Combat Boots vs. Air Power

As Monday’s reporting date for the Pentagon’s ongoing Quadrennial Defense Review draws near, the most important issue concerns needlessly duplicative service roles and weapons programs in a time of cutbacks.

The most important choice lies between new air and space technologies offering a proven edge in combat effectiveness and an increasingly anachronistic approach in which America’s air and space assets are viewed mainly as supporting adjuncts to surface forces. Ever since the success of Operation Desert Storm six years ago, a near-impasse has existed between soldiers and airmen over this issue. Although there has been recurrent sparring between the Air Force and Navy over the extent to which carrier-based aviation contributes its fair share for the disproportionate cost it represents, the main confrontation has been between the Air Force and Army over the more basic question of whether air power--in all services--has displaced land power.

This issue has high budgetary stakes. Yet it ultimately involves a more principled clash between two opposed ideologies of warfare. Despite the determining role played by the allied air campaign in Desert Storm, the Army continues to insist that air power should merely support land operations. It remains wedded to the mantra that “boots on the ground” constitute not just the definitive measure of victory in war but an indispensable condition for achieving such victory.

In contrast, air power professionals maintain that the combination of stealth, precision standoff attack capability and what has come to be called “information dominance” now permits the nation’s air and space assets to produce decisive results at only a fraction of the previous cost in human life. It is this claim to a paradigm shift in the American way of war, counterpoised against the Army’s more bounded view of surface operations, that has heated the defense debate.

No responsible air power professional in any service has claimed that air power can invariably substitute for land power or that the new capabilities of air and space power obviate the need for robust land forces. Yet airmen rightly insist that air and space assets can determine war outcomes, thus enabling surface forces to achieve their goals with a minimum of effort and bloodshed. It was not by luck that of 500,000 U.S. troops deployed in Desert Storm, there were only 148 fatalities during the five weeks of actual fighting.

This suggests that the main role of land power may now be merely to secure a win rather than to achieve it. Naturally, such a conclusion is hard for surface warfare professionals to accept. Nevertheless, although it took all force elements to produce the allied victory in Desert Storm, the Army’s 100-hour ground offensive was preceded by more than a month of nonstop aerial preparation, which accounted for the Army’s low incidence of fatalities. As a telling testament to what contributed most to rendering Desert Storm a virtual shutout, the United States shipped nearly 220,000 rounds of tank ammunition into the theater, of which less than 2% was fired.

This in no way vitiates the Army’s claim that it takes troops on the ground to administer the coup de grace. Yet the question that matters most now is what force elements--land or air and space--make the greatest sense for doing the hard work needed to position those troops so they can deliver the coup de grace, should such be required, without incurring intolerable losses. Current American air attack options offer the promise of dealing decisively with enemy ground forces from standoff ranges, thus eliminating a threat to U.S. troops who might otherwise have to engage the enemy directly and run the risk of sustaining high casualties. This not only permits but indeed dictates a fundamental shift in American strategy from the classic land-warfare approach to a new generation of air and space.