Operation Iraqi Freedom began as a preventive war in that the United States attacked another country because of an assessed future threat rather than in response to a blatantly hostile act or to preempt an imminent danger that the targeted country represented. As such, it was the first (and, with the advent of a successor U.S. administration in 2009, only) exercise of the then-emergent George W. Bush doctrine, which was distinguished by a willingness on the part of the administration to use force to protect the nation’s avowed interests without an immediate provocation and without the support of a formal alliance.
During the final countdown that preceded the start of full-scale combat operations, Jessica Tuchman Matthews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, rightly characterized the impending campaign as an “optional war.”1 Vice President Dick Cheney justified Operation Iraqi Freedom somewhat differently as a proactive rather than reactive response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: “We had certain strategies and policies and institutions that were built to deal with the conflicts of the 20th century. They may not be the right strategies and policies and institutions to deal with the kind of threat we now face.”2 Explaining this shift in strategy from deterring enemies to forcefully eliminating their ability to inflict direct harm on the United States, Cheney added that the September 11 attacks had changed the preexisting rules: “If we simply sit back and operate by 20th-century standards, we say wait until we’re hit by an identifiable attack from Iraq. The consequences could be devastating.”3 He later observed that the Bush administration’s dominant concern after the September 11 attacks was that the next threat to American security would not be box-cutters but nuclear weapons, that the nation’s leaders could accordingly no longer fail to connect the dots as they had done before the terrorist attacks, and that no responsible American president could have ignored the potential for an Al Qaeda–WMD connection in Iraq.4
Allied air operations against the enemy’s ground forces were uniquely effective throughout the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom. Yet in marked contrast to the first Persian Gulf War of 1991, they took a backseat to the ground effort not only in their sequencing in the joint campaign but also in the amount of information that was publicly released about them. In point of fact, the bombing attacks in downtown Baghdad during the air war’s first two nights were the only visible parts of that effort to most observers who were watching the war unfold on their home television sets. What remained unseen was the constant pounding that allied air attacks were delivering elsewhere throughout the country with unremitting accuracy against Iraqi tanks, artillery emplacements, and IADS facilities. While those on the home front were riveted to television reportage of friendly ground troops tied down by the sandstorm and engaged by Fedayeen Saddam hit-and-run attacks, allied strike aircraft were shredding Republican Guard units wholesale by means of JDAM attacks into the gloom, thanks to Global Hawk and other ISR assets that could geolocate those enemy assets unerringly through the weather. As the Air Force chief of staff, General Jumper, later put it, “We killed a lot of those guys, that equipment, during the sandstorm when those people assumed that because they couldn’t see ten feet in front of their face, neither could we.”5
As if to reinforce this assessment, the most authoritative review of the U.S. Army’s contribution to the campaign noted: “It is difficult to overstate the importance of air operations in the context of [Operation Iraqi Freedom]. By dominating the air over Iraq, coalition air forces shaped the fight to allow for rapid dominance on the ground. Air power decisively turned the tide in tactical operations on the ground on several occasions. . . . Integration of precision munitions with ground operations, supported by a largely space-based command and control network, enabled combat operations to occur in ways only imagined a decade ago.”6 The study cited “lethal combinations of A-10s, F-15s, F-16s, F/A-18s, B-1s, B-52s and a host of other aircraft” as being “absolutely essential to the ground campaign’s success. The Air Force’s investment of air liaison officers and enlisted terminal attack controllers embedded into the maneuver units paid off in spades.” The only complaint voiced by Army commanders—one universally shared by Air Force airmen as well—was that “the clearance-of-fires process was sometimes unwieldy.”7
CENTCOM enjoyed complete control of the air over Iraq essentially from the opening moments of formal combat. The earlier Desert Storm experience had started out with thirty-eight days of air-only operations that were obliged to focus on suppressing the Iraqi air force and Iraq’s ground-based IADS before the campaign could proceed to attack Hussein’s occupying forces in the Kuwaiti theater of operations. In contrast, this war, in Anthony Cordesman’s words, “began with air superiority and moved swiftly to air dominance” thanks to more than a decade of prior Northern Watch and Southern Watch operations plus seven months of escalated Southern Focus attacks to further degrade the Iraqi IADS and prepare the battlespace for the impending second campaign.8
The immediate goals of the campaign were the neutralization of Iraq’s armed forces and the expeditious takedown of Hussein’s regime with minimal collateral damage by achieving tactical surprise, getting inside the regime’s decision loop, severing its command and control links, and undermining its capacity for collective action. “Violating virtually all of the traditional wisdom about how to prepare for a campaign of this scope,” the Army assessment noted, “the V Corps and I MEF forces appear to have achieved operational and tactical surprise when they started their attack before all of the ‘necessary’ forces had arrived and without a lengthy air effort. . . . The running start appears to have thrown the Iraqis off their defensive plan, and they were never able to regain their footing.”9 As coalition operations moved ever closer to direct contact with Iraqi troop positions, allied air power and light but high-impact SOF forces working in combination stayed ahead of the enemy at every step, often achieving specific mission objectives either before or independently of direct engagement by the main opposing forces on the ground. An American reporter captured the essence of the campaign when he described CENTCOM’s strategy as “premised on the synergy of disorienting air power, faster-moving ground forces, information dominance of the digital battlefield, and greater reliance on special forces.”10
Yet the war was more than just a preventive exercise in regime takedown. It also turned out to be a live battle laboratory for refining some novel approaches to joint and combined warfare that had first been conceptualized and applied during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in 2001. To begin with, a major improvement during the preceding year in the trust relationship between President Bush and General Franks, as well as between General Franks and General Moseley, gave the latter essentially full autonomy in approving target nominations as well as allowing an autodelegation arrangement from CENTCOM to the CAOC for nearly all target categories. The senior CAOC director for the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom recalled that the number of “Mother may I’s” from the CAOC staff to him or to General Moseley, let alone from General Moseley to General Franks or to higher authority, could almost be counted on one hand, and none of those rare instances, in contrast to the Enduring Freedom experience, resulted in lost opportunities.11
Indeed, improved working relations both within and across CENTCOM’s components proved indispensable in enabling the successful prosecution of Iraqi Freedom. In particular, CENTAF intelligence experts and operations planners brought together many outside individuals who had worked together just a year before in Operation Enduring Freedom. For example, the principal command and control planners for Enduring Freedom were reconvened to lead the Iraqi Freedom force enhancement and force application cells in the CAOC’s MAAP team. Equally important, strong trust relationships between CENTAF and CENTCOM that were painstakingly developed by General Moseley and his key subordinates during the latter months and early aftermath of the major combat portion of Enduring Freedom went far toward eliminating previous tensions and ill will among CENTCOM’s warfighting components and services. Many members of the CAOC’s special operations liaison element in Enduring Freedom were likewise retained as primary planners for Iraqi Freedom. By the same token, operations planners in CENTAF’s CAOC developed close and harmonious working ties with their counterparts at CENTCOM. “The daily contact with our CENTCOM counterparts during Operation Enduring Freedom continued throughout the buildup to Iraqi Freedom,” a senior CENTAF planner recalled. “While the key players on each side did not always see things the same way, there was never distrust or secrets.”12
As for bottom-line conclusions aimed at capturing the war’s most memorable achievements from his personal perspective, General Moseley put at the top of his list General Franks’ decisive “fast and final” plan, which was distinguished by an unprecedented level of jointness and coalition cooperation. He further noted the willing acceptance of risk across all components at the operational level, the integration of all theater air assets into a single focus, the close integration of air and SOF operations, and the air component’s ability to operate deep inside defended Iraqi airspace right up to the edge of Baghdad from the campaign’s opening moments. General Moseley also spotlighted as major campaign accomplishments the land component’s march to Baghdad, which was the fastest mechanized ground advance in the history of modern warfare; CENTCOM’s complete crushing of the Iraqi air force, navy, Republican Guard, Special Republican Guard, and Special Security Organization as coherent and functioning entities; and the offensive’s all but complete dismantling of Iraq’s command and control network. The Iraqi air force launched no sorties, and there were no attacks by other means against CENTAF’s airfields, the U.S. Navy’s carrier battle groups, constantly incoming sustainment trains of fuel trucks, or any other coalition facilities. Finally, with respect to the air component’s carefully disciplined targeting and force employment, he pointed out that the air offensive had caused no catastrophic environmental effects, strategically dislocating collateral damage, or significant deleterious effects on Iraq’s civilian and economic infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, key southern and northern oil fields, or associated petroleum, oil, and lubricants infrastructure.13
In particular, General Moseley valued the trust relationship between General Franks and himself (and between CENTCOM and its air component more generally) that had gradually evolved since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan nearly two years before. Indeed, so great was Moseley’s autonomy as Franks’ air component commander that as the opening night of full-scale air operations against Iraq was unfolding, CENTCOM’s director of operations, Major General Renuart, plaintively pressed him for an air component update, asking: “Will you tell us what you’re bombing when you get a chance?” With regard to this significant improvement in the CAOC’s freedom of action in setting the pace and focus of strike operations compared with the first halting weeks of Enduring Freedom, General Moseley frankly characterized the earlier air war over Afghanistan as “the JV [junior varsity] scrimmage” for Iraqi Freedom. Of the substantial improvement in joint force performance that the latter experience reflected, he noted that “you learn to fight by fighting.”14
In this important regard, the Iraqi Freedom experience clearly highlighted the need for regular and recurrent large-force peacetime training evolutions among the participating warfighting components to exercise the joint command and control system from top to bottom. For example, kill-box management in the counterland war would most likely have been far more efficient and effective in execution if all involved command and control entities had been given a prior opportunity to rehearse tactics, manage kill boxes, and flow combat aircraft into areas in which immediate responsive CAS was needed. CENTAF analysts later concluded that Marine Corps expeditionary forces and Army corps elements must be included in such exercises to practice and refine the target nomination and prioritization process.15 With continuing planned improvements to the Air Force’s training CAOC at Nellis AFB, the entire joint force command and control and combat forces complex should have ample opportunities to gain access to such training in future Red Flag operations.
Based on the campaign experience, CENTAF staffers stressed the obligation of the U.S. Air Force’s Air Combat Command and the U.S. Army’s Forces Command to pursue increased opportunities for full-scale and joint live-fly training exercises, to include full-up AOCs and ASOCs in such exercises, and to recognize the value of training for future joint high-intensity warfare as it is most likely to be fought.16 A knowledgeable airman aptly described the main problem with the present status of joint air-ground training, observing that air power has typically been
handcuffed to operate in unrealistic ways. First, aircraft [in even recent past joint training exercises] were directed to fly low and in nontactical ways so the Army could “see” air power. Second, using air power realistically would have been so devastating to the OPFOR [opposing force] that it would have reduced the difficulty of the tactical problem for the brigade commander. Third, air power’s effects were accordingly reduced to allow the brigade commanders to achieve the desired learning objectives. Fourth, the E-8 JSTARS was directed not to provide the full picture to the ground, since this would provide too much situational awareness to the brigade commander. JSTARS was not allowed to transmit the marshaling OPFOR’s positions to the ground forces undergoing training. Finally, the participants did not practice conducting joint deep fires, since [the Army’s National Training Center] was designed to test the close battle.17
In a comprehensive overview of the areas of combat performance that mattered most at the campaign’s operational and strategic levels, an after-action assessment conducted at Air Combat Command concluded that new levels of achievement demonstrated by allied air forces while pursuing CENTCOM’s initial goals in Operation Iraqi Freedom included early establishment of uncontested control of the air, the dominance of mass precision, unprecedented rapidity of action, unprecedented connectivity and integration of ISR and command and control, unprecedented efficacy of joint warfare, and unprecedented service flexibility in rapid adaptation.18 On the first count just noted, the British MoD’s after-action report observed that CENTCOM’s plan for allied ground combat was “facilitated throughout by an air campaign which achieved significant attrition of the enemy’s combat power and involved unprecedented accuracy and lethality based on the widespread, though not exclusive, use of precision munitions and linked sensors and data streams.”19 The air component’s achievement of air dominance in the skies over Iraq enabled all else that followed with respect to harmonious joint force integration in conducting offensive operations with virtual impunity.
As for the tangible results that were made possible by this application of allied air power, the Air Combat Command review concluded that “the coordinated use of coalition air power quickly created the conditions that allowed land forces to achieve high rates of maneuver and tempo in response to enemy activity.”20 It further observed: “Captured senior Iraqi General Staff officers reported that the fighting effectiveness of the Republican Guard divisions had been largely destroyed by air strikes.”21 Essentially confirming this observation, Col. William Grimsley, commander of the 1st Brigade of the U.S. Army’s 3rd ID, recalled: “We never really found any cohesive unit of any brigade, of any Republican Guard division.”22
The air portion of CENTCOM’s campaign to topple the Ba’athist regime actually began in the summer of 2002 when U.S. and British aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone began systematically picking apart the Iraqi IADS by attacking fiber-optic cable nodes that connected its command centers, radars, and weapons. When full-scale combat operations began in earnest on March 20, 2003, the rapid collapse of forward-deployed Iraqi ground units in the south freed up allied aircraft to concentrate on the Republican Guard almost from the very start. Lieutenant Colonel Hathaway, General Moseley’s chief strategist, observed that the overarching objective of that effort was to ensure that the Republican Guard’s forces would be so physically and psychologically incapacitated that they would be unable to mount any significant resistance when allied ground forces moved into contact with them.23 Toward that end, the CAOC moved tankers and airborne ISR aircraft deep into Iraqi airspace and cleared allied aircrews to drop at will against any Republican Guard targets of opportunity in designated kill boxes. Aircraft returning to base with unexpended ordnance from missions against prebriefed fixed targets were often redirected to engage detected Republican Guard tanks and artillery emplacements, both static and moving, as their assigned “dump” targets.
The three-week air war was also distinguished by the application of mass precision for the first time. Although the total number of precision-guided munitions used during the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom was about the same as that used in Desert Storm, that number represented an order of magnitude increase overall because only about 7 percent of the munitions employed in Desert Storm were precision-guided, whereas in Iraqi Freedom the number was close to 70 percent. CENTCOM’s deputy commander, Lieutenant General DeLong, called Operation Iraqi Freedom “one of the most surgical and precise bombing and ground campaigns in the history of warfare.”24 Since all allied strike aircraft participating in the major combat phase were capable of delivering precision-guided munitions, the ratio of aircraft to targets attacked was unprecedentedly low. In contrast to the five-week air offensive portion of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, which saw 126,645 sorties flown, for a daily average of 2,945, the major combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom generated only about 41,000 sorties, for a daily average of only 1,576, while producing the desired combat effects.25 During the campaign’s first twenty-four hours, literally every allied air-delivered weapon directed against an Iraqi target was precision-guided. Even by March 24, well into the war’s first week, 80 percent of the air-delivered munitions were precision-guided.
More important than CENTCOM’s increased reliance on precision munitions per se was the addition of inertially aided munitions, which offered four distinct advantages over their laser-guided counterparts. First, they can be delivered accurately against fixed targets regardless of weather conditions. Second, the aim points do not need to be deconflicted with respect to their proximity to one another. In the case of laser-guided munitions, combat pilots must ensure that the infrared “bloom” of another weapon detonation nearby does not affect the effectiveness of their own bombs. Inertially aided munitions, in contrast, permit attack on a target complex en masse. Third, they can enable fighter aircraft to attack two or more aim points during a single weapons delivery pass. Finally, they allowed coalition aircrews to achieve the greatest possible standoff from defended targets because they could release their weapons and immediately depart the area without having to continue to mark their intended aim point with a laser spot on which an LGB could guide until impact. A senior CAOC planner pointed out in this regard, “These factors allowed us to achieve mass that had not been possible before on a large scale. Indeed, the only combat aircraft that did not carry inertially aided munitions during the first night’s attacks were F-15Es, because they had not yet been loaded with the requisite software.”26
This pathbreaking application of mass precision was for the first time accompanied by a prevalence of effects-based thinking; that is, allied air operations were driven by specific desired results rather than the achievement of arbitrary levels of target destruction per se. Col. Mason Carpenter, the head of the CAOC’s strategy division, subsequently wrote in this regard:
The air and space effort was measured in effects, not numbers. Numbers were only interesting insofar as they helped determine effects. It did not really matter how many armored vehicles were destroyed. The real measure was how hard and well did the Iraqi armored divisions fight. When an Iraqi tank crew took off their uniforms and deserted, their tank was almost as good as destroyed. . . . Many of the surface forces failed to fight; the Iraqi air force failed to fly; and the Iraqi leadership failed to command. Effects are the bottom line.27
Carpenter added that this important net effect “cannot be captured or appreciated by traditional measures, such as the percentage of vehicles destroyed, numbers of sorties flown, or the percentage of munitions expended.”28
With respect to rapidity of action, Air Chief Marshal Burridge described the campaign as “the first operation that [he] would characterize as postmodern warfare,” in that “the degree and speed of maneuver and the tempo that was achieved was startling.”29 The speed of the coalition forces’ advance clearly impressed the Iraqi military leadership as well. During postcampaign interrogations conducted by JFCOM, numerous senior Iraqi officers and other operational-level commanders cited the speed and unpredictability of allied offensive operations as the main factors that led to the early collapse of their own forces.30
To be sure, the allied ground advance was slowed for a time by the unanticipated resistance from Fedayeen Saddam, the three-day shamal, logistics concerns, and the absence of prompt feedback on the progress of the land offensive. The air portion of the campaign, however, sustained its high pace of operations without interruption throughout the three weeks of major fighting. In the end, coalition forces made it to Baghdad from a standing start in just twenty-one days. It is hard to imagine how the ground advance could have gone much faster even had everything worked flawlessly. One assessment of the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom credited its success to “massive, precise, and responsive air power and a ground force that attacked over unprecedented distances with previously unseen speed.”31 Colonel Carpenter later concluded in a similar vein: “Never in the history of warfare has this much precision air power been applied in such a compressed period of time.”32 A Marine Corps reconnaissance platoon commander who was at the leading edge of I MEF’s final push toward Baghdad offered this succinct portrayal of what that accomplishment meant in practice: “For the next hundred miles, all the way to the gates of Baghdad, every palm grove hid Iraqi armor, every field an artillery battery, and every alley an antiaircraft gun or surface-to-air missile launcher. But we never fired a shot. We saw the full effect of American air power: every one of these fearsome weapons was a blackened hulk.”33
This last testament underscores tellingly how the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom showcased the manner in which counterland air attack has increasingly begun to move doctrinally beyond solely the classic supporting roles of CAS (direct support) and air interdiction (indirect support) toward missions that are not intended just to support the friendly ground force, but rather to destroy the enemy’s army directly and independently as the overall main weight of effort. An Air Force doctrine expert commented in this regard, “In the last update to Air Force Doctrine Document (AFDD) 2–1.3, Counterland Operations, we added a short section describing the generic term ‘attack’ as applying to those counterland missions that do not fall under the traditional mission rubrics of CAS or air interdiction. . . . I think it will be a while before we get this into joint doctrine, but the momentum is there.”34
In addition, owing again to the successful precedent established in Afghanistan, the Iraq war featured a more closely linked force than ever before. As one CENTCOM staffer put it: “Everything that had a sensor was connected.”35 Persistent ISR provided by airborne and space-based sensors coupled with a precision-strike capability by all participating combat aircraft allowed General Moseley to deliver discriminant effects throughout the battlespace virtually on demand. This cross-service synergy was greatly aided by the extraordinary collegiality that General Franks fostered all the way from the campaign’s earliest planning workups to the conclusion of major combat. During a strategy review session in the Pentagon with all four service chiefs on March 29, 2002, almost a year before the start of combat operations, Franks stated categorically: “At the end of the day, combatants, and that’s either me or the boss I work for [Secretary Rumsfeld], are going to put together a joint and combined operation here, and it is not going to scratch the itch of any one of the services.”36 The most comprehensive and thorough assessment of U.S. Army operations during the campaign characterized the unprecedented level of harmonious cooperation among the components as “arguably . . . the first ‘jointly’ coherent campaign since the Korean War,” as well as also “arguably the first campaign in which the initiatives inherent in the Goldwater-Nichols legislation bore full fruit.”37 Much the same can be said for the integration of space, mobility, and information in General Moseley’s planning and execution of allied air and space operations. One account characterized him as “the quarterback of the [air] operation, calling audibles in response to changing circumstances.”38
This unprecedented efficacy of joint force employment was a significant force multiplier in and of itself. There was a minimum of preoccupation with who was “supported” and who was “supporting.” On the contrary, the intercomponent relationships were fluid and dynamic. In sharp contrast to the initially flawed execution of Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, in which CJTF Mountain’s two-star Army commander sought at first to go it alone rather than seek the active involvement of fixed-wing air power, the integration of the air component into the planning and execution of joint operations in Iraqi Freedom was generally done properly and was essential in producing the resultant joint-force synergy. Indeed, seemingly anticipating the harmonious interaction at the operational and tactical levels, Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, at that time the head of the Pentagon’s Office of Force Transformation, observed several months before the campaign’s start that “a new air-ground system has come into existence where you no longer talk in terms of one being supported and the other being supporting. That would be like asking if the lungs are in support of the heart or if the heart is in support of the lungs. It’s a single system.”39
This pattern of performance, moreover, was light-years removed from so-called Little League rules of joint warfare, in which all force elements are treated as coequal and each gets its fair-share chance to play a part. Instead, the component commanders pooled their combined combat assets into a “job jar” from which they selectively drew and matched the right combination of forces for any given situation. The result was an unprecedented mutual-support relationship between allied air and ground forces working in full concert. “The Iraqi land forces were forced to expose themselves by the speed of land operations and then hit hard from the air,” one author noted, “which, in turn, sharply reduced the Iraqi threat to U.S. and British land forces. Jointness took on a new practical meaning.”40
Allied air and ground operations were almost seamlessly integrated, with target information flowing with unprecedented rapidity and ease from SOF troops to aircrews and vice versa. Thanks to what senior leaders in the CAOC described as a “ruthless, staring constellation [of surveillance assets] looking at Baghdad,” allied SOF units could spot targets and pass that information to an ISR system that got it promptly transmitted to strike aircraft orbiting overhead.41 General DeLong later commended the U.S. military for “successfully transforming itself from being service-based to being joint-based.”42 The war saw air and space operations integrated into “a combined and joint campaign in the truest sense of the words. . . . No single component held the key to success—it required the full team effort for the coalition to succeed quickly.”43
With respect to that observation, Admiral Cebrowski spoke of a “new sweet spot” highlighted by the Iraqi Freedom experience in the traditionally conflicted relationship between land forces and air power: “My sense is that the comfort level in regard to all indirect fires is going up,” suggesting that ground commanders may now be increasingly inclined to rely on precision air-delivered CAS rather than on organic artillery and mortar fire.44 He added: “I think, when the lessons learned come out, one of the things we are probably going to see is a new air-land dynamic.”45 Indeed, as another account noted, the plan for Iraqi Freedom “so effectively integrated the different types of joint fires that the phrase ‘air campaign’ may have become anachronistic.”46 Thanks to the effectiveness of the combined allied air and ground offensives and to the fragility of Iraq’s air and ground defenses, the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom was successfully prosecuted in less than half the time, with fewer than a third the total number of strike sorties, and with only a tenth the number of bombs that were dropped during Operation Desert Storm. Furthermore, the studiously discriminating nature of the bombing left Iraq’s infrastructure largely intact, and a potential ecological and economic disaster was averted by timely allied action on the ground in securing the country’s oil fields.
Of this synergy, one senior officer, discounting talk of CENTCOM’s reportedly “brilliant” plan, noted that there are two kinds of plans: “The plan that might work, and the plan that won’t work. This was a plan that might work. It had lots of options in it. It was well rehearsed. All the leaders understood the plan. And when it came time to execute, I think we seized every opportunity to exploit success. So when you combine the effects of very devastating air power, special operations, and then . . . a fairly bold ground attack, all of that caused any regime defensive plans to crumble.”47 General Leaf agreed, saying, “There will be silly arguments about which component achieved victory. It was a combination.”48
Admiral Giambastiani subsequently testified before the House Armed Services Committee that CENTCOM benefited not only from precision munitions but also from “precision decisions to direct our smart weapons” made possible by such recent improvements as the synergistic interaction of SOF and conventional forces. He attributed the campaign’s success to the “overmatching power,” with far fewer ground troops than would otherwise have been required, that was enabled by the leveraging of the “key dimensions of the modern battlespace—knowledge, speed, precision, and lethality.”49 That characterization, he added, spoke not only of an American style of warfare moving beyond the organizing construct of “overwhelming force” that had been the hallmark of Operation Desert Storm, but also of “a remarkable shift . . . in the way joint forces operate today,” culminating in what he called “a new joint way of war.”50 Expanding further on this point, Admiral Giambastiani’s director for joint requirements and integration at JFCOM added that the success of the joint and combined effort was substantially the result of “advances in technologies, coupled with innovative warfighting concepts joined together by a new joint culture,” which collectively enabled “a level of coherent military operations that we have not been able to achieve before.”51
Finally, with respect to flexibility in execution, the war featured a simultaneous conduct of offensive air and ground operations in which the use of various force elements by CENTCOM’s component commanders was mutually supporting and synergistic in the operational results it achieved. In a postcampaign briefing at the Naval War College, the chairman of the JCS, General Myers, contrasted this approach with the “sequenced, sectored, and segregated campaign” of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, adding that what made the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom distinct and unique was the essentially simultaneous start of the air and ground offensives. Myers characterized the latter approach as a “more flexible, adaptable, and agile campaign.”52 Although Iraqi leaders from Hussein on down thought that they could hunker down and endure any allied bombing campaign, the concurrent air and ground offensives were more than they anticipated. Ultimately, the intensity and effectiveness of nonstop allied air operations led some Iraqi units to expend as much as 80 percent of their effort merely on surviving by separating their ordnance, equipment, and personnel. Even then, Iraqi commanders conceded that allied forces managed to attack all three of those Iraqi equities concurrently and successfully.53
Allied air power was crucial in setting the conditions for the rapid conclusion of major combat on the ground. An RAF Harrier GR7 squadron commander who took part in the western desert operation called the performance nothing less than “awesome,” a crucial point that, he added, tended to be overshadowed by the postcampaign insurgency and sectarian violence that festered after the successful toppling of Hussein’s regime.54
Characteristic of the feedback that allied aircrews at the unit level received from their leaders after the three weeks of fighting were over was the praise from the commander of the Air Force’s 524th Fighter Squadron, Lt. Col. Tom Berghoff, for his F-16 pilots:
I am extremely proud of the squadron’s accomplishments. We had a lot of guys who were young—without much experience out on the wing—who did just great. They did really well because my flight leads did what they were supposed to. They led the flights, made the right decisions, and took their wingmen and got them in and out of Iraq, and the end result was a 100 percent mission success rate. All the targets were positively [identified] as military, and there were no collateral damage issues—there was no fratricide by the squadron. Pilots made the right decisions, threat-reacted to survive, [and had] no battle damage. We flew a lot of sorties and worked hard. We didn’t miss one of our [time-sensitive target] taskings, and a lot of that was quick reaction, quick thinking. When things happen fast, there is a tendency to make mistakes, but they didn’t. We blew up a lot of high-value targets and supported the Army’s push to Baghdad. And we brought everybody home.55
Colonel Carpenter, who headed the CAOC’s strategy division throughout the campaign, later observed that the three weeks of major combat made the most of “a disabling strategy intended to ensure the swift collapse of the regime by applying rapid, deliberate, disciplined, proportional, and precise force within fast decision cycles to dislocate and disrupt the regime at the strategic level.” He further noted that it employed “selective disruption at the operational level, used enabling operations to empower the Kurds in the north, and used preventive operations in the west to preclude the Iraqis from employing WMD and/or conventional theater ballistic missiles that would trigger political involvement from Israel.”56 The last of those operations saw a uniquely heavy SOF involvement. Allied SOF teams scoured the western Iraqi desert for Scud missiles and launchers to prevent any such missiles that might have been in Iraqi hands from being fired at Israel. They also performed as ground FACs for allied air power on a far greater scale than they had in Afghanistan.
The integration of allied SOF teams and air assets in Iraqi Freedom was both a successful force multiplier and a template for future joint and combined operations. That successful integration emerged from seeds that were planted during an impromptu SOF and CAOC training exercise that had been held even before the start of Operation Enduring Freedom. The nation’s earlier combat experience in Afghanistan made a perfect live-fire training environment for the CAOC’s special operations subdivision, whose staff learned a great deal very quickly about the problems and virtues of working closely with joint and combined fixed-wing air power. The Afghan experience also gave airmen in the CAOC a valuable opportunity to learn how to interact with and maximize air support for SOF operations.
In a subsequent attempt to capture the essence of allied air operations throughout the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom, University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape alleged that the campaign had succeeded in toppling Hussein’s regime only after allied air power “shifted from attacking leadership targets to bombing Iraq’s Republican Guard and other regular military units.” That flawed assessment was based on the mistaken premise that “the war began with an effort to shock and awe the Iraqi leadership into capitulating without a fight, but this quickly failed,” as a result of which allied air power was instead “turned against Iraq’s forces in the field.”57 In fact, both elements of the air campaign were carefully planned as sequential undertakings and were anticipated as such by CENTCOM’s most senior leaders. CENTCOM’s air component attacked Republican Guard targets from day one onward, but its main weight of effort, by careful design from the very start, moved progressively from the inside (i.e., those security and leadership protection forces closest to Saddam Hussein) to the outside (i.e., those forces farther away from Hussein—the Republican Guard).
In sum, the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom was a true joint and combined effort in which all force elements played influential roles and in which, as two historians writing an early synopsis of the campaign aptly noted, there was “little of the petty parochialism that too often marks interservice relations within the [Washington] Beltway.”58 The CFLCC, General McKiernan, later spoke directly to that cooperative spirit when he reflected during an after-action interview: “The big strength in this campaign was the personalities of the various component commanders. . . . You can say a lot of that [interservice cooperation was possible] because of developments in joint doctrine and training. . . . But a lot of it [was] . . . also in the chemistry between . . . the leaders.”59 Such harmony was especially notable during the challenging and complex urban air-ground combat that occurred during the days immediately preceding the fall of Baghdad. Of that experience, General Moseley’s representative to the land component, General Leaf, commented, “The key to adapting to that environment has been open communications and dedicated teamwork between the air and land components. Cooperation between ground and air forces in this conflict has been extraordinary, and our operations in urban Baghdad are an extension of that.”60 General Franks likewise observed on the eve of the regime’s collapse, “The fact is that if you have a whole bucket of air force and a whole bucket of ground force and the rest, it’s a fool who decides ahead of time which application against this pot you describe is the thing that reaches what I call the tipping point.”61
General Myers added that the close integration of all force elements was “a huge lesson here.”62 His successor as JCS chairman, Gen. Peter Pace of the Marine Corps, echoed the same judgment when he said: “History is going to show that this war is the first time that U.S. forces operated . . . the way those who crafted Goldwater-Nichols envisaged.”63 Speaking as the maritime component commander, Vice Admiral Keating characterized the operational payoff as “joint warfighting at the highest form of the art I’d ever seen. . . . There was understanding, friendship, familiarity, and trust among all the services and special forces working for General Franks. He did, in my view, a remarkable job of engendering that friendship, camaraderie, and trust. In fact, he insisted on it. . . . There was no service equity infighting—zero.”64
Indeed, the three weeks of major combat in Iraqi Freedom clearly vindicated the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, which directed the gradual evolution of a true joint culture of mutual trust and cooperativeness in American joint force operations. As an early draft of JFCOM’s postcampaign lessons-learned assessment emphatically put this point, CENTCOM pulled together for the second Persian Gulf War “what was arguably the most coherently joint force the United States has ever fielded. . . . [It] developed and matured a climate of jointness that, while deemphasizing various service cultures, led to the components learning to trust each other, working together to achieve unified action. The resulting joint environment and supporting joint networks enabled CENTCOM to overcome obstacles and eliminate many of the gaps that challenge cohesion in an ad hoc joint force.”65 In particular, the campaign experience saw major improvements in the development of greater harmony in the relationships between the Air Force and naval aviation (along with the latter’s important Marine Corps component).66 That process materially helped CENTCOM’s air component to overcome persistent barriers that had once impeded the fullest possible exploitation of American air power and its integration with other force elements in a joint and combined context.
It would be premature, however, to conclude that the American armed services have reached the end of the long road from service interoperability to service interdependence as a result of their Iraqi Freedom experience. As David Johnson pointed out in this regard in 2006, “despite all the self-congratulatory talk of . . . ‘seamless joint operations’ emerging from [the second Persian Gulf War], the reality remains that within their [areas of operations], component commanders called the shots, perhaps at the cost of overall joint effectiveness. . . . At the heart of the issue [here] is the persistent reality that the services do not feel confident that they can rely absolutely on each other when the chips are down. Thus they maintain redundant capabilities and develop service warfighting concepts that are largely self-reliant.”67
Continuing in this vein, Johnson added:
As it stands now, joint doctrine frequently reflects a consensus view of what the services will tolerate, rather than a truly integrated joint perspective. . . . A signal example of this reality is the FSCL, as employed by the Army in both Gulf Wars, which is permissive to ground component commanders . . . but restrictive to the employment of air power. The FSCL, however, is merely symptomatic of the Army’s desire to control a large [area of operations]—and all the resources of the other services entering that [area of operations]—to execute its operational doctrine. This limits the employment and effectiveness of fixed-wing air power—which is more effective than organic Army systems for deep operations—in operations short of the FSCL but forward of the range of divisional indirect fire systems. . . . [Many] of the purported lessons learned about the relative roles of air and ground power since the end of the Cold War have been interpreted within service perspectives—perspectives shaped by experience and culture—and this has the effect of sustaining the status quo. Much work remains to attain a truly joint American warfighting system.68
The lead author of the most thorough assessment of U.S. Army operations throughout the major combat phase of Iraqi Freedom wrote more directly in that regard that notwithstanding much “chest-thumping” over the alleged achievement of unprecedented cross-service harmony, the persistent friction that bedeviled the relations between CENTCOM’s land and air components over the ownership and control of joint battlespace throughout much of the three-week offensive “drove home the point that we really still don’t fight joint campaigns.”69 Perhaps this conclusion may be safely regarded as the main downside lesson from the Iraqi Freedom experience.70
On the plus side, however, the air component in the campaign against Hussein’s regime had everything to do with allied ground forces’ freedom from attack and freedom to attack. In fulfilling its roster of combat tasks in the campaign, allied air power did not just “support” the land component by “softening up” enemy forces. More often than not, it conducted wholesale destruction of Iraqi ground forces prior to and independently of allied ground action. On other occasions, it both supported allied ground actions and was supported by them in shaping enemy force dispositions for more effective attack from the air.
The Iraqi Freedom experience further demonstrated that the air assets in all services are at the brink of a major transformation from analog to digital approaches to warfighting. Because virtually every combat aircraft that participated in Iraqi Freedom was capable of delivering GPS- and inertially aided munitions, the air component quickly exhausted its preplanned target list. With respect to target attack flexibility, air component strike missions throughout the three weeks of major combat called for a variety of weapons guidance mechanisms (both GPS and laser), fuzing options (instantaneous, delayed, or airburst), and warhead sizes (500-pound, 1,000-pound, and 2,000-pound). At least eighteen munition and fuzing combinations were available to CAOC weaponeers for the conduct of Iraqi Freedom.
The RQ/MQ-1 Predator and RQ-4 Global Hawk UAV platforms, which had operated together for the first time so effectively in Afghanistan, gave CAOC planners every incentive to leverage the diverse capabilities of these aircraft even more effectively during the three-week war in Iraq. Global Hawk was used to detect and geolocate such mobile targets as tanks, SAMs, and early-warning radars and then to forward this information in real time to airborne strike aircraft that were best positioned to engage those pop-up targets of opportunity. Just as the Predators had been major winners during Enduring Freedom, the Global Hawk truly came into its own in support of subsequent combat operations in Iraqi Freedom. As CAOC operators later reported, “Global Hawk’s ability to gather information on troops, equipment, SAMs, and AAA, send that information to intelligence analysts, and finally deliver it to the CAOC floor for execution reflected a process and concept that need to continue.”71
One informed account described the “critical role” played by the array of CENTAF’s air assets “in every aspect of fighting during Iraqi Freedom, from high-intensity maneuver to low-intensity convoy security and urban or rural anti-guerilla operations. . . . At the outermost tier, beyond the FSCL, air assets shaped the battlefield by preventing operational movement by major Iraqi forces, keeping formations bottled up in Al Amarah, and preventing Republican Guard units from retreating into urban areas. Within the FSCL, air assets maintained a constant grinding action, wearing down Iraqi units well ahead of coalition ground forces. . . . This integration set aside many of the interservice disputes,” yielding a “sophisticated synergy of [ISR] sensors, command and control processors, and precision-guided munitions—a nexus that advocates of air power feel was exploited in a mature form for the first time.”72 Allied air operations were intended to facilitate the quickest possible capture of Baghdad without any major head-to-head land battles between allied and Iraqi ground forces.73 With respect to the interservice disagreements that recurred from time to time at the margins of the campaign’s conduct, the lead author of the most thorough assessment of U.S. Army operations rightly concluded that “most of the issues we quibble over, while important, are not as important as the [more] fundamental truth—it was a joint fight with problems solved by men of good will who understood the stakes. . . . At the end of the day, I have nothing but admiration for the work the air component did in Iraqi Freedom.”74
Unfortunately, the remarkable advances that were steadily made in American air warfare capability after the first Gulf War of 1991 and were so amply demonstrated in early 2003 have since been almost completely overshadowed by the subsequent insurgency and sectarian violence that prevailed in Iraq for four years after the three weeks of major combat that brought down Hussein’s regime.75 Only in 2007 did Gen. David Petraeus develop and implement a new approach stressing long-proven principles of counterinsurgency warfare aimed at providing genuine security to the Iraqi people to supplant the counterproductive brute-force approach that a succession of previous U.S. joint force commanders had used throughout the preceding four years of the allied occupation of Iraq. The steadily mounting political, economic, and human costs of that deadly turmoil tended, for a disturbingly long time, to render the initial three-week campaign in March and April 2003 an all but forgotten (and, to many, even irrelevant) achievement. The persistence of that civil strife led former secretary of defense Melvin Laird to offer a sober reminder to observers of all persuasions that “getting out of a war is still dicier than getting into one.”76 It also bore discomfiting witness to the “initial miscalculations, misdirected planning, and inadequate preparation” of the second Bush administration’s leading national security principals that lay at the root of the ensuing devolution of events.77
Certainly, credible witnesses had warned of just such a festering predicament. Among numerous others, William Lind of the Free Congress Foundation wrote presciently: “When American forces capture Baghdad and take down Saddam Hussein, the real war will not end but begin. It will be fought in Iraq, in part, as an array of nonstate elements begin to fight America and each other. . . . This kind of war, fourth-generation war, is something American and other state armed forces do not know how to fight.”78 Ever since postcampaign developments in Iraq first began to turn sour, a legion of respected commentators have dissected and documented the hastily improvised, underresourced, and ineffectual attempts at stabilization in Iraq undertaken at the outset by the Bush administration.79 Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson observed on this score: “None of the people in Washington who had led the nation into a preemptive attack by a small invasion force nearly bereft of allies wanted to believe that the conflict could drag on for months, perhaps tying up most of the Army’s ten divisions and bleeding the nation of money and manpower.”80
All the same, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee three months after the coalition took down the Ba’athist regime and well into the steadily intensifying postcampaign insurgency, Secretary Rumsfeld continued to appear either unmindful of or indifferent to the need for a sufficient allied presence on the ground to ensure the prompt social and political stabilization of Iraq and to provide adequate security for the Iraqi rank and file. Expressing the contrary view, Rumsfeld declared: “In the 21st century, mass may no longer be the best measure of power in a conflict. After all, when Baghdad fell, there were just over 100,000 American forces on the ground. General Franks overwhelmed the enemy not with the typical three-to-one advantage in mass, but by overmatching the enemy with advanced capabilities and using those capabilities in innovative and unexpected ways.”81 The error that both Franks and his superiors in the administration made, however, was to assume—against more than ample prior expert advice to the contrary—that a parsimonious commitment of allied ground troops to meet the immediate needs of regime change would also suffice to end the war satisfactorily and to achieve the coalition’s broader goal of bringing a functioning democracy to Iraq.
Whether or not one believes that going to war against Hussein’s Iraq was in the best interests of U.S. and international security, the overwhelming consensus today among informed commentators with the benefit of hindsight is that CENTCOM’s campaign plan, encouraged and approved by the Bush administration, failed both completely and unpardonably to anticipate and address the needs of postcampaign stabilization and attempted democratization that have continued to demand American and allied attention ever since the end of major combat in 2003. That manifold failure, as well as such subsequent sins of commission on the administration’s part as the ill-advised wholesale dismantling of the Iraqi army and police force and the forced displacement of all Iraqi civil servants with any senior Ba’ath Party connections into the ranks of the unemployed, overlooked the most fundamental tenet of democratic nation-building theory, namely, that an indispensable precondition of successful political modernization must be the establishment and growth of effective state institutions of governance.82 Indeed, it would not be a reach to say that the first edicts of the Coalition Provisional Authority that were put into place in Iraq by the Bush administration under Ambassador Paul Bremer in the immediate aftermath of the Ba’athist regime’s collapse had the direct and intended effect of doing precisely the opposite.
Today, in large part because of those misguided rulings and, even more so, of CENTCOM’s and the administration’s shared failure to see to the needs of ensuring public security in the immediate aftermath of the regime’s collapse, most would concur with Thomas Friedman’s judgment that the war “was not preordained to fail but was never given a proper chance to succeed.”83 Thomas Ricks put the same point in a different way in his postmortem on the American-led invasion: “Speed didn’t kill the enemy—it bypassed him. It won the campaign, but it didn’t win the war, because the war plan was built on the mistaken strategic goal of capturing Baghdad, and it confused removing Iraq’s regime with the far more difficult task of changing the entire country.”84
To be sure, the United States and its allies brought to an end not only the iron rule of a dictator who had brutalized his people for more than thirty years, but also the continuing regional security challenge from Ba’athist Iraq that had occasioned a costly American and British military presence in Southwest Asia ever since the conclusion of Operation Desert Storm. The flawed and incomplete way in which that laudable objective was pursued, however, points up most uncompromisingly the crucial importance of never forgetting the abiding rule that no plan, however elegant, survives initial contact with the enemy. It also provides a sobering reminder that any exhaustive plan for a complete regime takedown must anticipate and duly invest against the most likely political consequences in addition to planning the campaign’s course and outcome through the major phase of combat operations. Johns Hopkins University strategist Eliot Cohen interjected perhaps the most incisive judgment yet rendered on this account when he wrote at the end of 2006: “From the outset of the Iraq war, much of our difficulty has stemmed not so much from failures to find the right strategy as from an astounding and depressing inability to implement the strategic and operational choices we have nominally made. . . . We have not come to the brink of failure because we did not know how important it is to employ young Iraqi men or keep detained insurgents out of circulation or to prevent militia penetration of the security forces by vetting the commander of those forces. We have known these things—but we have not done these things.”85
On that point, a thoughtful treatise by Frederick Kagan that appeared in 2006 spotlighted “the primacy of destruction over planning for political outcomes” that had predominated up to that time in American military thought since Desert Storm. That focus, Kagan wrote, had occasioned a counterproductive situation in which the nation’s military transformation efforts to date had entailed “a continuous movement away from the political objective of war toward a focus on [merely] killing and destroying things.” Such misplaced emphasis, he suggested, was quintessentially reflected in the revealing label “Phase IV” (the then-envisaged follow-on to the major combat phase, or “Phase III,” of Iraqi Freedom), which treated postwar stabilization and consolidation operations almost as an afterthought to the “decisive combat operations” that American military planners viewed as the “main mission.”
Such an approach sufficed handily for Operations Desert Storm, Deliberate Force, and Allied Force during the 1990s, but those were limited undertakings aimed at coercing desired enemy behavior, not at the more demanding task of removing one government and replacing it with another. However, Kagan argued, if the nation’s military engagements in its ongoing war against Islamist extremism are going to continue to be wars of regime change, as was clearly the case in both Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, then the first concern in operations planning “should be determining what the political end state should look like in as much detail as possible,” because “military victory over the incumbent government is . . . only the prelude to the operations that will actually determine the outcome of the effort.” Accordingly, Kagan insisted, “Phase IV,” or whatever the regime replacement activity is to be called, is “not subordinate to or even equal with ‘decisive combat operations.’ . . . It must predominate.”86
Andrew Krepinevich offered a comparable observation even earlier, while the dust from Phase III was still settling, when he wrote that “the U.S. military’s preference to do what it does best—defeat enemy forces in the field and then quickly depart—must be overcome. The practice of crafting quick exit strategies must yield to a willingness to develop a comprehensive strategy for winning both the war and the post-conflict period that follows.” Krepinevich also was among the first to suggest candidly after the initial flush of allied self-congratulation had worn off and the new reality of post-Hussein Iraq had begun settling in that “as can be seen in the wake of the coalition’s victory in Iraq, those who practice regime change incur consequences as well as certain moral and political responsibilities.”87 Finally, he rightly noted that the campaign experience had pointed up the criticality of continued U.S. access to overseas basing options, a luxury often taken for granted that had begun to appear in growing jeopardy since the end of the Cold War in 1991. As a case in point, he observed, CENTCOM’s unexpected loss of the use of Turkish territory at the last minute sidelined some one hundred American aircraft that had been slated to take part in the campaign and disrupted planned U.S. tanker operations to support the Navy’s carrier air wings deployed in the eastern Mediterranean. Rebasing those tankers in Bulgaria, said Krepinevich, “provided an acceptable, if not entirely satisfactory, solution.”88
The successful conduct of Iraqi Freedom’s major combat phase presaged a new era of warfare for the United States in two ways. At the same time that the experience heralded the nation’s final mastery of high-intensity conventional warfare, it also brought Americans face to face for the first time since Vietnam with a refined mode of fourth-generation asymmetric warfare that is likely to be the defining feature of conflict in at least the world’s most unstable and ideologically riven arenas for the indeterminate future. This newly emergent challenge, against which the United States remains inadequately configured in most respects despite steady improvement since 2003, is distinguished by nonstate and transnational actors and associations, loosely knit cells of self-generating action groups, dispersed and nonlinear operations without fronts, concurrent attacks on all elements of friendly governments and economies, sheer violence and disruption as its proximate goals, and terror as its primary instrument of choice.89 As one of the best assessments of this burgeoning form of post–Cold War conflict put it, fourth-generation warfare “uses all available networks—political, economic, social, and military—to convince the enemy’s political decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit. . . . It does not attempt to win by defeating the enemy’s forces. Instead, via the networks, it directly attacks the minds of enemy decision makers to destroy the enemy’s political will.”90
Whatever errors the Bush administration’s most senior leaders may have made by failing to insure adequately against the most likely needs of the endgame, however, there can be no denying that the allied combatants in all services who prosecuted the campaign at the operational and tactical levels, thanks in considerable part to the enabling contributions of CENTCOM’s air component as described in the preceding chapters, performed in an exemplary way when it came to the execution of Iraqi Freedom’s major combat phase in March and April 2003. A former Marine Corps F/A-18 pilot wrote of that experience that none of what ensued afterward “should detract from what was done and learned during [the three weeks of major combat in] Operation Iraqi Freedom. The successes were spectacular in a way that was unlike anything seen before.”91
The air component’s contribution toward that outcome bore powerful witness not only to the many investments that the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, along with their RAF and RAAF counterparts, had made in the hardware ingredients of their combat repertoires since Desert Storm, but also to such crucial intangibles as the cutting-edge aircrew training at the postgraduate level provided by the USAF Weapons School at Nellis AFB, Nevada; the Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center with its integral Topgun program at NAS Fallon, Nevada; and Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One at MCAS Yuma, Arizona. The air component’s banner performance further resulted from the repetitive case-hardening of allied aircrews and their commanders at all levels that had been inculcated over the course of the preceding decade through recurrent, realistic large-force training exercises, exacting operational readiness inspections and tactical evaluations at regular intervals in between, unrelenting frankness in training mission debriefings, and continuous joint and combined enforcement of the northern and southern no-fly zones over Iraq. All of that finally culminated in an opportunity for CENTAF to exercise those investments in high-intensity combat under the leadership of an able and aggressive air component commander and with the help of the most experienced CAOC staff in the history of air warfare.
Against that positive and gratifying backdrop, however, must be juxtaposed the exceptionally costly and arguably avoidable sectarian violence and sustained insurgency that the United States and its coalition partners were subsequently forced to contend with for more than six painful years as a result of the Bush administration’s ill-considered going-in plan for achieving an orderly regime change in Iraq. If there is any enduring lesson to be drawn here with respect to the role and utility of air power in modern warfare in light of that subsequent bitter experience, it surely must be that even the most capable air weapon imaginable can never be more effective than the strategy it is intended to underwrite.
As Colin Gray insightfully noted in this regard in 2007, for air power’s inherent advantage “to secure strategic results of value, it must serve a national and . . . overall military strategy that is feasible, coherent, and politically sensible. If these basic requirements are not met, [then] air power, no matter how impeccably applied tactically and operationally, will be employed as a waste of life, taxes, and, frankly, trust between the sharp end of [a nation’s] spear and its shaft.” More to the point, Gray went on to insist, a nation’s overall campaign strategy can be so dysfunctional that it “cannot be rescued from defeat by a dominant air power, no matter how that air power is employed.”92 By all signs from the continuing unease that so many around the world have felt since 2003 as a result of the nation’s still-undecided gamble in Iraq, this dictum remains no less pertinent to the challenges that the United States and its leaders face across the conflict spectrum today and for the foreseeable future. Those challenges entail not only our continuing counterinsurgency preoccupations of the moment, but also the all but certain prospect of higher-intensity showdowns against more able opponents who can be counted on to test us for higher stakes in years to come.