Lesson Objective: To comprehend the problems and issues of space operations and the conduct of theater level warfare as we enter the 21^st century.

PJELA: 1A, 1B - National Security Strategy

Core Values: Integrity First, Service Before Self, Excellence in All We Do

Core Competencies: Information Superiority, Air and Space Superiority, Precision Engagement, Global Attack, Rapid Global Mobility, Agile Combat Support

1. Summarize the role and effectiveness of air power in the Gulf War.

The role of the air power was to multifaceted. To begin with, it allowed rapid deployment and buildup of coalition forces in the Middle East. While the buildup was going on, it provided, with ground and naval forces, for defense of forces. During the war, air power destroyed the command and control capability of Iraq, cut forward troops off from resupply, gained air supremacy, destroyed troops and equipment in the field, supplied planning and intelligence information to commanders, and supported ground troops once the ground war started. The air campaign began on 17 January 1991 and ran through the end of the war on 28 February 1991. For all but the last four days the air war was the only war. The short duration of the ground war is a testimony to the effectiveness of air power.

2. Explain space system capabilities and their impact upon a theater of war.

The categories of space systems include communications, navigation, environmental monitoring, and early warning. The communications satellites provide the capability to set up mobile communications within the theater with a lot of flexibility. Satellite navigation systems, which is Global Positioning System (GPS) provides the ability for precision bombing and navigation for those weapon systems that have GPS, as well as precise positioning for troops on the ground. Environmental monitoring consisted of Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) and Landsat, SPOT and national reconnaissance satellites, which provided targeting intelligence and planning information. The Defense Support Program (DSP) supplied early warning.

3. Compare USAF intentions regarding space operations with a "space force" alternative.

In promoting its leadership role in military space for the 21^st century, Air Force leaders relied on the institutional memory and experience acquired over more than a generation. The Air Forces broad vision for its role in space ran along two lines. First it involved a series of campaigns to convince our leaders that national security dictated giving the Air Force sole responsibility for military space activities, including development and deployment of weapons in space. The second centered on a continuing effort to institutionalize space within the Air Force and armed forces by transferring responsibility of Air Force space activities from the research and development side to the operational side of the service. In order to chart the course for the Air Force space program into the next century, General Merrill McPeak, Air Force Chief of Staff established a Blue Ribbon Panel on space, led by General Moorman. This panel addressed space roles and missions issues that affected the Air Force internally and expanded its analysis to emphasize the role of the Air force in the wider military and national arena. The panel envisioned the future Air Force as a thoroughly integrated air and space force that reflected General McPeak’s mission statement of June 1992, which declared air and space coequal. It stated that "the Air Force will lead the Defense Department in the acquisition, operation and application of space capabilities to preserve the peace and win in war."

1. How did concern with maintaining the coalition impact conduct of the air campaign?

The air campaign, just like the overall campaign, was conceptualized, planned and executed with regards to the impact it would have on the allied coalition. The US understood that in order to maintain the conflict within the Kwait / Iraq area maintaining the coalition was critical. The coalition would be in jeopardy if Iraq were able to draw Israel into the conflict and provide a diversion of Arab effort away from Iraq and towards Israel. Once the initial impact of the Iraqi invasion was realized, coalition nations were involved in basically all aspects of the campaign. This concern eventually evolved into a dual chain of command with Saudi Lt. Gen. Khalid was the Commander, Joint Forces and Theater of Operations and Gen. Schwarzkopf as the Commander of all US Forces.

Although the initial air campaign planning was done by a group of Air Staff officers in the pentagon (Checkmate), Gen Horner thought the plan was seriously flawed. Gen Horner then established a theater planning group headed by Brig. Gen. Buster Glosson. Although this group (Black Hole) eventually had representatives from the British Royal Air Force and the Saudi Royal Air Force it worked in secrecy. This was due to American and Saudi sensitivity to the concerns of friendly Arab governments that threats of offensive military action might impede a negotiated settlement.

Maintaining the coalition together forced changes in the direction of the air campaign on several occasions. The first change occurred on the second day when the first Scud missiles launched from western Iraq landed in Israel. Scud missiles were initially regarded as nuisance weapons that could cause political difficulties for the coalition. However, in order to keep the coalition together, the long and basically unsuccessful Scud hunts were started and continued for the rest of the campaign. These Scud hunts included continuous airborne surveillance of western and southern regions of Iraq, positioning strike aircraft within Scud launch areas, attacks on communications links thought to be transmitting Scud launch authorization, attacks on suspected sites and strikes against Scud production and storage facilities. They were designed specifically to keep Israel from attacking Iraq and the coalition collapsing.

Another area this impacted the air campaign was the selection of targets. Minimizing the suffering of Iraqi civilians was part of the air campaign planning. The operation plan included prohibiting attacks on cultural and historic sites, hospitals, mosques, sites of special significance to the Islamic religion, civilian population centers and other non military structures. "Anything which could be considered as terror attacks or attacks on the Iraqui people will be avoided." This is why after the attack on the Al-Firdos bunker SecDef Cheney and Ge. Powell severely curtailed bombing in downtown Baghdad.

2. Was the air campaign in the Gulf War necessary and/or sufficient to secure a military victory in the war? Was a military and/or political victory attained?

The readings clearly reflected that the air campaign was decisive. They also acknowledged that few, if any, believed that the air campaign could secure victory independent of a ground campaign…

-pg. 256: --USCINCCENT’s Intent: attack into the Iraqi homeland using air power to decapitate his leadership, command and control, and eliminate his ability to reinforce Iraqi ground forces in Kuwait and Southern Iraq…then gain undisputed air superiority over Kuwait so that we can subsequently and selectively attack Iraqi ground forces with air power in order to reduce his combat power and destroy reinforcing units. …

--four-phase structure of the air campaign: a strategic air campaign into Iraq, air supremacy over the Kuwait theater, preparation of the battlefield by attrition of the Iraqi Army, and air support for the ground attack.

--the air campaign plan executed by Coalition forces at the outset of the Gulf War consisted of three elements:

• a broad statement of purpose, including the idea of a four-phased war;
• extremely detailed air tasking orders for the first two days of the war, plus additional staff work on the third day of operations; and
• a more diffuse set of expectations about how the air war would unfold and what it would accomplish against any given target set.

-pg. 259: Shortly after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, a group of Air Staff officers in the Pentagon began planning an air campaign designed to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Col. John A. Warden III, the Air Staff’s Deputy Director for Warfighting, supervised this effort. The group initially numbered six but quickly grew to more than one hundred officers from the Air Force and other Services, operating out of offices that were previously the facility of an Air Staff division called Checkmate; this ad hoc group itself became known as Checkmate. Warden and his Checkmate organization developed military objectives, a concept of operations, and a targeting scheme designed to accomplish the President’s objectives using air power alone.

-pg. 271: --The Gulf War was the first conflict in history in which a large percentage of the air-to-air engagements that produced confirmed kills—sixteen of the thirty-three victories against fixed-wing Iraqi aircraft credited to Coalition fighters during Desert Storm—involved BVR shots. These BVR shots were possible because Coalition fighters, operating in conjunction with platforms such as the E-3 AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System), could shoot BVR with little risk of accidentally [sic] hitting friendly aircraft.

--The most conclusive evidence of Coalition success in rendering KARI (French built integrated computer coordinated air defense system) and its associated "strategic" SAMs impotent can be seen in Coalition attrition data (Figure 11). From an operational standpoint, the relevant measure of effectiveness against Iraq’s ground-based air-defense system was not SOCs, IOCs, or missile-firing batteries physically destroyed but the numbers of Coalition aircraft that were not shot down or damaged while carrying out their missions over Iraq and the Kuwait theater of operations.

-pg. 275: How effective were the Coalition attacks on Iraqi leadership and Telecommunications/Command, Control, and Communications (C3)?

--the results of these attacks clearly fell short of fulfilling the ambitious hope, entertained by at least some airmen, that bombing the L and CCC target categories might put enough pressure on the regime to bring about its overthrow and completely sever communications between the leaders in Baghdad and their military forces.

--Common sense would argue that strikes against these two target categories must have imposed some, if not considerable, disruption and dislocation on the Iraqis involved.

--Without access to high-level Iraqi officials and records, the degree of disruption and dislocation inflicted by strikes in the L and CCC target categories cannot be quantified, not even roughly.

-pg. 276: How effective were Coalition air efforts against the E and O target categories?

--attacks rapidly shut down the generation and distribution of commercial electric power throughout most of Iraq, forcing the Iraqi leadership and military on to back-up power…almost eighty-eight percent of Iraq’s installed generation capacity was sufficiently damaged or destroyed by direct attack, or else isolated from the national grid through strikes on associated transformers and switching facilities, to render it unavailable.

--electric power in central and southern Iraq went down during the initial days of the war, just as the planners had hoped

--critics argued that the bombing of electric power had "contributed to" 70,000–90,000 postwar civilian deaths above normal mortality rates over the period April–December 1991—principally because of the lack of electricity in Iraq for water purification and sewage treatment following the cease-fire

-pg. 277: --The political outcome turned out to be something that no one foresaw. Saddam Hussein both retained power and continued to defy the United Nations, thereby causing the continuation of economic sanctions that pre-vented Coalition assistance in reconstruction or humanitarian relief. To attribute responsibility for Iraq’s increased mortality rate in the aftermath of a major military defeat solely, or even primarily, to the damage inflicted on Iraq’s electric-power system ignores the Iraqi government’s responsibility for its own prewar and postwar decisions.

--strikes against refining capacity appear to have been considerably more effective than those directed against stores of refined products that could be put to military use. The CIA eventually concluded that Coalition air strikes had rendered more than 90 percent of Iraq’s petroleum refining capacity inoperative…given the small level of effort expended to disable over 90 percent of Iraq’s refinery capacity, this aspect of the air campaign appears to have been both highly leveraged and effective.

-pg. 283: --Strategic air attacks were in some cases less effective than air planners had hoped for or believed, as in the case of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program—by mid-1992, for example, UN Security Council inspection teams had identified and destroyed more of Iraq’s nuclear missile programs than had the air campaign.⁷⁰ In other cases, such as that of Iraq’s electrical power system, the Coalition met its immediate military objectives. In yet other cases such as the L and CCC target categories, effectiveness cannot be precisely estimated.

--The planners of air attacks against the Iraqi army recognized the important status of the Republican Guard units, but those forces proved a difficult target. They were singled out as a center of gravity for the part they played as the strategic reserve in the Iraqi ground scheme of maneuver and for their political role as defender of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

-pg. 302-303: --the extraordinarily lopsided quality of the war in general and of the air campaign in particular has led a number of observers to conclude that the war’s conduct and outcome augur a revolution in the conduct of war, a transformation of warfare itself.

I perceive this question as another way to ask: Was Desert Storm a Revolution in Warfare?, which conveniently, was the title of the last Keaney & Cohen reading. So this answer comes mostly from that reading:

…the extraordinarily lopsided quality of the (Gulf) war in general and of the air campaign in particular has led a number of observers to conclude that the war’s conduct and outcome augur a revolution in the conduct of war, a transformation of warfare itself. The popular arguments for this conclusion have taken two forms. The first sees the Gulf War as evidence that technology has finally enabled airmen to fulfill the expectations that air power advocates advanced in the 1920s and 1930s. Air power proponents such as Giulio Douhet and Billy Mitchell had described the things that air power could achieve in theory, but until the Gulf War, air forces lacked the "tools and systems capable of achieving them" in practice.¹ The second line of argument interprets Desert Storm as confirming the decade-old Soviet prediction of an impending "military-technical revolution" driven by advances in micro-electronics, automated decision-support systems, telecommunications, satellite and other advanced sensors, lasers, and, especially, non-nuclear munitions so accurate and lethal that they could wreak levels of military damage comparable to those attainable with tactical nuclear weapons.²

Kearny & Cohen looked at both sides of this question. Although their article was not confined to the Air Force, they felt that some events and developments from the Gulf War did tend to point towards the Air Force "doing business in a new and different way."

Although there were many aspects of Gulf War operations that were not wholly new, such as target set categories that were essentially the same as those used in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, Suppression of enemy Air Defenses (SEAD), precision munitions (believe it or not, some were used during the Linebacker operations), etc., the differences arose in subtle ways such as:

Targeting: the emphasis on targeting national-level leadership and telecommunications from the outset, rather than vital elements in enemy war production as had been the focus of the Combined Bomber Offensive of World War II.

SEAD: The intimate cooperation of aircraft from different Services and nations in this effort also represented something of a departure from the past and testified to the benefit of centralized planning under a Joint Force Air Component Commander (JFACC).

Precision munitions: it was the intensity of the operation more than the technology employed that represented a departure. Desert Storm saw in 6 weeks the dropping of more than double the number of laser-guided bombs released over North Vietnam in 9 months. Aircraft attacked a much broader range of targets than in the Linebacker operations, prosecuted the bulk of the attacks with these munitions at night rather than in the daytime, and used precision-guided missiles (most notably some 5,400 Maverick anti-armor missiles and more than 2,000 HARM antiradar missiles) more extensively than ever before. Again, the war saw qualitative rather than a quantitative change in weapons employment.

Bottom line: The Air Force can be seen as moving towards doing business in a new and different way--but whether that constitutes a revolution in warfare remains to be seen. It was, after all, only one war. In Keaney & Cohen’s words: Did Desert Storm constitute a revolution in the nature or conduct of war? At a distance of two years and after careful scrutiny of the evidence, some of the aspects of the war that seemed most dramatic at the time appear less so than they did in the immediate afterglow of one of the most one-sided campaigns in military history. Despite the talk of Iraq possessing the fourth largest army in the world, the fact remains that in this war a minor power found itself confronted by the full weight of the world’s sole superpower, amply and ably aided by the forces of its key allies. While the overall outcome—the ejection of Iraqi forces from Kuwait—was likely from the moment the war began, the cost and longer term consequences were not.

True revolutions in war may take decades and require not merely new technologies but new forms of organization and behavior to mature. It is probably too soon to conclude without reservation that we have entered a new era of warfare. But as we consider the war, some signposts of change surely stand out. Military planners and organizations will wish to reflect on the undoubted departures made during the Gulf War for some time to come. But whether the signposts identified here really point down paths very different from those the armed forces of the United States have been down before will depend on the future actions of the travelers themselves. The ingredients for a transformation of war may well have become visible in the Gulf War, but if a revolution is to occur someone will have to make it.