Developing joint counterinsurgency doctrine: an airman's perspective

Joint Force Quarterly, April, 2008 by Charles J. Dunlap, Jr.

Furthermore, for Airmen, strategic thinking encompasses the aim of achieving victory without first defeating the enemy's fielded military capability. Put a different way (especially apt for the COIN operations conducted by American troops), it means defeating the enemy's military capability without excessive reliance upon the close fight (that is, the fight so costly in human terms that it can generate intractable political issues).

Strategic, airminded thinking can also mean developing ways of pacifying the host-nation population that avoid the potential difficulties arising from excessive interaction by American troops with an Iraqi population that resents them as occupiers.

Officially, the definition of strategic air warfare speaks about the "progressive destruction and disintegration of the enemy's war-making capacity to a point where the enemy no longer retains the ability or the will to wage war." In COIN, destroying an enemy's warmaking capacity is a complex, multilayered task, but the point is that an Airman's perspective on doing so would not necessarily require the tactical, "close" engagement by ground forces FM 3-24 favors. In fact, it may involve nonkinetic means employed from afar.

Not only do Airmen naturally look for opportunities to neutralize the enemy from afar, but they also instinctively look for ways to affirmatively frustrate the adversary's opportunity for the close fight. In insurgencies, the close fight that FM 3-24 supports usually optimizes the adversary's odds because the ground dimension is typically the only one in which the insurgent can fight symmetrically. Airmen prefer to deny the enemy the chance to fight in the way he prefers, or even on more or less equal terms.

Airmen seek engagement dominance, which denies an adversary the opportunity to bring his weapons to bear. As a matter of doctrine, therefore, Airmen first seek to achieve air superiority so that airpower's many capabilities can be employed with impunity. Generally speaking, American airpower achieves such dominance in COIN situations. Because insurgents are often (albeit not always) helpless against U.S. airpower--and especially fixed-wing airpower--it represents a unique and powerful kind of asymmetric warfare that favors the United States, an advantage an effective COIN doctrine must exploit.

U.S. airpower allows Airmen to control their domains to a far greater degree than Soldiers have been able to achieve on the surface dimension (particularly in Iraq). Much of the reason for the worldwide U.S. superiority in airpower is a result of top-quality equipment. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Airmen are inclined toward high technology.

The Technological Inclination. One of the most pervasive if inexplicable staples of COIN literature (including FM 3-24) is an attitude toward technology that frequently ranges from overlooked to misunderstood to outright antagonistic. Much of this antipathy is aimed directly at airpower. Typical of the latter perspective is Air War College Professor Jeffrey Record's essay describing the "American Way of War" as "obsessed" with a technology "mania" that is "counterproductive" in COIN. (26) He explicitly cites the air weapon as the "most notable" cause of the counterproductivity: