JULY/AUGUST AIRFORCEMAG.COMPhoto: SSgt. Dixie Trawick via National ArchivesUSAF airmen at
Aviano AB, Italy,
coordinate
aircraft
involved in
NATO air
strikes during
Operation
Deliberate
Force on Nov.
6, 1995. The
11-day action
consisted
almost entirely
of airpower
and imposed
a cease-fire
on the Serb
aggressors in
the Yugoslav
civil war.- The 11-day action consisted almost entirely of air-
power and imposed a cease fire on the Serb aggressors in
the Yugoslav civil war.
Meanwhile, the Army was showing discomfort with the
RMA and sought to discredit the effectiveness attributed
to airpower in the Gulf War.
“The recent air campaign against Iraqi forces gained
not a single one of the US or UN objectives in the Persian
Gulf,” said retired Gen. Frederick J. Kroesen of the Asso-
ciation of the US Army (AUSA) Institute of Land Warfare.
“Four days of land combat—aided immeasurably by the air
campaign—achieved every goal and victory.”
“Armies are the foundation of nearly all military forces,”
declared Maj. Gen. Jay M. Garner, assistant Army deputy
chief of staff for operations and plans. “Air forces and navies
are ‘add-ons’.”
Conversely, Gen. Ronald R. Fogleman, Air Force Chief of
Staff, said in February 1996 that “developments in recent
years have given hope that we are on the verge of introduc-
ing a new American way of war.”
Fogleman said the nation “has not only the opportunity,
but the obligation, to transition from a concept of anni-
hilation and attrition warfare” and “brute force-on-force
conflicts” to an “asymmetric force strategy” that could
“compel an adversary to do our will at the least cost to the
United States, in lives and resources.”
Among the factors making the new American way of war
possible, he said, were “the extended range, the precision, and
the lethality of modern weapon systems that are increasingly
leveraging and leveraged by an agile C4I [command, control,
communications, computers, and intelligence] capability that
enables war ghters to analyze, to act, and to assess before an
adversary has the capability to react.”
CONFIRMATION
“Joint Vision 2010,” published in July 1996 by the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, took a similar position. “Instead of relying on
massed forces and sequential operations, we will achieve
massed effects in other ways,” it said.
With precision targeting and longer range systems, it
continued, “we should be increasingly able to accomplish
the effects of mass—the necessary concentration of combat
power at the decisive time and place—with less need to
mass forces physically than in the past.”
That struck at the heart of the core capability of land
forces, and a JCS expansion of the vision statement in May
1997 went further. It specifically acknowledged a Revolution
in Military Affairs that promised to “transform traditional
ideas about maneuver, strike, protection, and logistics”
and possibly “a complete renovation of the conduct of war.”
The Quadrennial Defense Review, also in 1997, said
that the RMA would “fundamentally change the way US
forces fight.”
In the spring of 1999, Operation Allied Force in the Bal-
kans compelled the Serbs to withdraw from Kosovo and
accept the peace terms dictated by NATO. Airpower was
the only force engaged in the 78-day operation.
Nevertheless, that did not keep Army officers away
from a different explanation. At AUSA, Lt. Gen. Theodore
G. Stroup attributed the victory to the Kosovo Liberation
Army, which consisted of about 2,000 irregulars who had
been in action for only a few days with no visible results.
Army Gen. Wesley Clark, in overall command of the
NATO operation, said the decisive factor was not airpower
but rather pressure from the “planning and preparation
for ground operations” and the threat of a ground inva-
sion. In fact, NATO had no plans to invade Serbia, and no
land invasion could have been conducted for another six
months, if then.REVERSAL
The backlash was unrelenting. In November 1996, the
Army put out is own vision statement that said the contribu-
tion of land forces was “to make permanent the otherwise
transitory advantages achieved by air and naval forces.”
AUSA’s Kroesen said that “airpower is still a part-time
participant that cannot provide the final, decisive action
that wins wars.” Retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales