For Hitler, then 105 days from suicide, Berlin was to be a lethal cul-de-sac, as Baghdad might quickly become for Saddam Hussein. One reason for the probable brevity of Saddam’s last war is that air power’s hour has at last arrived.
In 1911 the Italian Army in Libya became the first to experiment with aircraft as weapons. Since then air power has played many roles in many wars. But until very recently, air power’s efficacy was limited–severely limited–by the difficulty of putting free-falling munitions on targets. Until now, the question has been: How many sorties–how many planes–would it take to destroy a target? Now the question is: How many targets can you destroy with a single sortie?
John Keegan, the military historian, writes that in August 1941 a British report found that “of those aircraft attacking their targets, only one in three got within five miles… Over the French ports the proportion was two in three; over Germany as a whole… one in four; over the Ruhr [Britain’s principal target area] it was only one in 10.”
Under the best conditions–daylight, only antiaircraft fire (no fighter planes attacking the bombers), bombers equipped with the Norden bombsight–only 70 out of 500 landed within 1,000 feet of the target. And 500 bombs might mean 100 B-17s each carrying five 500-pound bombs. Under bad conditions, one of 500 bombs would get within 1,000 feet.
John Warden, who was a U.S. Air Force colonel and an architect of air operations during the 1991 Gulf War, says that in the Second World War B-17s would have to drop 9,000 bombs to have a 90 percent chance of hitting a target one third the size of a football field. An Air Force historian says that when 108 B-17s with 648 bombs attacked a German power plant 400 feet by 500 feet, it was estimated that there was a 96 percent chance that two–one of 324–would hit the target. And when on June 15, 1944, 47 B-29s targeted a Japanese steel plant with 376 bombs, one hit the plant. No wonder that German and Japanese war production increased until very late in the war.
Today a target that can be seen or precisely located can be hit with a single precision bomb. In the Gulf War, the only bombers used were B-52s–all of them older than their crews–which were used for “terror effects” bombing of concentrated Iraqi infantry, and as platforms for launching cruise missiles. Today, four B-2s, each carrying 16 2,000-pound bombs, could destroy all of Saddam’s palaces. Soon a single B-2 will be able to strike 80 targets with “smart” munitions. Planes from the five aircraft carriers around Iraq can strike 3,500 targets a day.
Retired Gen. Richard Hawley, who as a young man flew 433 missions in Vietnam, remembers that when he graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1964 the hot plane was an F-100, a single-seat fighter he describes as “a motor and a gas tank and a gun.” It is to today’s stealthy F-22 as a Model T Ford is to a Ferrari. The accelerating sophistication of the U.S. air arsenal almost compels a kind of unilateralism because it becomes increasingly difficult to integrate most other nations’ forces into operations.
Air power by itself recently won a sort of war–the 1999 no-casualty campaign, conducted from 15,000 feet, to stop Serbia’s depredations in Kosovo. However, air power alone will never supplant ground power. As has been said, no one surrenders to an airplane. But today’s air dominance vastly simplifies the tasks of ground forces, because they cannot be threatened from the air, and enemy ground forces cannot concentrate.
Furthermore, the plain fact of air dominance becomes a huge factor in psychological warfare, which, by encouraging surrenders, can minimize violence. Imagine the Iraqi infantry’s sense of vulnerability, emphasized by the shattering noise of U.S. aircraft–never mind their munitions.
Hawley recalls that in 1997 two B-1 bombers, each carrying 80 500-pound bombs, were on a long-range training flight from Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota to drop their bombs on a Kuwait training range, hitting targets simulating enemy armor. Hawley happened to be visiting Kuwait at the time, and with help from the U.S. ambassador arranged to have the bombing run shown on Kuwait television, which is the most-watched channel in the city of Basra in southern Iraq, where a large contingent of Iraqi armor was based. That use of air power may contribute to lifesaving surrenders six years later.
