An Air-Campaign Primer

The American-Israeli war with Iran has primarily taken the form of an air campaign, a very different mode of war than ground operations—one with its own goals, strengths, and limitations. After the previous independent air campaign of this kind, in the 1991 Gulf War, I led the U.S. Air Force’s assessment of the effort, the Gulf War Air Power Survey. The present campaign differs in important respects, but the same kind of questions posed then can help make sense of what we’re seeing now.

Airpower is peculiar in many ways. An old saw has it that a bomber is a thunderbolt, contained in an eggshell, invisibly tethered to a base. It captures some important truths: Aircraft can deliver tremendous violence from a platform that is intrinsically vulnerable, and that requires a well-protected base and skilled maintenance staff, the unsung heroes of air operations. More than that, airpower is unusual: Unlike land or sea forces, airplanes can linger (loiter is the technical term) over a target for only a brief period of time. Simultaneously, however, it is enormously flexible. Airpower can be massed over one target today and over another hundreds of miles away tomorrow.

These qualities of concentration, speed, and flexibility have shaped how air forces—above all the few air forces capable of waging air campaigns—think about airpower. Most air forces are capable of raids, intense but brief assaults lasting a few hours. Very few are capable of thinking about campaigns, meaning sustained air attacks over a period of weeks or months intended to achieve large and lasting effects on the ground. The United States Air Force is the preeminent air force of that kind.

[Tom Nichols: Operational excellence, strategic incompetence]

Even for the United States, air campaigns have been relatively rare. During World War II, the bomber offensives against Germany and Japan occurred in tandem with extensive operations on land and sea and competed with them for scarce resources. In Korea and Vietnam, most air operations aimed to support troops in contact with the enemy, either directly (dropping bombs on enemy infantry engaging our troops) or indirectly (attacking their supply lines). Independent air campaigns against industrial production or rear areas such as ports have had mixed results. The 1991 Gulf War, with 38 days of air operations preceding a four-day ground offensive, was unusual. Even then, most of the flying done by the United States and its allies was directed against Iraqi forces, particularly those deployed along the Kuwaiti border, and only a small fraction went against so-called strategic targets in Iraq, such as telecommunications, electricity, or its nuclear program.

From the American point of view, the present war is the first sustained air campaign since 1991. Operation Midnight Hammer, the one-day attack on Iran’s nuclear program, was essentially a large raid, an intense but brief set of attacks. In 2003, ground operations began at almost the same time as air operations. This is something different.

Air campaigns require centralized planning and decentralized execution. During World War II, airmen fought for and eventually won the ability to direct air operations in a centralized way, rather than parceling out aircraft to support ground units. Other services tried (and still try) to preserve control over their own airplanes and attack helicopters, but the trend over time has been to put more control in the hands of a single joint-force air-component commander (JFACC), who is usually an Air Force officer.

Air operations, particularly on this scale, are managed through a daily air-tasking order. The ATO can be adjusted as it is being executed, but it is essential to coordinate a large number of aircraft. It includes things such as times for takeoff, times on target (in the bombing business, getting somewhere too early is as bad as getting there too late), call signs and tracks for the airborne refueling tankers, frequencies for radio communication, bases to which aircraft should return, mission type, and, of course, target coordinates and ordnance loads. Such elaborate planning is essential for all kinds of reasons, including minimizing the chances of the kind of fratricidal fire that downed three American F-15s at the beginning of the current operation.

Planning is one thing, but execution is another matter. Attacks are conducted by so-called packages—groups of aircraft that may fly from different bases, and include those providing protection against enemy aircraft or surface-to-air missiles as well as those dropping bombs. The leader of a package may not even be the senior officer present but rather the most skilled aviator, and they can adjust to circumstances in the extraordinarily compressed period of time in which air attacks occur.

For air-campaign planners, the first order of business is destroying or at least neutralizing the enemy’s integrated air-defense system, or IADS. This means taking apart the network of radars and missiles that can track incoming aircraft and shoot them down. That is the work of the opening phase of an air campaign, one which is now pretty much over in Iran. After that, air-campaign planners go after target systems—in the current case, ballistic-missile launchers and storage sites, enemy naval forces, and regime headquarters.

What air campaigns can achieve depends not just on the nature of the enemy but also on rapidly evolving technologies, which makes drawing lessons from previous air campaigns difficult. Today, for example, almost all munitions dropped are guided. Precision weaponry first appeared in World War II with German and American radio-guided glide bombs but did not really come into its own until the first Gulf War, and even then such munitions were fewer in number, more primitive, and less accurate than the weapons deployed today.

The deployment of more sophisticated bombs and missiles is only one part of the picture. Unmanned aircraft can now loiter over a target for hours, or even days, and space-based observation is orders of magnitude more effective than it was in 1991. Command and control has changed as well. In 1991, the JFACC had only intermittent ability to monitor all of the air activity in the Iraq theater of war; full visibility of air assets is now routine. Adjusting the ATO digitally is much easier than it was in the days of printed orders. And now other kinds of long-range weapons—cruise and ballistic missiles, unmanned vehicles, and even attack helicopters—can be woven into a campaign.

The nature of air-campaign planning brings with it certain ways of thinking about war itself. Too often, airmen think of a campaign less in terms of strategy—using military power to achieve political ends—than as a matter of working one’s way through a “target deck” of thousands of things to blow up. The focus on progressing through the deck can substitute for careful thinking about the means of achieving political goals. The theory of victory may be merely assumed or simply missing.

[Karim Sadjadpour: Trump has lost the plot in Iran]

The indirect effects of air campaigns, for good and for ill, are unpredictable. Debates still rage about the bombing of Germany during World War II. On the one hand, it turned out that German production of aircraft, for example, went up until near the end of the war despite the bombing. On the other hand, the bomber offensive forced massive diversions of German industrial capacity to making air-defense weapons, and the bombing raids forced the Luftwaffe fighter force up into the air where Allied fighter planes could wear it down to the point that it played a negligible role in the ground campaign that followed the Normandy landings in 1944.

Finally, like all forms of military force, air power takes time to operate. A week into the war, it is clear that the Iranian IADS has been rendered ineffective, that the allied air forces have dramatically reduced but not eliminated Iran’s ability to launch ballistic missiles and drones, and that the regime has been forced by attacks on leadership targets to abandon centralized control and let local commanders act on their own. On Saturday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian apologized for attacks on neighboring states, blaming the breakdown in command. “Because our commanders and our leader lost their lives due to the brutal aggression, our armed forces, when there were no commanders present, acted on their own authority,” he said. (He later retracted the apology under pressure from hard-liners.)

The fog of war persists. The final element of any air campaign is the bomb- (or battle-) damage assessment, or BDA, which is a complicated art as much as it is a science, and it, too, takes time. We will not know the long-term results of this air campaign for quite a while. Unfortunately, however, for all the technological changes air power has seen in recent decades, our impatience to know, and our readiness to make snap judgments on scanty evidence, remain unaltered.