The case against the Air Force.

• Author: Coram, Robert
• Position: Weapons procurement

THE CASE AGAINST THE AIR FORCE

In September, the United States Air Force will mark its 40th anniversary with a celebration so spectacularly flattering to itself that Top Gun will seem an antiwar film by comparison. All around the world bands will play, jets will zoom through the skies, and generals will make speeches about the sky service's many contributions to free world defense. But while the public is watching the air show, Air Force leaders inside the Pentagon will use their moment to push plans for one of the most questionable initiatives in postwar military annals-- converting billions of dollars worth of frontline fighter planes into planes designed to deliver smart bombs behind enemy lines. All at the expense of providing close-air support to U.S. troops in battle.

This initiative, which has no formal name but may be referred to by its nickname, "deep strike,' comprises perhaps the most important and farreaching conventional weapons procurement decisions Congress will be asked to make in 1987. Because the subject is tangled and involves the kind of institutional cross-purposes for which no individual can be singled out as the villain, deep strike is hardly ever mentioned in the press or on Capitol Hill. Yet it is the ultimate expression of a jurisdictional feud that has been simmering within the U.S. military since the airplane was invented. It is not necessary to go back in history, however, to find a warning that deep strike may be a huge waste of money: April 15, 1986, will do.

That was the day nine of the Air Force's most sophisticated strike aircraft, armed with the best smart bombs, tried to kill Muammar Qaddafi as part of the Libya raid. Qaddafi is still alive. The lasers and high-tech target sensors on four of the FB111s broke down, causing the planes to turn back without releasing their weapons. None of the five planes that did deliver scored a direct hit. This was not the pilots' fault; scoring direct hits on small targets from fast-moving airplanes is almost impossible. But this modest technical display, instead of giving pause to Pentagon leaders and the two armed services committees, has been glossed over as the Air Force presses ahead with deep strike, a program to invest tens of billions of dollars in the technology that struck out against Qaddafi--on the assumption that such technology will demolish Soviet forces offering considerably more resistance than a madman's tent.

From a hardware standpoint, deep strike involves adapting Air Force F15 and F16 fighters into electronics-laden tactical bombers similar to the FB111. The resulting $45 million F15E "Strike Eagles' and $20 million A16s (no nickname yet) would be used primarily to attack targets behind enemy lines. This specialty is vital to the Air Force in its battle against a menacing and determined foe it has been fighting throughout its 40 years-- the Army. From an institutional standpoint, the key element of deep strike is the Air Force's desire to avoid having to cooperate with its rival service.

In military lingo, what we attempted to do to Qaddafi was "interdict' him. "Interdiction' means conventional destruction of a precisely chosen point deep in enemy territory. Since the Air Force's creation in 1947, it has maintained that interdiction of targets such as supply depots is the best way to assist troops in combat. The Army has countered that "close-air support' aerial attacks at the battlefront itself are more important. Pentagon debates on this subject go on endlessly. Damage to rear-area targets may cost an opponent dearly. If, for example, interdiction aircraft can destroy a shipment of shells, the opponent may run out of ammunition in a week. On the other hand, close-air attacks at the front drain enemy strength right away, which saves American lives and may determine the outcome of today's battle, not next week's.

Were funds unlimited, a military tactician would want plenty of deep-strike power at his disposal. But even in the Reagan era, defense funds are not unlimited. The great drawback to interdiction is that the price is so high compared to close-air support, and the gains at best speculative compared to the indisputable need to defeat the enemy at the point of battle, that cost-effectiveness is dubious. At about $5 million each, the target sensors for the F15E and A16 alone will cost nearly as much as an entire A10 close-support airplane.

Here is where a ridiculous entanglement arises. Because the Air Force shows little interest in providing close support for troops, the Army is forced to invest undue amounts in attack helicopters, which are both costlier than comparable airplanes ($10 million for the Apache antitank helicopter, versus about $7 million for most A10s) and far more vulnerable to being shot down. At present the Army is ruminating over a new helicopter program called LHX, one more carefully tailored to satisfy committees than to serve on the battlefield. Go-ahead decisions for LHX, A16, and the $5 million sensor (called Lantirn, a compression of "low altitude navigation and infrared system for night') are due soon; procurement of LHX may, over its production life, cost $60 billion--more than the Reagan administration has spent on the B1, the MX, or other programs that have received greater public notice. A little background on these systems suggests alternatives that could both save money and improve the effectiveness of American forces.

Scaring Hitler

The airplane, invented in 1903, was first incorporated into the U.S. military in 1907, with the creation of an Aeronautical Division of the Army Signal Corps. It wasn't until 1947 that the Air Force was made an independent service, the event being commemorated this year.

During Wold War. I, aircraft were primarily infantry tools. Some performed reconnaissance, others were employed to strafe troops; dogfighting developed when one side's airplanes tried to prevent the other's from accomplishing such objectives. Many pilots came away from the Great War suspicious that ground generals, jealous of their franchise, had used aircraft ineptly in order to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that the new flying machines were not significant. Many also came away feeling a bit superior to their lesstrained comrades on the ground. Corps elitism wasn't new to the Army, of course; the cavalry traditionally felt that being on horseback made it superior to those on foot. The new flyboys, thousands of feet up above those dying in the trenches, quite literally carried elitism to a new height.

In 1913 an Army lieutenant named Henry H. "Hap' Arnold had written an article for The Infantry Journal suggesting that aircraft could be used not just for close support of troops, but for ambitious offensive operations. Eight years later an Italian theorist named Guilio Douhet wrote The Command of the Air, the first comprehensive work on air power. Douhet argued that airplanes might render the gruesome trench warfare of World War I obsolete. Cheaper victories might be had by bombing the enemy's industries, destroying the means to fight.

That same year, 1921, Army Captain Billy Mitchell dispatched the first of several "unsinkable' battleships he would send to the bottom in his crusade to demonstrate that flying...