks on die government communications system accelerated the breakdown in government efficiency, reduced significantly the very high volume of communications die Iraqi military high command customarily used to direct field operations, and also made it more difficult for Saddam Hussein to communicate direcdy widi his citizenry. Pape diought the Iraqi military did not need much in die way of command from Baghdad, but in fact it had developed a very effective system to convey die necessarily high volumes of information to die front. Observers like Pape frequendy confuse tactical, operational, and strategic levels of command. They think diat because a small unit (a company, for example) is given a degree of autonomy, diat die same diing must apply to larger units. It does notanywheresimply because offense or defense at an operational (dieater, for simplicity) level requires enormous coordination to ensure diat logistics, supporting fires, communications, deception, and die rest come togedier at the right time and place. Few countries are capable of making diis come to pass (consider die friction between General Schwarzkopf and General Franks in die Gulf War). So far, those which have achieved it on an operational level, have only been able to do it widi very high bandwidth communications. The Iraqis had developed dieir system during die Iran war and had become quite proficient widi it. They, of course, had spent great sums of money to buy die most modern equipment and had bought enough to have a very robust and redundant system. It would have served diem well against any enemy, except one equipped widi precision weapons and die parallel war concept. This is a case where the reality of how the Iraqi high command operated from Baghdad was pre-

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cisely the opposite of what Pape thought it to be. Unfortunately for him, he drew major conclusions about the ineffectiveness of strategic attack on communications based on a totally erroneous understanding of how large ground operations are planned and controlled, and on the incredible volume of internal communications needed for a country to operate in the best of timeslet alone the worst As mentioned, another facet of the attack on strategic communications was the desire to make it more difficult for Saddam to talk to fellow Iraqis. As we all know, a harsh dictatorship is highly dependent on keeping its image and presence in front of the people. If it seems to disappear, people begin to behave as though it were not therewhich was one of our many parallel goals. There is more to this equation than just taking away communication from die dictator; the attacker must provide a substitute. At our first briefing to General Schwarzkopf, we said very explicidy that the strategic psychological operations campaign was entirely as important as die bombing campaign. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of a lot of people, including General Schwarzkopf, there was never a real strategic psychological operations campaign which would have done more to facilitate possible coups or other Iraqi actions against Saddam and his Tikrit clan.3 Saddam's security forces were the next area of attention. These comprised the various KGB and Gestapo-like services which protected Saddam and which carried out his reign of terror. We believed that attacks on these groups would loosen Saddam's grip and again facilitate coups or odier direct action against die government. Keep in mind that diis was but one of many parallel attacks and the success of die overall campaign did not depend on its success. As will be clear shortly, if not already, our air strategy was not a "decapitation" strategy as Pape mislabels it, although attacks against the leadership were very much a part of die plan. Many people have diought of die Republican Guard as die military primarily responsible for keeping Saddam in power. In actuality, die Republican Guard, which went into die field in division and corps-sized operations, was not the group which undertook die nasty day-to-day internal security work. Odiers did diat, and diey were a far more important die target dian die Republican Guard soldiers in Kuwait.

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3. There was an effective tactical psychological operations campaign against the Iraqi army in Kuwait Unlike the strategic campaign which needed Washington direction and participation, the tactical campaign was under General Schwarzkopf s authority and he did a great job with it.

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THE SECOND RING: KEY PRODUCTION

A T THE TIME OF the war, we called the next ring out "Key Production"; _Z~A.the idea was to highlight those activities on which the country as a system totally depended. Although we subsequently changed the name to "System Essentials," the concept is the same. In this ring, we identified electricity, retail petroleum, and weapons of mass destruction as the energy conversion functions which were vital to Iraq being what Saddam wanted it to be. Pape is one of the many commentators who failed to grasp the importance of electricity as a strategic target. It is, in virtually every country that has it, a strategic target of the first importance. Electricity is the most efficient way to move energy around a country. It powers everythingfrom radar antennas to elevators to telephone switching centers to computers. Yes, it is true that some of these have back-up generators, but the back-up generators are precisely what their name implies. They are not designed to be long-term sources of electricity and they do not substitute well for primary electricity even for short periods. The logic is pretty simple; if back-up generators were as good as primary electricity, there would be no national grid. When the electricity in a country goes off, it immediately puts a strain on almost every activity in a country and forces the occupants to expend energy to find alternates. Thus, with relatively litde effort, we were able to affect almost everything and everyone in most of Iraq. Consider a trivial example. Most of the government buildings in Iraq were multistorey, which meant they had elevators. When the power went out, the elevators in many cases stopped functioning at their previous level so occupants of upper storey had to walk up the steps. No big deal, one might say, until you realize that this simple act has probably imposed a fiveminute time penalty on every government worker and has also made him look for excuses not to go to his office or leave it.4 Although it has much more important effects, shutting off electricity is rather like pouring a layer of molasses over the whole country; people can still move, but they move more slow and they spend energy they would otherwise have put to more profitable uses. Attacks on electricity were exceptionally valuable in creating the system-wide strategic paralysis that we wanted to impose on Iraq. Our attacks on retail petroleum had a similar rationale: to create a major problem which would have an effect across the country. Here again, many
4. In the late 1970s the Carter administration shut down the escalators in the Pentagon in order to conserve energy. The amount of important physical interaction among occupants of the six levels of the Pentagon fell noticeably!

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commentators fail to understand the impact of stopping the production of refined petroleum products. They become mesmerized with the idea that it is only the fielded forces which count, and the problem for the affected country is nothing more that a reallocation of resources. In fact, it is far more because of all the demands for the resources. The user-level shortages, which develop quickly because it takes time to deal with a problem which arises overnight, magnify the problems caused by the failure of the electricity system. Every back-up generator has a relatively small supply of fuel collocated with it, which needs replenishment when the back-up generator is used for more than a few hours or days. With shortages in the fuel supply, however, finding generator fuel and getting it into the tank becomes difficult or impossible. Further complicating the reallocation problem is the fact that much of the support for even the military comes through private or nonmilitary transportation or supply companies. Given a lot of time to respond to a gradually developing problem, a competent bureaucracy can do something, but it is not clear that there is any bureaucracy in the world that can solve such a challenging problem when telephone coordination with multiple agencies is impossible, and physically finding the people who can make decisions is difficult to impossible.

THE FIFTH RING: FIELDED FORCES

N THE INTEREST of brevity, let us move directly to the fielded forces ring. Note that the centers of gravity in this area we had identified for the strategic part of the campaign were just air defense and offense. We saw them as being a part of the overall system which we had to convert in order to achieve our objectives. Reduction of the air defense system allowed us to use all of our attack aircraft without fear of large losses. In addition, its loss put Saddam in a precarious position, for his future and that of his country fell into the hands of his attackers as soon as he was unable to defend himself and Iraq. Operations against Iraq's strategic air offense (air platforms and missiles) were necessary to deprive Iraq of its ability to conduct potentially dangerous strategic counteroffensives. Most worrisome in early August, and a subject of conversation with General Schwartzkopf, was the likely outcome of serious Iraqi attacks on Israel. We were confident that we could suppress the air threat, but there was no obvious direct way to prevent the Iraqis from launching mobile missiles. Our goal was to do as much as we could indirectly to lessen the numbers and types fired and to ameliorate their effect as best we could.

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Although space limitations prevent me from addressing in detail the actual course of the war, one or two comments are in order to correct misconceptions in Pape's book. Many have assumed the Iraqi Air Force failed to achieve much because of incompetence on its part. This was not the case. During the Iran-Iran war, the Iraqi Air Force had conducted very sophisticated, very long-range operations against such key Iranian targets as oil tankers and petroleum facilities. Before the Gulf War, everyone had a healthy respect for the Iraqi Air Force and was most concerned. From a planning standpoint, it was necessary to devise a way to neutralize this very real threat. like the rest of the operations, our plan was parallel: knock out the air defense system and reduce national communications quickly in order to drive individual air force units into autonomous operations, which meant they had to deal with a national threat with only local information available to them. The consequences were severe and quick to become obvious; Iraqi pilots took off without any picture of the air defense system. They did not know whether an enemy fighter was orbiting high over their field or not. Too frequently there was, and their efforts to fly were futile. Their reaction was entirely correct; they took temporary refuge in the best air defense shelters in the worldshelters they reasonably thought would be proof against anything other than a direct nuclear hit. Much to their amazement (and to the amazement of many American officers), the latest generation of precision bombs were highly effective against these shelters. Thus, the Iraqis died if they flew and died if they did not. To recap to this point: contrary to Pape, our strategy was not a decapitation strategy by any means, but rather was a comprehensive strategy to use the tools available to us to do things which could not have been done in any war prior to the Gulf War.5 Our plan was to impose strategic paralysis on Iraq on the way to forcing Iraq to be in consonance with our postwar peace objectives. The beauty of parallel attack, now possible because of computers, stealth, and precision, is that the employer of the concept is not stuck in an old serial world where only one thing at a time could be done.

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5. As far as I could see, Pape used only one of my articles as source notes, and he only used what seemed to support his hypothesis. I am sorry that he did not take the opportunity to interview me while we worked a few hundred yards apart for almost two years; an hour or two would have helped give him a much better understanding of how things work in the real world and what our concepts really were. In addition, several other articles were available to him as well as many hours of video-taped lectures.

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WHAT IF: PAPE'S RECOMMENDED STRATEGY AND THE GULF WAR

T^APE BASES M U C H of his hypothesis about the primacy of denial oriented JL against military forces on the assumption mat most wars are fought over territory. Although some wars may be fought over territory, many are not, and those that are need not be resolved in the territory under dispute. As is well known, in fact, there is a rich history of one country securing its territorial or other objectives by acting in a completely different geographic or conceptual theater. We can, however, test Pape's hypothesis on territory and his dismissal of strategic attack by applying his ideas direcdy to the Kuwait situation. Of some interest, many in August 1990 (and even later) wanted to apply his preferred solution and just attack the Iraqi army in Kuwait; after all, was not that the problem and should not one solve problems where they manifest themselves? The direct solution called for the application of standard Army AirLand Battle doctrine, which would have meant air and artillery attacks to soften the Iraqi army in Kuwait, followed by American and Coalition ground attacks to push the Iraqis out of Kuwait. Doubdess, it was widiin the theoretical military capability of the Coalition to take this approach given a year or more to build up the attacker-to-defender ratios military commanders would have demanded. It would have been difficult for die president of the United States to secure political support for an operation which would have led to a high number of casualties, if forecasts in die late summer of 1990 under the aegis of die Joint Chiefs of Staff were accurate. Put aside for a moment the questions about logistical and political feasibility and assume the hypodietical operation was successful and diat Saddam had lost as much of his army in Kuwait as he lost in the actual operation. At the end of a rollback war which involved no serious attack on the interior, Saddam would have been out of Kuwait, but would have suffered no significant strategic damage. The war would likely have ended with a cease-fire widi two substantial forces facing each other across die KuwaitIraq border. Saddam's losses would have been much less than they were in the war widi Iran, and despite losing up to half of what he had in Kuwait, he still would have had one of the most capable armies in die world. Under diese circumstances, does anyone believe that he would have permitted the gross infringements on Iraqi sovereignty which followed the war and are still occurring? Would he have permitted unarmed UN inspectors to wander around Iraq, commanding the destruction of important and expensive weapons and programs? To say the least, it seems unlikely. Saddam's ground-force losses were trivial compared to what he had previously

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weathered and what he was willing to accept as part of his own strategy of attrition. In the real world, it was the terrible weakening of Saddam's strategic base which forced him to accept unconscionable peace terms and which has allowed a handful of American airmen to keep him within the bounds defined by the United States (which may well have been far less than what we could have had).6 Think for a moment about the Iraq with which we would now be living had we not so reduced Iraq strategically that it had to accept our onerous post-war intrusions. Iraq almost certainly would now have a nuclear capability; it would have an air and missile delivery capability; and it would certainly be uncowed. Can we imagine any semblance of a remaining coalition against Iraq, and can we imagine that any state in the region would support oil and weapons embargoes against a strategically strong, nuclear-equipped Iraq? That is exactly what we would have if we had followed Pape's plan, which he penned even with the benefit of hindsight. Indeed, it is time to give up our beloved sails, no matter how pretty they be and how comfortable they make us. Succinctly summarized, it seems highly unlikely that pure execution of Pape's denial strategy, focused against Saddam's forces in the field, would have led to realization of any goal other than pushing Saddam out of Kuwait (which would have really suffered in the process); conversely, we know the results of a war that had as its central element a strategic attackas imperfecdy executed as it might have been.

OTHER DISAGREEMENTS

/-|-o BE FAIR TO Pape, my response to him should be as long as his book JL and should address each of the many points over which we have nearcomplete disagreement. Absent diat space, however, an abbreviated list must suffice: Pape maintains in his book that strategic air attack is not effective and that, in any event, defense against it is quite easy. To the contrary, defense against air attack is extraordinarily difficult and is only rarely successful. Part of the reason why air offense is dominant is die difficulty of defense. In old-style ground war, the defender knew mere were only limited avenues of approach. Furdiermore, the attacker generally moved at about die same
6. Since 26 August 1992, Operation Southern Watch, a U.S. led coalition of airmen flying out of bases in Saudi Arabia, has quietly kept vigil over Iraqi territory and has controlled both the skies above and the land beneath withouttheassistance of ground forces.

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slow speed as the defender, so the defender, with less distance to cover in most cases, could generally succeed in meeting the attacker before the attacker reached strategically important areas. The time available for a defender to react to air attack, however, and the necessity to guard a very large number of possible approaches, make defense extraordinarily difficult. This has been the case since the earliest days of aviation. The British success against the Germans in the Second World War was an anomaly, and was very close in any event. It is very difficult to understand why or how Pape came to the conclusion that precision weapons were not of revolutionary importance. Precision weapons have changed the face of war because they permit parallel attack and enormous reduction in the time required to disable any target system. In addition, they are extraordinarily cheap when measured against the effects they produce on the enemy. Even if the bombs themselves and their delivery platforms are relatively much more expensive than their imprecise ancestors, they are still inexpensive when the right measurement is used. If the measure of merit is merely tons of bombs dropped or sorties flown, without regard to effect on the enemy or losses to the attacker, then imprecise weapons and airplanes are cheap. We fight, however, to accomplish something, so the measure of effectiveness and cost must be based on the effect produced on the enemy. If one prefers to risk 3,000 men and 300 airplanes to attack a Schweinfurt-type target, rather than risk one airplane and one pilot, which have a much higher probability of success, then old and imprecise is the answer. Pape suggested in his book that attacks on the Iraqi electrical system only came about because of some strange, historically ignorant cabal secretly plotting to make it happen. There was no "lobbying" for electrical strikes on Iraq by people who had "forgotten" Korea. Attack on the Iraqi electrical system was part of the first plan we presented to General Schwartzkopf, who understood exactly what such strikes would produce and why they were imperative. Far from being ignorant of the history of air war, the whole planning team was intimately familiar with it and was determined to apply all of its lessons. Pape goes to great lengths to say that "punishment" strategies do not work. Deliberately killing innocent civilians in order to achieve political objective goes against all of our moral thinking in late twentieth-century America. To say that punishment does not work, however, is to ignore three thousand years of history and innumerable sieges. The fact that someone can cite three examples in which punishment did not work (where the punishment was mild by historical standards, and very short-lived) does

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not make a very strong case. It is instructive to recall that Germany agreed to very onerous peace terms following the First World War only after the post-war blockade imposed unacceptable suffering on the civilian population. This point is important not because we want to see these kinds of strategy resurrected (quite the opposite), but because we are burying our heads in the sand if we think others will not use them and that they will not succeed. Many commentators, including Pape, have talked about the losses suffered by airmen participating in the strategic air campaign against Germany in the Second World War. They were heavy in absolute terms, but in total they equaled only one or two particularly bad days on the Western Front during the First World War, where the returns were a few hundred yards of worthless land. Were the losses suffered by airmen taking part in the strategic air campaign in the Second World War worthwhile? Participants in the Strategic Bombing Survey, such as Paul Nitze, certainly diought they were. Even if we were to put aside the conclusions of the Survey, as Pape would have us do, one salient fact stands out: the Western Allies defeated Germany at a fraction of the cost of fighting to a stalemate from 1914 to 1918. Was not the strategic attack on the German core homeland the single most important difference? There is a popular misconception that wars primarily affect soldiers and combatants. Although this is becoming true as we move deeper into the preciseness of the air age, the shadows of countless civilians would be amazed how anyone could fail to grasp the terrible toll war imposes on the innocent. The Thirty Years War is a classic example of the fallacy of Pape's conclusion, as is the civilian loss rate on the eastern front in the Second World Wara portion of the war, incidentally, in which air played a much smaller role than it did on the western front. The deterrence theorists of the 1950s and 1960s spoke frequently about evacuating cities as part of a the nuclear Kabuki dance they envisioned. In the real world, evacuation of urban centers and the maintenance of the evacuees may be nearly impossible. In addition, if it were done for more than a few days, it is hard to envision how a state would function. This is another case where an academic theorist departs radically from reality. Pape says that amphibious operations in the Second World War required "huge ratios of superiority to succeed." In the Pacific, American commanders looked for a three-to-one advantage over the defenders, but frequently succeeded with less. At Normandy, the Allies were significandy inferior to the German defenders. Perhaps "huge superiority" means superiority in

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power rather than in numbers. If that is the case, however, Pape's argument is a truism. Many observers, even in the military, think they can ignore the necessity of winning air superiority, or that they can do it on the cheap, by winning it over a limited piece of territory. Pape has erred in his support for both ideas. Air superiority is key to strategic operations, just as it is key to every other kind of operation. Winning air superiority is difficult, and one of the surest ways to fail is to think you can take the parsimonious approach and go for local superiority. Local air superiority is a very dangerous idea simply because it ends up requiring air defense, which is very difficult. In the last few paragraphs I have taken Pape to task for making technical errors in talking about air powerwhich is a much more technically difficult subject than conventional ground operations. No one would suggest that only experts in air operations can analyze the value of air power in a variety of roles, or understand the technical aspects of it. The nontechnical analyst who bases his conclusions on technical aspects he does not understand, however, runs the risk of discrediting his work.

STRATEGIC USE OF AIR POWER IN THE GULF AND IN FUTURE STRATEGY

ONTRARY TO Pape's conclusions, the strategic application of airpower Cwas most effective in the Gulf War, even given the restrictions imposed on it and the errors made in its execution. It was strategic attack on Iraq which put it in a position where it was forced to accept the dictates of its opponents and to suffer serious intrusions on its sovereignty since the end of the war. It is strategic attack which is cheaper, faster, and less bloody than the industrial-age warfare which Pape wants to bring back It is strategic attack based on precision, stealth aircraft, and standoff weapons which offers extraordinary new options to American political leaders. The true service to the nation is to learn how to use it more effectively, to develop weapons that are precise not only in impact but in effect, and to educate potential enemies so they understand what happens to them and to their countries when their strategic centers collapse about them. It is time for us to give up the past and enter the twenty-first century with ideas appropriate to it, not with ideas rooted in outmoded concepts of war and competition.