There is further debate among airpower intelligentsia about whether the attack should be aimed at destroying an enemy’s means (his military forces and the various facilities that allow him to make war) or his will (his determination to resist). The extremists on both sides hold that if you do one, then you don’t need to do the other. Both are wrong. Attacking an enemy’s will can pay big dividends, but it is hard to know exactly how to do it. Bombing cities into dust sometimes works, as does targeting his military capabilities, but both are costly and have many drawbacks; so the theorists can debate in their ivory towers until they run out of words.

Meanwhile, the men and women in the field have to select the best of both as they apply to their given situation, and sometimes they don’t get the mix right. This was one area, in fact, where airpower failed in the Gulf War.

In Desert Storm, Coalition air forces attempted to destroy the will of Iraq by bombing leadership targets in Baghdad, but these attacks failed miserably to degrade Iraq’s determination to resist. Why? Because Coalition air commanders did not know what constituted the sources and strength of Saddam’s will. As Chuck Horner is the first to admit, he had the means to destroy Saddam’s will but didn’t know how to do it.

In contrast, when the Coalition attacked the means of the Iraqi Army in the field, it also destroyed that army’s will. Thus, when Coalition land forces engaged forty-two Iraqi divisions, the result after four days was 88,000 Iraqi POWs and only 150 U.S. ground force deaths (half of which were accidentally inflicted by U.S. forces).

What went wrong? The first problem was with intelligence. U.S. intelligence operatives have not been trained to think in terms of the effects of military force on a given enemy. As a result, instead of risking judgments, they behave like accountants (with numbers, there is little risk). Intelligence operatives like to count enemy airplanes rather than determine the effect of killing an ace pilot.

The second problem was with the Plan. The Plan is not chiseled in stone. It is a script, and no performance ever goes according to script. After the first bomb drops, the enemy changes. Perhaps he is stronger than before, perhaps he is weaker. But changed. So the theorist is right at the opening moment of the war, and wrong ever after.

We’ll be discussing both problems in more depth later on.

WHAT IS AN AIR CAMPAIGN?