Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Things haven’t been going well for the Air Force recently.  After performing amazingly well in the first few months of the Afghanistan War and the first few weeks of the Iraq war, they look increasingly useless.  It’s hard to see how air power fits into a counterinsurgency where winning the hearts and minds of the population and population protection are two main objectives.  With air power, of course, comes collateral damage, and it’s hard to get people on your side when you inadvertently drop bombs on wedding parties and things like that.   There’s also the long term problem that the Air Force doesn’t need to upgrade its fighter force, i.e. buy a bunch of F-22s and F-35s, and yet they really, really want to and are pissing off Congress.  So, the Air Force is trying to turn itself into just another tool in the COIN kit, despite the fact that most COIN practitioners are very wary of air power.

It’s instructive to look at Air Force Charles Dunlap’s Small Wars Journal piece defending the USAF and explaining how its a key aspect of COIN operations.  This is a tough job to carry out, and he starts by putting forward one of the most absurd assertions about the Surge I’ve ever read:

Clearly, the complexities of today’s COIN operations require a more fully joint approach that takes advantages of the full range of capabilities – and thinking – available in the U.S. armed forces. Fortunately, this seems to be the approach actually being taken in Iraq. Notwithstanding FM 3-24, USA Today reports, for example, that a four-fold increase in airstrikes through the first nine months of 2007 reflected “a steep escalation in combat operations aimed at al-Qaeda and other militants.”7 As a result of the greater use of airpower, both Iraqi and American deaths have fallen.

To which I say….ARE YOU SERIOUS?   There is a real debate going on in defense policy circles about what, exactly, is responsible for the reduction of violence.  The explanations favored by many COIN types is that the increase in troops with Petraeus and the adoption of COIN tactics has led to the violence reduction. Advocates for conventional military power, like Gian Gentile, say that we’ve always been using some form of COIN and that the reduction in violence can be attributed to a combinations of sheer troop strength, bribing Sunni insurgents and Sadr’s cease-fire, not a subtle change of tactics.  While it’s certainly true that air strikes have increased, just about no one thinks that it’s been the key to reducing Iraqi and American deaths.  If anything, the increase in air strikes is a recognition that we can’t meet basic COIN recomendations about troop strength (approximately 500,000), so we have to supplement our on-the-ground capabilites with air power.   This is not what any COIN practitioners, or really anyone outside the Air Force, think we should do, it’s more a second or third best option we’re stuck with.

But besides his misrepresentations of the Surge, Dunlap defends his branch against the classic COIN incitement of air power -that its indiscriminate nature causes too much collateral damage which then jeopardizes the mission of separating the civilians form insurgents – by pointing out that air strikes have gotten much more precise.  Although this claim is, in a sense, true; in practice, most commanders recognize the limits of air power.  For example, in Afghanistan, where we have nowhere near enough troops to do population protection, Afghan civilians have been refusing to cooperate with Americans because of errant air strikes.  I’m sure that the authors of the COIN manual are aware of how much more accurate air munitions have gotten, but they still recommend against its use.

Dunlap makes good points that ground troops can also kill civilians and that killings that appear to be intentional are more likely to inflame Iraqi public opinion against American troops.  Even if this is true, what Dunlap ignores is that air power can not be positive in a way that ground force can be.  You can’t do population protection with bombers.  You can really only kill people.  So while ground forces may cause more collateral damage, they can redress it in a way that air power can not.