Success in Modern War

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Success in modern war: A response to Robert Pape's bombing to winJohn 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 — 190To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09636419708429345URL: 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

WHEN I WORKED in the White House as a special assistant to thevice-president, I once visited a friend with a splendid office in theOld Executive Office Building. The office looked directly down

on the West Wing and had die high ceilings, fireplace, and ornate wood-work which put the building in a class by itself. I commented to my frienddiat it would be fun to know who else had occupied die office. He had al-ready checked, and one of die most interesting was Herman Melville'sbrodier, who was a captain in die navy in die 1890s. Not only did he knowdiat Captain Melville had owned die office in die last decade of die lastcentury, he also knew what his primary job had been at die time: to keepdie navy from returning to die sail so beloved by die admirals of diat day. Ifeel like Melville (take your pick as to which one): it is really time to moveon beyond sail, to seize die opportunities inherent in air power and strate-gic 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 myfriend Robert Pape's new book, but radier it is an attempt to make die casefor a strategy and tools which match well die needs of die United States indie twenty-first century.

As Pape suggested, it is very important diat diose associated widi na-tional security understand what modern airpower can and cannot do toachieve political objectives. How to arrive at an increased level of under-standing is die problem. Pape chose to do it by assuming diat mid-cold warnuclear war dieories accurately describe war, concluding diat only one ofdie major dieories—denial—was valid, and dien showing how airpowercould play a role in achieving denial, while very carefully repeating die con-ventional 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 AirCommand and Staff College. From 1988 to 1991 he was deputy director for warfighting onthe Air Staff.

SECURITY STUDIES 7, no. 2 (winter 1997/98): 172-90Published by Frank Cass, London.

Downloaded By: [Cornell University Library] At: 17:32 24 November 2010

Success in Modern Wan A Response to Robert Pope 173

attack did not work. Although his intentions and effort were good, I fearthat he missed the mark considerably, and in the process perpetuated oldmyths that are daily becoming more dysfunctional.

The number of old myths is astounding. One of the first is that strategicattack does not work. The concept of strategic attack is very simple: preser-vation of the homeland is the most important function of a state, and stateshave historically done whatever was necessary to ensure survival. In addi-tion, states throughout history have recognized that a secure home frontwas a prerequisite to external military operations. Examples of states andleaders doing unusual things to. preserve themselves and leaders ensuringthe security of their home fronts abound. Thucydides relates clearly that theAthenians accepted the demands of Sparta when Sparta put herself in aposition to cut off grain supplies from the Black Sea area and Alexander theGreat made unity in Greece a prerequisite to his operations against Persia.Throughout history, walled cities have surrendered when food or water ranout even though they were secure militarily. Britain emasculated Spain byblocking the flow of vital financing from the New World, and Germanysigned the Versailles Peace Treaty because the post-war blockade had be-come unbearable. In that same conflict the Ottoman government had ap-parently made the decision to drop out of the war if the British fleet ap-peared before Constantinople. In the past, strategic attack was slow, some-times difficult to execute, and normally done through indirect means. Theadvent 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 ithad been against Germany in the first year of air attacks against the Ger-man homeland.

The purpose of war is not to defeat the enemy's armed forces. Paradoxi-cally, it may not even be to win the war itself! The only reasonable purposeof war ought to be to win the peace which follows, and all planning andoperations should be directly connected with the final objective. We pay lipservice to this idea, but in policy, military, and academic circles, we easilyget lost in a Clausewitzian world in which defeat of the enemy militaryforces becomes a end in itself rather than merely one of a number of possi-ble means to a higher end. In this sense, Pape's war categorizations of pun-ishment, risk, denial, and decapitation merely put labels (and misleadinglabels at that) on tactical employment of war tools.

General Schwartzkopf well understood the real purpose of the waragainst Iraq. The proposals we put to him on 8 August 1990 flowed from avery specific view of the peace that should follow a war with Iraq, and from


THE FIVE RINGS SYSTEM

FIELDED FORCES

\ \KEY PRODUCTION

\LEADERSHIP


Success in Modern Wan A Response to Robert Vape 175

an understanding that attainment of our peace objectives depended on ourrecognition that Iraq was and is a complex system. The plan we put for-ward was to attack Iraq in order to change Iraq, the system, so that it wouldbe compatible with the envisioned postwar peace.

In the simplest of terms, the postwar peace had to contain these twomajor elements: Iraq out of Kuwait, and an Iraq that would not be a threat-ening regional superpower for an extended period of time (a decade waswhat I had in mind). We could achieve the latter by destroying Iraq as astate, but it was clear that the resultant power vacuum might be even moreof a threat to regional stability than a powerful, belligerent Iraq.

THE FIVE RINGS SYSTEM

OUR PLAN TO produce this postwar peace began with an analysis of Iraqbased 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. Theunderlying assumption of this approach is that all organizations are put to-gether in about the same way. Thus, every organization has a leadershipfunction to give it direction and help it respond to change in its externaland internal environments; each has an energy conversion function to takeone form of energy and convert it into a different kind of energy; each hasan infrastructure to hold it togedier; each has a population; and each hasfielded forces to protect and project the organization. To make it easy tovisualize the concept, we laid it out in graphical form as follows: By puttingthe five rings together graphically, we immediately grasp the idea that weare dealing with a system, that the military—or fielded forces—are but onepart 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 entiresystem enough to reach our peace objectives. With this approach to strate-gic analysis, we always begin our thinking in the center; only at the centercan a single input of energy (an entreaty from the president of the UnitedStates, or something physical like a bomb) result in a significant change inthe system. On occasion, the single input of energy has led to the collapseof empires—for example, the departure of Darius III from the fields of Ar-bela led almost instantly to the transfer of Persia to Alexander. For themost part, however, this does not happen and it would be a poor strategistwho bet everything on it. Remembering that our goal was to affect the en-tire Iraqi system—and fully understanding that it would be silly to dependon "decapitation" as Pape erroneously called our proposal—we identified


176 SECURITY STUDIES 7, no. 2

additional centers of gravity progressing from the inside to the outside. Theversion we presented to General Schwartzkopf at our second meeting withhim, a week after the first one, looked roughly like this (I have combinedand simplified slighdy for space purposes):

IRAQI TARGET SYSTEMS

Leadership

SaddamHussein'sgovernment

Nationalcommandand control

Internal se-curity forces

Keyproduction

Electricity

Retailpetroleum

Weaponsof massdestruction

Infra-structure

Roads

Population

Military elites

Foreignworkers

Ba'athists

Middle class

Fieldedforces

Strategicair defenses

Strategicoffensive (airand missile)

It is important to understand that the five rings and the table of Iraqi cen-ters of gravity are describing a system. With die understanding of Iraq as asystem, our task becomes one of converting it into something that will bein consonance with our postwar objectives. The faster we can force theconversion, die more likely we are to succeed, because the slower we pro-ceed and the more serially we approach die problem, die more likely it isthat the enemy will find ways to counter our operations. Thus, our goal wasto bring die Iraqi system under rapid—or parallel—attack. For the firsttime in the history of nonnuclear warfare, we had the concepts, aircraft, andweapons to make parallel attack possible.

With die new technologies (new in the sense that they were available to-gedier in quantity for the first time), we were able to think about attackingIraq as a system, in parallel instead of in the serial fashion, which old eraweapons 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 thingbecomes the Clausewkzian fixation on the dash of armies—the approach Pape espouses.


Success in Modern War. A Response to Robert Pope 177

grasp. In fact, the differences are so extreme that many of the terms whichwere reasonable with serial and military war are utterly dysfunctional whenapplied to parallel and system war. A quick comparison with the SecondWorld War will be illustrative.

In the Second World War, the United States began the daylight bombingof Germany in January of 1943. Over the course of the war, the U.S. princi-pal bomber, the B-17, had about a one-thousand-yard Circular Error Prob-able—or CEP.2 To put this in perspective: if you want to hit somethingabout a third the size of a football field, and you want a 90 percent prob-ability of at least one bomb falling into the described area, you must dropover nine thousand bombs. In Second World War terms that meant flying athousand B-17 sorties and putting about ten-thousand men at risk over thetarget Because of the relative inaccuracy of weapons, it was necessary toattack large complexes instead of the important parts of these complexes.Likewise, it was necessary to group large numbers of airplanes together fortwo reasons: first, they had to have sufficient mass to penetrate enemy de-fenses; second, it was necessary to drop a very large number of bombs inorder to have any chance of hitting anything.

When the United States began its daylight operations against Germany, itcould only put relatively small numbers of bombers in the air at any timeand, for the reasons noted, could only attack one target. The result was aserial attack to which the Germans responded by repairing damage and im-proving their defense schemes. For the latter, the Germans put an enor-mous amount of resources into building and manning antiaircraft guns andthey also withdrew dangerously large numbers of fighters form the tacticalfronts. The strategic base of Germany was so important that Hitler and hishigh command recognized that they had to defend it regardless of the cost.This historical fact, which has repeated itself in every instance where a statehas found itself under strategic attack of any kind, shows that governmentand military leaders understand the importance of a secure strategic base farmore than a disconcertingly large number of academic commentators.

In the German case, Albert Speer recognized in 1943 that strategicbombing would doom his country, even though he was able through heroicefforts to push pack the final collapse of the transportation and energysystems until early 1945, when there were so many bombers attackingGermany's strategic centers that the damage accumulated faster than theGermans could deal with it.

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



If our tools in the Iraq case had been similar to those available in theSecond World War, we would have been compelled to attack Iraq seriallyand we would have started with some small part of its air defense system. Ifwe were very lucky, after a long period of time we might have been able tostart the reduction of the key inner rings, but that would have been far intothe future. Likewise, it would have been chancy; Iraq in the summer of1990 had perhaps the most modern air defense system in the world.

Fortunately, we had completely different tools to use against the Iraqsystem. We had an information system which allowed us to coordinate op-erations ranging from Colorado Springs to Great Britain to Baghdad itself.We had stealth aircraft which penetrated by themselves and thus broughtmany targets under simultaneous attack. We had unmanned missiles. Mostimportant of all, we had bombs which had a very high probability of hittingthat against which they were aimed. Precision has changed warfare.

To update our Second World War example: in the Iraq war, if we wanteda high (90 percent) probability of hitting a target a third the size of a foot-ball field, we could confidendy dispatch one F-117 stealth fighter mannedby one pilot who would drop one bomb. This represents an incredible fourorders of magnitude improvement in accuracy and personal productivityover the Second World War. It also does something else of great interest.In the Second World War, conventional bombing seemed to do a lot ofdamage, and indeed it leveled entire cities. Despite the apparent damage,however, vital functions continued in many cases. In 1945 Berlin, for ex-ample, the telephone and teletype systems continued to work until the veryend as did die water system and even much of die electrical system. This ina city which from the air looked badly hurt. The reason for diis anomaly issimple: die important things tend to be small and die odds are good thatthey will not be hit directly. In odier words, even diough die strategic targetbase is relatively small (several hundred targets for even large nations), it isvery difficult and time-consuming to affect widi inaccurate weapons andserial operations. Contrast 1945 Berlin widi 1991 Baghdad: widiin minutesof die war's start, electricity went off in Baghdad, and returned only afterdie war's end. Similarly, die ability to communicate plummeted. Pape failedto grasp die revolutionary impact of precision weapons and dius signifi-candy undermined his already shaky arguments against strategic airpower.

In die old inaccurate world, we evaluated die effects of bombing or artil-lery barraging in terms of die physical damage done to die target. In dieGulf War, intelligence analysts—and subsequent commentators—wouldnote diat only 10 percent of die electric facilities were destroyed, or only 15percent of die road surface between Baghdad and Basra, or only 25 percent


Success in Modern War. A. Response to Robert Pope 179

of the communications facilities. They would then extrapolate their damageobservations to equation with function and say that the Iraqis still had 75percent of their capacity available, which was more than enough.. Theworld, however, is different in the era of precision and parallelism. With thetwo, the targets become the important parts of the electric, communica-tions, or transportation system. In the case of the latter, destruction ofsome thirty bridges (a small portion of the road surface) between Baghdadand Basra reduced movement by nearly a 100 percent and dropped the flowof critical supplies into Kuwait below the survival level in the first threeweeks of the war—which meant that Iraqis in Kuwait were quickly deplet-ing what they had stockpiled. The electrical and communication systemswere similar: by hitting the key facilities in each, the output levels droppedprecipitately—even though physical damage was relatively minor. In thepast, war efforts tended to be aimed at physical structures and successmeasured accordingly. Today, war efforts aim at function and we are suc-cessful when function stops, regardless of physical damage. Failure to un-derstand the shift from the physical to the function has significantly obfus-cated analysis of the Gulf War and has led writers such as Pape to errone-ous conclusions.

The overall thrust of operations in the first hours of the war was to be-gin inducing a strategic paralysis in Iraq which would simultaneously startthe process of cutting Iraq down to an acceptable postwar size and makingit 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 andwhy in a serial way. For convenience, we will start at the center of the fiverings 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 GeneralSchwartzkopf we stressed the importance of making clear to the Iraqis andto the rest of the world that our problem existed because of SaddamHussein's policies—not because we hated Iraq or Iraqis. By presenting thewar in this way, we wanted also to make clear to the Iraqis that they wouldfare well in a postwar world that did not include Saddam. Indeed, not tomake this case, would have been naive and would have caused us to loseour focus. Likewise, we discussed with General Schwartzkopf what wouldhappen in the event that Saddam was not displaced. Our view, with which



the General agreed, was that it would be far better for Iraq if Saddam wasno longer in power, but as long as we had taken away from Saddam thetools he needed to be a regional superpower threat, his disposition was notof overwhelming importance.

The consensus of the intelligence community in August 1990 was thatIraq was on its current course of conquest primarily because of the ambi-tions of Saddam Hussein, and that, if he were gone, Iraq's policies, at leastin the short term, would be less bellicose. Further, the majority of analystswith whom we consulted (inside and outside of government) were of theopinion that no one who might replace Saddam would be as bad as hesimply because they would lack the power base it had taken him almost twobrutal decades to build. Thus, if we could create a situation which led di-recdy or indirecdy to Saddam's departure from office, we would have con-tributed to our postwar peace objectives of creating an Iraq less direateningto its neighbors. In addition to the geostrategic rationale, there was a sec-ond reason that we needed to attack the Saddam government: to decreaseits ability to oppose our operations against Iraq. Contrary to Pape's postu-lations, strategic direction and coordination of combat, psychological, andsupport operations above a tactical or medium operational level come fromnational capitals, regardless of the type of government. Furdiermore, whendamage is accreting rapidly—as it does in parallel war—decisions mustcome much faster than in peacetime.

We could picture Saddam's government organization die same way wecould picture Iraq as a whole; the five rings approach recogni2es fractalrelationships 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 ringsstructure right down to die level of an individual. Widi diis picture of diegovernment, we could think about attacking it in parallel. We clearly did notknow where all die major offices were, but we were able to discover dielocations of many and to attack each widi a single bomb. We expected tohit most of die command centers of die government related to running thecountry in war. We knew diat each one of diese facilities had a backup. Wealso knew mat die backups in general would not be quite as well equippedand manned as die primaries. Here die reader should begin to get a senseof die effect of massive parallel attack.

In our everyday experience, we know how much our efficiency falls offwhen we lose our telephones for a day, or when we change our office loca-tion 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 soon. In normal affairs we accept diese problems knowing diey will eventu-


Success in Modern War A Response to Robert Pape 181

ally go away. Imagine what happens, however, when die majority of a gov-ernment's senior leaders and dieir key staffs change tfieir office addressesand phone numbers widiout notice in the midst of a very stressful situa-tion. Does anyone really believe mat die efficiency of die government mustnot decrease significandy and rapidly? In the days of inaccurate weapons,forcing a major change on the physical manifestations of government wassimply not possible; in the Gulf War it was possible and it happened. At-tacks on government command facilities had anodier effect; senior officialshad to become more mobile in order to reduce dieir chances of beingkilled. As Pape pointed out in a contradictory footnote, Saddam Husseinhimself was reluctant to use even a cellular phone for fear diat he would betargeted. Picture die president of die United States and most of his key ad-visors incommunicado for extended periods each day, and ask yourself howwell and quickly die government will make critical decisions. All this hap-pens despite an apparendy low level of physical destruction.

Attacks on die government communications system accelerated thebreakdown in government efficiency, reduced significantly the very highvolume of communications die Iraqi military high command customarilyused to direct field operations, and also made it more difficult for SaddamHussein to communicate direcdy widi his citizenry.

Pape diought the Iraqi military did not need much in die way of com-mand from Baghdad, but in fact it had developed a very effective system toconvey die necessarily high volumes of information to die front. Observerslike Pape frequendy confuse tactical, operational, and strategic levels ofcommand. They think diat because a small unit (a company, for example) isgiven a degree of autonomy, diat die same diing must apply to larger units.It does not—anywhere—simply because offense or defense at an opera-tional (dieater, for simplicity) level requires enormous coordination to en-sure diat logistics, supporting fires, communications, deception, and dierest come togedier at the right time and place. Few countries are capable ofmaking diis come to pass (consider die friction between GeneralSchwarzkopf and General Franks in die Gulf War). So far, those whichhave achieved it on an operational level, have only been able to do it widivery high bandwidth communications. The Iraqis had developed dieir sys-tem during die Iran war and had become quite proficient widi it. They, ofcourse, had spent great sums of money to buy die most modern equipmentand had bought enough to have a very robust and redundant system. Itwould have served diem well against any enemy, except one equipped widiprecision weapons and die parallel war concept. This is a case where thereality of how the Iraqi high command operated from Baghdad was pre-



cisely the opposite of what Pape thought it to be. Unfortunately for him, hedrew major conclusions about the ineffectiveness of strategic attack oncommunications based on a totally erroneous understanding of how largeground operations are planned and controlled, and on the incredible vol-ume of internal communications needed for a country to operate in thebest of times—let alone the worst

As mentioned, another facet of the attack on strategic communicationswas 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 im-age and presence in front of the people. If it seems to disappear, peoplebegin to behave as though it were not there—which was one of our manyparallel goals. There is more to this equation than just taking away com-munication from die dictator; the attacker must provide a substitute. At ourfirst briefing to General Schwarzkopf, we said very explicidy that the stra-tegic psychological operations campaign was entirely as important as diebombing campaign. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of a lot of peo-ple, including General Schwarzkopf, there was never a real strategic psycho-logical operations campaign which would have done more to facilitate pos-sible coups or other Iraqi actions against Saddam and his Tikrit clan.3

Saddam's security forces were the next area of attention. These com-prised the various KGB and Gestapo-like services which protected Saddamand which carried out his reign of terror. We believed that attacks on thesegroups would loosen Saddam's grip and again facilitate coups or odier di-rect action against die government. Keep in mind that diis was but one ofmany parallel attacks and the success of die overall campaign did not de-pend on its success. As will be clear shortly, if not already, our air strategywas not a "decapitation" strategy as Pape mislabels it, although attacksagainst the leadership were very much a part of die plan.

Many people have diought of die Republican Guard as die military pri-marily responsible for keeping Saddam in power. In actuality, die Republi-can Guard, which went into die field in division and corps-sized operations,was not the group which undertook die nasty day-to-day internal securitywork. Odiers did diat, and diey were a far more important die target diandie Republican Guard soldiers in Kuwait.

3. There was an effective tactical psychological operations campaign against the Iraqi armyin Kuwait Unlike the strategic campaign which needed Washington direction and participa-tion, the tactical campaign was under General Schwarzkopf s authority and he did a great jobwith it.


Success in Modern War: A Response to Robert Pope 183

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 asystem totally depended. Although we subsequently changed the name to"System Essentials," the concept is the same. In this ring, we identifiedelectricity, retail petroleum, and weapons of mass destruction as the energyconversion functions which were vital to Iraq being what Saddam wanted itto be.

Pape is one of the many commentators who failed to grasp the impor-tance of electricity as a strategic target. It is, in virtually every country thathas it, a strategic target of the first importance. Electricity is the most effi-cient way to move energy around a country. It powers everything—fromradar antennas to elevators to telephone switching centers to computers.Yes, it is true that some of these have back-up generators, but the back-upgenerators are precisely what their name implies. They are not designed tobe long-term sources of electricity and they do not substitute well for pri-mary electricity even for short periods. The logic is pretty simple; if back-upgenerators were as good as primary electricity, there would be no nationalgrid. When the electricity in a country goes off, it immediately puts a strainon almost every activity in a country and forces the occupants to expendenergy to find alternates. Thus, with relatively litde effort, we were able toaffect almost everything and everyone in most of Iraq.

Consider a trivial example. Most of the government buildings in Iraqwere multistorey, which meant they had elevators. When the power wentout, the elevators in many cases stopped functioning at their previous levelso occupants of upper storey had to walk up the steps. No big deal, onemight say, until you realize that this simple act has probably imposed a five-minute time penalty on every government worker and has also made himlook for excuses not to go to his office or leave it.4 Although it has muchmore important effects, shutting off electricity is rather like pouring a layerof molasses over the whole country; people can still move, but they movemore slow and they spend energy they would otherwise have put to moreprofitable uses. Attacks on electricity were exceptionally valuable in creatingthe system-wide strategic paralysis that we wanted to impose on Iraq.

Our attacks on retail petroleum had a similar rationale: to create a majorproblem 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 inorder to conserve energy. The amount of important physical interaction among occupants ofthe six levels of the Pentagon fell noticeably!



commentators fail to understand the impact of stopping the production ofrefined petroleum products. They become mesmerized with the idea that itis only the fielded forces which count, and the problem for the affectedcountry is nothing more that a reallocation of resources. In fact, it is farmore because of all the demands for the resources. The user-level short-ages, which develop quickly because it takes time to deal with a problemwhich arises overnight, magnify the problems caused by the failure of theelectricity system. Every back-up generator has a relatively small supply offuel collocated with it, which needs replenishment when the back-up gen-erator is used for more than a few hours or days. With shortages in the fuelsupply, however, finding generator fuel and getting it into the tank becomesdifficult or impossible. Further complicating the reallocation problem is thefact that much of the support for even the military comes through privateor nonmilitary transportation or supply companies. Given a lot of time torespond to a gradually developing problem, a competent bureaucracy cando something, but it is not clear that there is any bureaucracy in the worldthat can solve such a challenging problem when telephone coordinationwith multiple agencies is impossible, and physically finding the people whocan make decisions is difficult to impossible.

THE FIFTH RING: FIELDED FORCES

IN 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 sawthem as being a part of the overall system which we had to convert in orderto achieve our objectives. Reduction of the air defense system allowed us touse all of our attack aircraft without fear of large losses. In addition, its lossput Saddam in a precarious position, for his future and that of his countryfell into the hands of his attackers as soon as he was unable to defend him-self and Iraq. Operations against Iraq's strategic air offense (air platformsand missiles) were necessary to deprive Iraq of its ability to conduct poten-tially dangerous strategic counteroffensives. Most worrisome in earlyAugust, and a subject of conversation with General Schwartzkopf, was thelikely outcome of serious Iraqi attacks on Israel. We were confident that wecould suppress the air threat, but there was no obvious direct way to pre-vent the Iraqis from launching mobile missiles. Our goal was to do as muchas we could indirectly to lessen the numbers and types fired and to amelio-rate their effect as best we could.


Success in Modern War. A Response to Robert Pope 185

Although space limitations prevent me from addressing in detail the ac-tual course of the war, one or two comments are in order to correct mis-conceptions in Pape's book. Many have assumed the Iraqi Air Force failedto achieve much because of incompetence on its part. This was not thecase. During the Iran-Iran war, the Iraqi Air Force had conducted very so-phisticated, very long-range operations against such key Iranian targets asoil tankers and petroleum facilities. Before the Gulf War, everyone had ahealthy respect for the Iraqi Air Force and was most concerned. From aplanning standpoint, it was necessary to devise a way to neutralize this veryreal threat. like the rest of the operations, our plan was parallel: knock outthe air defense system and reduce national communications quickly in orderto drive individual air force units into autonomous operations, which meantthey had to deal with a national threat with only local information availableto them. The consequences were severe and quick to become obvious; Iraqipilots took off without any picture of the air defense system. They did notknow whether an enemy fighter was orbiting high over their field or not.Too frequently there was, and their efforts to fly were futile. Their reactionwas entirely correct; they took temporary refuge in the best air defenseshelters in the world—shelters they reasonably thought would be proofagainst anything other than a direct nuclear hit. Much to their amazement(and to the amazement of many American officers), the latest generation ofprecision bombs were highly effective against these shelters. Thus, theIraqis died if they flew and died if they did not.

To recap to this point: contrary to Pape, our strategy was not a decapita-tion strategy by any means, but rather was a comprehensive strategy to usethe tools available to us to do things which could not have been done inany war prior to the Gulf War.5 Our plan was to impose strategic paralysison Iraq on the way to forcing Iraq to be in consonance with our postwarpeace objectives. The beauty of parallel attack, now possible because ofcomputers, stealth, and precision, is that the employer of the concept is notstuck in an old serial world where only one thing at a time could be done.

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



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

T^APE BASES MUCH of his hypothesis about the primacy of denial orientedJL against military forces on the assumption mat most wars are foughtover territory. Although some wars may be fought over territory, many arenot, 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 itsterritorial or other objectives by acting in a completely different geographicor conceptual theater. We can, however, test Pape's hypothesis on territoryand his dismissal of strategic attack by applying his ideas direcdy to theKuwait situation. Of some interest, many in August 1990 (and even later)wanted to apply his preferred solution and just attack the Iraqi army inKuwait; after all, was not that the problem and should not one solve prob-lems where they manifest themselves?

The direct solution called for the application of standard Army AirLandBattle doctrine, which would have meant air and artillery attacks to softenthe Iraqi army in Kuwait, followed by American and Coalition ground at-tacks to push the Iraqis out of Kuwait. Doubdess, it was widiin the theo-retical military capability of the Coalition to take this approach given a yearor more to build up the attacker-to-defender ratios military commanderswould have demanded. It would have been difficult for die president of theUnited States to secure political support for an operation which would haveled to a high number of casualties, if forecasts in die late summer of 1990under the aegis of die Joint Chiefs of Staff were accurate.

Put aside for a moment the questions about logistical and political fea-sibility and assume the hypodietical operation was successful and diat Sad-dam had lost as much of his army in Kuwait as he lost in the actual opera-tion. At the end of a rollback war which involved no serious attack on theinterior, Saddam would have been out of Kuwait, but would have sufferedno significant strategic damage. The war would likely have ended with acease-fire widi two substantial forces facing each other across die Kuwait-Iraq border. Saddam's losses would have been much less than they were inthe 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. Underdiese circumstances, does anyone believe that he would have permitted thegross infringements on Iraqi sovereignty which followed the war and arestill occurring? Would he have permitted unarmed UN inspectors to wanderaround Iraq, commanding the destruction of important and expensiveweapons and programs? To say the least, it seems unlikely. Saddam'sground-force losses were trivial compared to what he had previously


Success in Modern War: A Response to 'Robert Pope 187

weathered and what he was willing to accept as part of his own strategy ofattrition. In the real world, it was the terrible weakening of Saddam's stra-tegic base which forced him to accept unconscionable peace terms andwhich has allowed a handful of American airmen to keep him within thebounds defined by the United States (which may well have been far lessthan what we could have had).6

Think for a moment about the Iraq with which we would now be livinghad we not so reduced Iraq strategically that it had to accept our onerouspost-war intrusions. Iraq almost certainly would now have a nuclear capa-bility; it would have an air and missile delivery capability; and it would cer-tainly be uncowed. Can we imagine any semblance of a remaining coalitionagainst Iraq, and can we imagine that any state in the region would supportoil and weapons embargoes against a strategically strong, nuclear-equippedIraq? 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 togive up our beloved sails, no matter how pretty they be and how comfort-able they make us.

Succinctly summarized, it seems highly unlikely that pure execution ofPape's denial strategy, focused against Saddam's forces in the field, wouldhave led to realization of any goal other than pushing Saddam out of Ku-wait (which would have really suffered in the process); conversely, we knowthe results of a war that had as its central element a strategic attack—as im-perfecdy executed as it might have been.

OTHER DISAGREEMENTS

/-|-»o BE FAIR TO Pape, my response to him should be as long as his bookJL and should address each of the many points over which we have near-

complete disagreement. Absent diat space, however, an abbreviated listmust suffice:

Pape maintains in his book that strategic air attack is not effective andthat, in any event, defense against it is quite easy. To the contrary, defenseagainst 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 avenuesof 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 flyingout of bases in Saudi Arabia, has quietly kept vigil over Iraqi territory and has controlledboth the skies above and the land beneath without the assistance of ground forces.



slow speed as the defender, so the defender, with less distance to cover inmost cases, could generally succeed in meeting the attacker before the at-tacker reached strategically important areas. The time available for a de-fender to react to air attack, however, and the necessity to guard a very largenumber of possible approaches, make defense extraordinarily difficult. Thishas been the case since the earliest days of aviation. The British successagainst the Germans in the Second World War was an anomaly, and wasvery close in any event.

It is very difficult to understand why or how Pape came to the conclu-sion that precision weapons were not of revolutionary importance. Preci-sion weapons have changed the face of war because they permit parallelattack and enormous reduction in the time required to disable any targetsystem. In addition, they are extraordinarily cheap when measured against theeffects they produce on the enemy. Even if the bombs themselves and their deliv-ery platforms are relatively much more expensive than their imprecise an-cestors, they are still inexpensive when the right measurement is used. Ifthe 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 im-precise weapons and airplanes are cheap. We fight, however, to accomplishsomething, so the measure of effectiveness and cost must be based on theeffect produced on the enemy. If one prefers to risk 3,000 men and 300airplanes to attack a Schweinfurt-type target, rather than risk one airplaneand one pilot, which have a much higher probability of success, then oldand imprecise is the answer.

Pape suggested in his book that attacks on the Iraqi electrical system onlycame about because of some strange, historically ignorant cabal secretlyplotting to make it happen. There was no "lobbying" for electrical strikeson Iraq by people who had "forgotten" Korea. Attack on the Iraqi electricalsystem was part of the first plan we presented to General Schwartzkopf,who understood exactly what such strikes would produce and why theywere imperative. Far from being ignorant of the history of air war, thewhole planning team was intimately familiar with it and was determined toapply all of its lessons.

Pape goes to great lengths to say that "punishment" strategies do notwork. Deliberately killing innocent civilians in order to achieve political ob-jective goes against all of our moral thinking in late twentieth-centuryAmerica. To say that punishment does not work, however, is to ignorethree thousand years of history and innumerable sieges. The fact thatsomeone can cite three examples in which punishment did not work (wherethe punishment was mild by historical standards, and very short-lived) does


Success in Modern War: A Response to Robert Pope 189

not make a very strong case. It is instructive to recall that Germany agreedto very onerous peace terms following the First World War only after thepost-war blockade imposed unacceptable suffering on the civilian popula-tion. This point is important not because we want to see these kinds ofstrategy resurrected (quite the opposite), but because we are burying ourheads in the sand if we think others will not use them and that they will notsucceed.

Many commentators, including Pape, have talked about the losses suf-fered by airmen participating in the strategic air campaign against Germanyin the Second World War. They were heavy in absolute terms, but in totalthey equaled only one or two particularly bad days on the Western Frontduring the First World War, where the returns were a few hundred yards ofworthless land. Were the losses suffered by airmen taking part in the stra-tegic air campaign in the Second World War worthwhile? Participants in theStrategic Bombing Survey, such as Paul Nitze, certainly diought they were.Even if we were to put aside the conclusions of the Survey, as Pape wouldhave us do, one salient fact stands out: the Western Allies defeated Ger-many 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 mostimportant difference?

There is a popular misconception that wars primarily affect soldiers andcombatants. Although this is becoming true as we move deeper into thepreciseness of the air age, the shadows of countless civilians would beamazed how anyone could fail to grasp the terrible toll war imposes on theinnocent. The Thirty Years War is a classic example of the fallacy of Pape'sconclusion, as is the civilian loss rate on the eastern front in the SecondWorld War—a portion of the war, incidentally, in which air played a muchsmaller role than it did on the western front.

The deterrence theorists of the 1950s and 1960s spoke frequently aboutevacuating cities as part of a the nuclear Kabuki dance they envisioned. Inthe real world, evacuation of urban centers and the maintenance of theevacuees may be nearly impossible. In addition, if it were done for morethan a few days, it is hard to envision how a state would function. This isanother 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 command-ers looked for a three-to-one advantage over the defenders, but frequentlysucceeded with less. At Normandy, the Allies were significandy inferior tothe German defenders. Perhaps "huge superiority" means superiority in



power rather than in numbers. If that is the case, however, Pape's argumentis a truism.

Many observers, even in the military, think they can ignore the necessityof winning air superiority, or that they can do it on the cheap, by winning itover a limited piece of territory. Pape has erred in his support for bothideas. Air superiority is key to strategic operations, just as it is key to everyother kind of operation. Winning air superiority is difficult, and one of thesurest ways to fail is to think you can take the parsimonious approach andgo for local superiority. Local air superiority is a very dangerous idea simplybecause it ends up requiring air defense, which is very difficult.

In the last few paragraphs I have taken Pape to task for making technicalerrors in talking about air power—which is a much more technically diffi-cult subject than conventional ground operations. No one would suggestthat only experts in air operations can analyze the value of air power in avariety of roles, or understand the technical aspects of it. The nontechnicalanalyst who bases his conclusions on technical aspects he does not under-stand, however, runs the risk of discrediting his work.

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

CONTRARY TO Pape's conclusions, the strategic application of airpowerwas most effective in the Gulf War, even given the restrictions im-

posed on it and the errors made in its execution. It was strategic attack onIraq which put it in a position where it was forced to accept the dictates ofits opponents and to suffer serious intrusions on its sovereignty since theend of the war. It is strategic attack which is cheaper, faster, and less bloodythan the industrial-age warfare which Pape wants to bring back It is strate-gic attack based on precision, stealth aircraft, and standoff weapons whichoffers extraordinary new options to American political leaders. The trueservice to the nation is to learn how to use it more effectively, to developweapons that are precise not only in impact but in effect, and to educatepotential enemies so they understand what happens to them and to theircountries when their strategic centers collapse about them.

It is time for us to give up the past and enter the twenty-first centurywith ideas appropriate to it, not with ideas rooted in outmoded concepts ofwar and competition.


Success in Modern War

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