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AIR SUPPORT TO SOLDIERS AND MARINES

Airpower is like poker. A second-best hand is like none at all.

—Gen. George Kenney, USAAF

Make no mistake: the successful execution of wars in the American era depends on U.S. dominance in the third dimension. Since the introduction of aircraft to war, no U.S. fighting method, from Patton’s to McChrystal’s, has had the least chance of succeeding without absolute, uncontested control of the skies. Our military has been seduced by past successes in the air. The last time an American Soldier had to endure the helpless horrors of an aerial bombardment was when a North Korean fighter strafed the Korean airbase at Kimpo in 1951. Only twice in the American era has our aerial dominance been challenged. On the first occasion Russians and North Koreans flying the superb MiG-15 stoutly and skillfully fought against U.S. pilots in their F-86 Saber jets. But, while dramatic and often bloody, the drama of combat over “MiG Alley” never seriously affected the ground battles in Korea.

The second occasion occurred over the skies of Vietnam in 1967 when the North Vietnamese, using sophisticated Soviet-supplied missiles and guns and fighter aircraft, embarrassed the Air Force and Navy by downing a tragically high number of aircraft. Again, while too many fliers died or were captured during subsequent battles over the skies of North Vietnam, U.S. aerial dominance was never challenged decisively in that or subsequent wars. In South Vietnam, tactical success on the ground increasingly depended on the ubiquitous presence of aircraft orbiting overhead. Few large-scale tactical engagements proceeded very far before Soldiers and Marines called for close support from Air Force, Marine, or Navy fighters or the newly introduced helicopter gunships flown by Army and Marine pilots.

The role of U.S. airpower after Vietnam changed in two significant ways. First, the ground and air dimensions of war merged. This phenomenon was first recognized officially in the late seventies with the Army’s introduction of Air-Land Battle. The poor grammar was intentional. The authors of the new doctrine combined the two dimensions to indicate the obvious: no longer would there be separate air and land battles. Virtually every dimension of the land battle would have an aerial corollary, from communications to intelligence, logistics, ground maneuver, and, of course, firepower.

The campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq and by the Israelis in Lebanon reinforced the significance and imperative of this air-ground convergence. To make the point, in 1996 I came up with the phrase air-ground “interdependence” to explain the remarkable melding of air and ground warfare that appeared after Desert Storm. Interdependence suggests a degree of intimacy far beyond just the development of joint processes and procedures intended to bring all the services together. Interdependence implies that our greatest advantage on the future battlefield, regardless of the level or type of war, will occur at the point where the aerial and ground dimensions intersect.

Winning at the “crease” will demand a level of closeness between the air and ground mediums that will allow nearly simultaneous application of fires and maneuver applied in broad patterns that strike and check the enemy everywhere he can be seen and engaged. The entire premise for interdependence rests with the ability of air and ground forces to gain unprecedented proficiency in the delivery of close-in fires.

Recent experience suggests that we have achieved success at perfecting air-ground interdependence at the strategic and operational level of war. Desert Storm proved that strategic strikes by fleets of long-range fighters, missiles, and bombers had developed to a remarkable degree. Experience in Afghanistan and during the march to Baghdad in 2003 demonstrated that the Air Force and Navy had perfected aerial operational fires to the extent that commanders on the ground no longer stopped to consider the originating source of long-distance killing fires, whether from aircraft, artillery, ships—it did not matter.

The second phenomenon of this new age of aerial warfare is the overwhelming and incontestable aerial dominance by Western militaries. Absolute dominance has led to a propensity of opposing militaries to “spot” command of what Professor Barry Posen of MIT calls the “global commons”—the air, sea, and space. To offset American precision killing power the enemy has retreated into the “contested zones,” those regions of the globe that favor his style of war. The enemy has found succor and solace in distant, inhospitable regions unapproachable by conventional means. He has chosen to achieve success by fighting at the tactical level of war, where human and cultural advantages offset technological advantages. Regardless of where and at what level he seeks to fight, he will have as his principal operational objective the control of time. He will seek to win by not losing. He will use his position of advantage in remote, inhospitable, and alien places to kill enough Americans and stretch out the campaign until we tire of the effort and go home.

Our enemy’s actions provide proof positive that U.S. airpower is both indispensable and uncontestable. In fact, experience in recent wars demonstrates conclusively that control of the air will provide the single greatest firepower advantage in the American era. Our Soldiers and Marines have voted for airpower by their preferences in combat. In Iraq and Afghanistan they consistently call for aerial fires: first for the AC-130 “Spectre” gunship, then Army AH-64 helicopter gunships, then fighter bombers, and, finally, artillery . . . if it is in range.

Aerial dominance in the American era, combined with the growing reluctance to risk casualties from putting “boots on the ground,” has created a new approach to contemporary wars, the “light footprint” war. In effect, Western militaries have “hired out” air forces to countries in distress if support to them is important enough to engage but not important enough to engage decisively on the ground. In places like Serbia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and (in the case of drone warfare) Yemen and Pakistan aerial strikes delivered from safe altitudes and in concert with indigenous ground forces have had a salutary effect of stopping an enemy ground force and, in some cases, achieving something akin to victory. Failures of an air-only approach in Libya, Syria, and, so far, Iraq offer a cautionary tale, however. Without a reliable ground force to exploit the advantages of air strikes and to quell the chaos that too often follows aerial assault, a campaign conducted exclusively by air might cause harm in the long term.

The greatest challenge for the future will be to find better ways to kill an enemy who has learned to “hug” ground units in contact. Killing close in by air is termed “close air support” (CAS) and is the most difficult of all missions to perform, because proximity to friendly forces always adds the risk that mistakes will kill our own Soldiers. But in spite of difficulty and risk, when a Soldier’s life is at stake and an enemy is “hugging” him in close combat he expects the aircraft orbiting above to kill the enemy no matter how close the fight.

Enemies have also learned to open fire and then disappear in the period between the request for support and the arrival of aircraft overhead. The enemy has also countered precision bombs by using the media to raise the stakes for occasional failures. Efforts to lessen response times have been met by an enemy who has developed his own creative means to enable him to move frequently and fight in ever more dispersed formations. In limited wars fought by the United States since the end of World War II, approximately 96 percent of all combat deaths occur within the “last mile” from the line of contact. In order to reach enemies huddling within the last mile the Army and Marine Corps must develop new ways of planning, delivering, and controlling close-in fires.

SOURCES OF FRICTION

Close air support is hard, as noted, because it offers both the most certain means for killing enemy combat forces and the greatest likelihood for harming friendly troops. Historically, both the air and ground services have been tentative in using CAS unless absolutely sure of the need. The conventional wisdom used to be that it was better for ground forces to use artillery, mortars, or attack aviation first and reserve CAS for targets farther away from troops in contact. Air forces likewise favored the freedom inherent when striking more distant targets, where collateral damage to friendly troops was least likely. In fact, CAS has always suffered from several sources of “friction” that collectively have prevented it from being fully effective as the primary source of killing power in support of ground operations.

Without question, GPS- and laser-guided killing power has effectively reduced if not eliminated “target location error” (TLE), the distance between the target location identified by the Soldier on the ground and the spot where the bomb lands. TLE has traditionally been the greatest source of imprecision in the delivery of close-in fires. In Vietnam TLE averaged about 250 meters. Today, thanks to handheld observation devices with embedded lasers and GPS, Soldiers can locate targets with accuracy of a meter or less. Precision weapons now land within a few feet of the identified target location. Unfortunately, as we have seen recently in Iraq and Gaza, very precise weapons serve to heighten the trauma and embarrassment when weapons hit the wrong target precisely. Mistakes occur infrequently, but when they do the global media are first on the spot to declare that since U.S. weapons are so precise, any discretionary “error” surely had to be intentional. Nothing is worse than being precisely wrong. The enemy recognizes the impact of discretionary errors on morale. As we have seen with the Israelis in Lebanon and elsewhere, the enemy will continue to find diabolical and creative ways to enhance the probability that aerial fires will strike innocent civilians and friendly ground forces. A single discretionary error can have a devastating effect on the success of a campaign.

A great deal of moral courage and trust is needed to restart a close-support mission after a severe incident of fratricide. Past experience suggests that such errors often compel commanders to slow mission times, increase minimum safe distances, and restrict the use of certain weapons and platforms. These additional sources of friction favor the enemy. Marine and Army close-combat units discovered in Fallujah in 2004 that even with the aid of superb tactical intelligence and precision locating devices they were never able effectively to deliver bombs very close. Fear of collateral damage and confusion over exactly where the enemy was located compelled those in close contact to pull back at least four hundred meters. A rule of thumb still useful today is that the minimum safe distance a ground force should be from a bomb is about “a meter a pound.” Thus today’s heavy bombs preferred by the Air Force might push back the point of contact between friendlies and the enemy a thousand meters or more. The sight of withdrawing ground troops often was the signal for the enemy to withdraw, leaving the aircraft to bomb empty buildings. To be as safe as possible the delivering fighter plane would carry the smallest bomb available, usually a five hundred pounder. But the rule-of-thumb five-hundred-meter separation might as well be five hundred miles when the urban fight is joined at point-blank range.

An emerging and very troubling aspect of modern aerial warfare is the proclivity of the enemy to resist attack by even the heaviest bombs. Before the beginning of Operation Protective Edge, the 2014 Israeli attack into Gaza, Hamas militants constructed heavily reinforced defenses along parallel housing blocks on the outskirts of Gaza City. During the opening phase of the seven-week campaign the Israeli Golani Brigade suffered heavy casualties when attacking these well prepared defenses. The Israelis had badly underestimated the amount of destructive close air support needed to crush the Hamas defenses. The Israeli air force tried to reduce collateral damage among civilians by dropping five-hundred-pound bombs. Soon the bomb sizes increased to one thousand and then two thousand pounds, just enough to collapse the concrete bunkers and thick building walls that constituted the Hamas defenses. The lesson the Israelis learned was that heavy urban defenses dictate that infantry forces must either move back or hunker down and risk casualties when heavy bombs are delivered very close. They relearned the painful rule of thumb taught by the Marines in Fallujah, that the contact distance in the urban fight is often fifty meters or less and at that distance a two-thousand-pounder can be just as deadly to the attacker as the defender. So increasingly we are witnessing ground units taking extreme risk in ignoring “minimum safe distances” to kill a close-in enemy who is heavily protected and willing to die.

Timeliness is the greatest source of friction in supporting the close fight with airpower . . . and the enemy knows it. ISIS in particular takes effective advantage of lengthening mission times. Rules of engagement, poor intelligence, and the ability of the enemy to hide have increased mission times over Iraq and Syria to an hour or more. Because of what Soldiers term the “latency” or “dwell time” of these missions, the enemy has plenty of opportunity to disappear before an orbiting aircraft is cleared to deliver bombs. As a consequence more than 75 percent of air missions against ISIS return to base without dropping. All too often the time that it takes to deliver close air support is so long that even those missions cleared for drop end up killing only buildings. As ISIS has adapted and learned to operate under the U.S. aerial campaign, its losses have fallen dramatically. No longer do its forces travel in convoys. Like their Hezbollah brethren they move in twos and threes in civilian cars and pickups. They hide critical items well inside buildings or bury them in the desert. They no longer brandish very large and distinctive captured U.S. equipment in the village square. Most ISIS offensive operations are conducted the old-fashioned way: with suicide bombers followed by mortar fire and dismounted infantry attacks.

In the campaign against ISIS, just like previous campaigns against Fallujah, Ramadi, and elsewhere, the Army and Marines discovered what generations before them already knew: missions are slow principally due to human, not technological, factors. With today’s constrictive rules of engagement every bomb or shell has a commander’s name on it. Mistakes can be both fatal and career ending. The embedded journalist is waiting behind the next wall to report the incident to the world . . . often with a video playback.

Layering aggravates the problem of latency. On average, each level of decision making takes at least eight minutes, a figure that has not changed substantially in half a century. The standard for latency in the future will depend, as always, on actions by the enemy. Most challenging will be the engagement of moving targets, such as terrorist vehicles and foot-borne enemy on the move. The standard for aircraft on station to engage moving targets should be two minutes. Stationary targets, particularly those with uncertain intentions, may wait longer for engagement, but under no circumstances should the time from identification to attack be less than ten minutes. Clearly, missions after an hour or more do very little harm in proportion to their expense.

In Afghanistan, thanks in large measure to drones and long-endurance fighters and bombers, the air services are getting better at maintaining a constant aerial presence over troops in contact. But problems still remain. Response times measured in only a few minutes can be achieved only if supporting aerial platforms are constantly overhead. High-performance aircraft are not very efficient when circling as they wait for something to happen. Even a flight time to target measured in minutes might be too slow when supporting today’s fleeting and brutal engagements.

Of course, we have learned that aerial observation does not have to be done by manned aircraft. Any vehicle overhead (even if unarmed and unmanned) changes the enemy’s behavior. When he sees a drone he immediately goes to ground and disperses. He turns off his electronic communications. Reinforcements and supplies fail to arrive, out of fear of being spotted. When he withdraws deep into urban structures he gives up the advantage of direct observation.

The variable most likely to reduce all sources of friction is trust. Trust between Soldier, his commander (or the approving authority), and the pilot overhead must be earned. It is purchased gradually and can be forfeited instantly if a bomb accidentally kills friendlies. Technology can do little to establish trust. Trust comes slowly, from long-term association and proven performance in combat. Trust cannot be established between strangers.

REDUCING FRICTION

As we develop the means to deliver fires closer to friendly troops, the enemy finds ways to move even closer. As our response times quicken, the enemy learns to retreat even more quickly. As our weapons get more precise and destructive, the enemy becomes more proficient at hiding, dispersing, going to ground. As fratricide and collateral damage decreases, the enemy finds a way to exploit the media to heighten the psychological impact of each event. Thus we are in a foot-race with an enemy who knows the weaknesses of our firepower systems and works constantly and cleverly to diminish their effectiveness.

Close-air-support mission responses are slowed because of too many layers in the decision-making chain. The only way mission times can be improved is to eliminate layers. The question is how to eliminate layers while ensuring that fires are delivered at the right time and place. Army and Marine infantry, those closest to the enemy, should be solely responsible for controlling the delivery of aerial fires. Only a maneuver Soldier can actually sense the threat. Only he has the inalienable responsibility for protecting his men and accomplishing the mission. Artillery and Air Force observers may have access to the latest sensors and superb connectivity to higher fire-support agencies, but no one except a close-combat Soldier possesses the fingertip sense of the battlefield necessary to determine the risks and the means to attack the target immediately to his front. Taking intermediaries out of the firing chain is no great technological challenge. Web-based sensors on board overhead drones linked to GPS and downloaded to a Soldier’s cell phone would remove any ambiguity about the exact nature of the target. A Soldier’s cell phone would provide a simple and reliable means for communicating directly with airplanes overhead. Special Forces small units today frequently act as their own observers for CAS. There is no reason all infantrymen cannot as well.

CAS is an incredibly intimate and personal mission. Thus, successful close air support depends on building trust between those who call for the mission and those who drop the bombs. Mistakes made by pilots dropping weapons in the wrong place and by Soldiers mistakenly shooting at friendly aircraft only exacerbate the problem. The trust curve can be increased bloodlessly by habitually associating air units most likely to support troops with troops they are most likely to support.

The Marines make their air wings part of each Marine division, and every smaller Marine expeditionary unit habitually takes along its share of pilots and planes. Marine pilots like to brag that they are infantrymen first. Sadly, such associations do not exist between Army and Air Force units. They should. A habitual relationship should be enduring and should never be a pickup exercise. Every Air Force fighter squadron commander should be held responsible for training Army maneuver observers in techniques and procedures for calling in and managing close air support. Higher-level commanders should be evaluated on their ability to make optimum use of aerial fires. Some squadron officers and enlisted airmen should literally live with their associated ground units. Maneuver tactical commanders must know each fighter pilot personally and understand the strengths and weaknesses of each.

In the past, effectiveness in CAS platforms was defined by the axiom “lower and slower is better than higher and faster.” Often in the era of limited wars the air services were obliged to swap the new for the old when older weapons proved to be better suited for closer support of troops in contact. During the early days of the Korean War the Air Force brought back World War II–era propeller-driven aircraft to replace jets after discovering that fast movers were incapable of spotting a dispersed enemy and bombing with precision.

This lesson was repeated in Vietnam. The Air Force and Navy again brought propeller-driven observation and attack aircraft out of mothballs to meet the same demand. Today venerable firepower platforms such as the AC-130 gunship and the iconic A-10 Warthog close-support jet seem to reappear time and again as essential firepower providers, even though the Air Force declares both to be too vulnerable for modern war. Since the earliest days in Vietnam the ageless B-52, designed during the forties as a strategic bomber, has been continuously drafted into the role of a conventional bomber. Some argue that today the availability of shared video images between pilots and Soldiers promises to make “low and slow” an anachronism. If both Soldier and pilot could see the same image of the target, and if the pilot trusts in the veracity of the commander in contact, perhaps the mission could be accomplished with precision bombs flying at high speed and altitude. One lesson seems to be accepted by all: that a real-time view of the target shared by the unit in contact, the pilot, and the critical decision makers is perhaps the most important single technological requirement to improve timeliness and effectiveness and lower the risks of CAS.

In today’s environment the process is the problem. Captain Swenson can certainly vouch for the fact that friction comes from those in the decision-making chain who are uncertain, poorly trained, and inclined to allow procedures to interfere with decisive action. Every decision maker who orders a bomb to be dropped must have the skill, instinct, and authority to make very critical judgments, often with insufficient information and when the target is unseen or indistinct. He must be able to differentiate friend from foe and enemy from the innocents. He must be immune to attempts by the enemy to deceive. None of these changes will happen until the air and ground components accept the truism that close air support has become far too important to be left substantively unchanged in the face of a strikingly different and more challenging conflict environment. Today the enemy is the catalyst for change. He understands how lethal we are from the air. He’s done all he can to lessen our advantage there. We must begin now to restore our ability to kill him with efficiency from the air if we are to defeat him and lower the human cost of close combat.