Air power: where's the love?

AuthorErwin, Sandra I.
PositionDEFENSE WATCH

At recent inside-the-beltway gatherings of Air Force officials and contractors, the exasperation has been palpable. Why is air power being blamed for the lack of progress in Afghanistan? How dare the secretary of defense call air power a "vulnerability?" When did it become acceptable to disrespect the U.S. military's greatest strategic advantage?

These are tough days for time-honored tactical aviation. World War II style carpet-bombing is long gone. Aerial dog fighting pretty much ended in Vietnam. Air power was the darling of the 1999 Kosovo campaign, when the conventional wisdom was that smart bombs and other high-tech weapons were the answer to avoid putting ground troops in harm's way. That worldview faded only months after the Iraq invasion.

When bombs need to be dropped now, oftentimes the Pentagon relies on unmanned aircraft, although much of the close-air support in Iraq and Afghanistan is still done by tactical fighters and A10 attack aircraft. Troops on the ground especially praise the A-10 as the essential "big guns" that they rely upon for protection. But repeated incidents of aerial strikes that killed civilians in Afghanistan have called into question the advantage of such powerful weapons in war zones where combatants hide among the population.

The political fallout from civilian deaths has been such that senior officials at the Pentagon are debating whether to severely curtail the use of aerial strikes in Afghanistan. The commander of U.S. and NATO forces there, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has endorsed such a policy.

Air power advocates lament that pilots almost always get blamed--sometimes unfairly, they say--for air strikes that miss targets and kill civilians. A pilot may have dropped a bomb on the wrong target, but technically he is not at fault if he follows precise orders from ground-based controllers who are responsible for identifing the targets, said retired Lt. Gen. Michael Dunn, president of the Air Force Association. "It's not like a pilot decides to drop a bomb. There's a ground component to this," Dunn said at a conference last month hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Airpower Studies.

Veterans of close-air support operations concur that in urban combat, confusion is prevalent because combatants and civilians cannot be easily identified.

"It's very difficult for a soldier on the ground to look across the street and tell with 100 percent accuracy who the noncombatants are," explained retired Air Force...

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