AIR APPARENT
With the centennial of air power’s role in warfare upon us, now is the ideal time to consider the past, present and future of American defense capability in the sky.
During World War I, aircraft began operating as aerial reconnaissance platforms. Pilots and aerial observers watched ground units and attempted to gain advantage from understanding troop strength, movement and tactical emplacement. The desire to prevent the enemy from gaining such information rapidly led to the need for air superiority, which led to air-to-air combat, which in turn led to the development of air interdiction – the need to destroy an enemy’s aircraft before it is airborne. Remarkably, these capabilities evolved in fewer than five years.
This rapid development of air power as a key component of U.S. military strength was a stunning feat of American ingenuity, as new technologies and the art of warfare continually pushed the bounds of the possible – and played a central role in propelling the United States into a position of pre-eminence by the end of the 20th century.
The contrails of history suggest that the rise of American air power and the rise of U.S. geopolitical power go hand in hand.
Vittles For Americans, air power played a key part in some of World War II’s most pivotal moments: Pearl Harbor, Doolittle’s Raid, Midway (showcasing carrier-borne naval air power), D-Day, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Gen. Dwight Eisenhower said of the D-Day invasion, “Without the air force, without its independent power, entirely aside from its ability to sweep the enemy air forces from the sky, without its power (to) intervene in the ground battle, the invasion would have been fantastic ... it would have been more than fantastic; it would have been criminal.”
Just two years after atomic-tipped B-29s hastened the war’s end, President Truman signed the National Defense Act at the urging of men like Eisenhower, elevating the Air Force into an independent branch. Fittingly, Truman signed the act into law aboard Sacred Cow, forerunner to Air Force One.
The new branch was soon put to work, albeit in an unexpected way. After Stalin blockaded the corridors connecting western Germany to western Berlin, Lt. Gen. Curtis LeMay crafted an air campaign unlike any in history. Blending the principles of strategic bombing with the efficiency of an assembly line, Allied pilots flew 277,000 missions and delivered 2.3 million tons of supplies to Berlin between June 1948 and September 1949. About 75 percent of those missions were flown by 300 U.S. planes.
Americans called the Berlin Airlift “Operation Vittles.” It served as a model for some 450 Air Force humanitarian airlifts during the Cold War. These acts of air diplomacy played a central role in displaying U.S. power and goodwill as Moscow and Washington vied for global influence.
The end of the Berlin Crisis offered little rest for the United States or the Air Force. North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950. By June 27, the Air Force was flying missions to repulse the onslaught. The Air Force flew 392,139 sorties during the war, often in inhospitable conditions over enemy territory.
Miracles In 1962, when President Kennedy learned that Moscow might be deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba, he ordered Air Force “blue-suiters” to fly modified CIA U-2s over the island. What they discovered was staggering: the Soviets were assembling 42 medium-range nuclear missiles and 24 intermediate-range nuclear missiles, deploying 42 long-range nuclear bombers, and trying to tilt the Cold War’s balance – and gain a first-strike capability.
At U.S. bases around the world, more than 1,000 bombers were readied for immediate takeoff. Scores of nuclear-armed B-47 and B-52 bombers sat wingtip to wingtip at air bases across the southeastern United States. Ninety nuclear-armed B-52s began round-the-clock orbits over the Atlantic. Fully one-eighth of the Air Force was airborne. Along with Navy quarantine operations and clever diplomacy, this massive display of air power averted World War III.
Speaking of averting war, U.S. bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) represented more than 58 percent of America’s strategic nuclear deterrent force at the height of the Cold War. This arsenal kept a fragile peace between the superpowers. Without the capability to destroy the world 10 times over, direct confrontation may have appeared too tempting to an aggressive, expansionist Soviet Union.
Even so, proxy wars raged. After enjoying a 6-to-1 kill ratio in Korea, the Air Force’s ratio in Vietnam dropped to 2-to-1 in the early years of the war, owing to Hanoi’s lethal mix of AAA, SAMs and fighter-interceptors. All told, the United States lost 2,254 fixed-wing aircraft in and around the country.
Yet the Air Force delivered more than ordnance in Vietnam. During the 77-day siege of Khe Sanh, as Air Force Magazine’s air power chronology details, the Air Force airdropped 165 tons of supplies per day. At the end of the war, U.S. cargo planes formed an air bridge that carried tens of thousands of war refugees to safety.
As the war wound down, Washington called upon the Air Force to bolster a besieged Israel. With a pan-Arab force lunging at the country, President Nixon’s response to the Yom Kippur War was unequivocal: “Send everything that can fly.” Dubbed “Operation Nickel Grass,” the monthlong airlift delivered 22,395 tons of war materiel. “For generations to come,” Prime Minister Golda Meir declared, “all will be told of the miracle of the immense planes from the United States bringing in the material that meant life to our people.”
Storms In the immediate post-Cold War period, the Air Force was delivering humanitarian aid seemingly everywhere, as the Air Force Historical Research Agency’s Daniel Haulman details: 40,000 tons to Iraqi Kurdistan, 62,800 tons to Bosnia, 2,274 tons to the former Soviet Union, 832 tons to Bangladesh, 4,500 tons to Rwanda, 23,000 tons to Zaire and Uganda. And the list goes on.
Air Force assets were among the first units deployed during Desert Shield, and the first six weeks of Desert Storm were almost exclusively an air affair. The Air Force accounted for 57 percent of sorties flown, paving the way for ground forces to smash the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s once-formidable army.
After Desert Storm, Washington needed a way to protect Iraqi Kurds from Hussein’s postwar vengeance. Thus was born the no-fly zone. U.S. air power guarded northern and southern Iraq for 12 years and played a central role in preventing Hussein from reconstituting his air and land forces.
Washington also employed no-fly zones in hopes of protecting Bosnian civilians from Slobodan Milosevic’s henchmen. But it wasn’t until the Air Force was allowed to take the offensive in 1995 that Milosevic finally came to the peace table. With the Air Force representing 68 percent of the U.S. aircraft deployed, air power helped end a war.
When Milosevic tried to repeat in Kosovo what he had done in Bosnia, the Air Force led a 78-day campaign targeting his centers of gravity. When the conflict was over, Air Force assets had flown 79 percent of NATO’s 38,000-plus sorties, Milosevic’s regime was mortally wounded and 850,000 Kosovar refugees returned home.
That 2-to-1 kill ratio during Vietnam became 48-to-0 during the 1990s, Haulman notes, and has remained high into the 2000s.
Burdens The Air Force and naval aviation launched the early counterstrikes against al-Qaida and its Taliban partners in Afghanistan. But it often goes unmentioned that Air National Guard F-16s were scrambled into the skies above Washington and New York minutes after the 9/11 attacks. They have continued to protect the homeland ever since – out of sight and out of mind for most Americans.
When the United States swung its sights back to Baghdad in 2003, Air Force F-117s fired the opening salvos. Moreover, a decade-plus of no-fly zones enabled coalition forces to face much less organized resistance when they returned to Iraq. “First on the scene in 1990, the Air Force was also last out of Iraq,” Air Force Magazine recalls, detailing how it kept watch “until every departing American was safely out.”
During the Obama administration, the Air Force’s share of the national-security load has arguably increased, as manned and unmanned assets conduct operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Mali, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The United States has conducted at least 347 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2009, neutralizing an estimated 2,600 militants. In Afghanistan in 2010, the Air Force dropped 60.4 million pounds of cargo and joint U.S. air power flew 33,869 close-air-support sorties. Air Force and Navy assets delivered ordnance 5,100 times.
Late 2014 saw the most weapons releases in Afghanistan by U.S. warplanes since 2012. Although 18 nations contributed to the 2011 campaign against Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, U.S. warplanes accounted for 25 percent of sorties – and 70 percent of aerial refueling. And when the Islamic State (ISIS) swept into Iraq, Air Force F-16s, F-15Es, B-1s, F-22s, drones, refuelers and cargo planes teamed with Navy F/A-18Fs and EA-6Bs to blunt the advance of a ruthless foe and deliver humanitarian aid to a defenseless people. All told, the Air Force has carried out 60 percent of Operation Inherent Resolve’s 16,000-plus strikes against ISIS.
Yet the Air Force’s most important role is not kinetic operations, but nuclear and conventional deterrence.
When China declared an air-defense-identification zone in the East China Sea, B-52s cruised through the area to enforce freedom of the skies. When North Korea began a spasm of war tantrums in 2013, B-2s executed high-profile maneuvers over the peninsula and F-22s deployed to South Korea. Likewise, during a spike in tensions with Iran, the Pentagon based F-22s in the United Arab Emirates. All these are examples of conventional deterrence.
Amid Moscow’s dubious 2011 claims to huge swaths of Arctic seafloor, C-5s, KC-135s, B-52s and B-2s repeatedly flew over the North Pole. After Moscow annexed Crimea, Washington rushed F-15s and F-16s to the Baltic nations and Poland, a package of B-52s and B-2s deployed to Britain, and a strike force of 16 B-52s and B-2s conducted strategic exercises – a sobering reminder that Air Force bombers and ICBMs still keep watch over an old foe.
Cuts Ominously, the sequestration guillotine is chopping away at our multitasking Air Force, which is set to shrink by 286 aircraft in the short term. In 2013, it temporarily stood down 31 squadrons due to funding constraints. During the next two years, it is set to cut 18,670 active-duty personnel.
The nation’s bomber fleet has perhaps suffered most over the past decade, even before sequestration began. Between 2003 and 2013, the active bomber fleet shrank from 173 to 144. With long-range strike arguably the single most important capability of the Air Force, its 16 operationally deployed B-2s may not be enough to penetrate advanced anti-aircraft defenses – a mission central to any offensive operation.
These cuts might make sense if the Air Force had a surplus of new airframes, or if peace was breaking out. But we know the opposite to be true.
B-52s, the largest segment of the bomber fleet, entered service between 1954 and 1962. The average age of an AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) is well over 30.
As to the state of the world, the Middle East is on fire, al-Qaida is reconstituting, jihadists are on the march in Iraq, North Korea is rattling nuclear sabers and Iran is plowing ahead with its own nuclear weapons program. And as the United States declaws itself, China’s military expenditure has skyrocketed by 170 percent over the past decade, while Russia has unveiled plans to deploy 600 advanced warplanes in the next 10 years.
Capabilities Understandably, Navy advocates often note that 71 percent of the earth’s surface is covered by oceans. The Navy plays an essential role in keeping sea lanes open for commerce and keeping bad guys at bay. But it’s worth noting that 100 percent of the planet is covered by air – not an insignificant matter given the central role U.S. air power has played in the post-Cold War world.
“What will be needed in the coming decades,” argues strategic analyst George Friedman of Stratfor, “is a weapon that can be based in the United States, reach the other side of the world in under an hour, maneuver with incredible agility to avoid surface-to-air missiles, strike with absolute precision and return to carry out another mission almost immediately.”
Friedman is sketching the future of U.S. air power, which will undoubtedly be led by the Air Force. Yet given present and likely future fiscal constraints, it is uncertain whether the Air Force will have the means to develop and field the very systems that will ensure U.S. dominance in tomorrow’s battlespace.
Alan W. Dowd is a contributing editor for The American Legion Magazine. Adam Lowther is a professor at the Air Force Research Institute.