Precision firepower: smart bombs, dumb strategy

Military Review, July-August, 2003 by Timothy R. Reese

The victor is the one who renders his enemy helpless to resist and thereby compels him to do the victor's bidding. The presence of ground forces is required to prevent the enemy from evading the effects of firepower, from passively resisting, or from restoring his willpower when the destruction from above stops. This requires the artful combination of air and naval firepower with landpower. Precision firepower is not a technological silver bullet for every strategic objective. We should not confuse the means of war for its end. Smart bombs and brilliant weapons alone do not make good strategy.

NOTES

(1.) T.R. Fehrenbeck, This Kind of War (New York: MacMillan, 1963), 427.

(2.) John Keegan. London Daily Telegraph, 6 June 1999.

(3.) Richard P. Hallion, Storm Over Iraq: Air Power and the Gulf War (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1992), 254.

(4.) USAF strategist Phillip S. Meilinger suggests that Guilio Douhet's call for a single defense arm headed by an air arm might have been proven correct after Operation Desert Storm. See Meilinger, "Giulio Douhet and tee Origins of Airpower Theory," in The Paths of Heaven: The Evolution of Airpower Theory (Montgomery, AL: Air university Press, 1997). See also Air Force Doctrine Document (AFDD) 1, Air Force Basic Doctrine (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office [GPO], September 1997), 12-13, 51, 61.

(5.) John A. Warden, "The Enemy as a System," Airpower Journal 9 (Spring 1995): 41-65.

(6.) Ibid.

(7.) AFDD 1, 30. See also AFDD 2, Organization and Employment of Aerospace Power (Washington, DC: GPO, 17 February 2000), chap. 1.

(8.) AFDD 1, 30.

(9.) Ibid., 51.

(10.) Price T. Bingham. "Transforming Warfare with Effects-Based Joint Operations," Aerospace Power Journal 15 (Swing 2001): 59. The Air Force has also introduced EBO as a way to measure the dollar-cost effectiveness of weapons systems and platforms. See Frank Wofle, "Air Force Officials to Emphasize Effects-Based Operations in QDR," Defense Daily 209 (18 January 2002): 1.

(11.) Jeffrey J. Becker, "Rapid Decisive Operations as Joint Operational Concept," Army 2 (February 2002): 50. For the base RDO document, see U.S. Joint Forces Command A Concept for Rapid Decisive Operations (Norfolk, VA: GPO, Final Draft, 25 October 2001).

(12.) B.H. Liddell-Hart, Strategy New York: Doubleday, 1967) 335. This is to distinguish military strategy from grand strategy, which can be defined as synchronizing the political, economic, information, and military instruments of power to achieve the Nation's policy objectives.

(13.) Certainly not all precision-firepower advocates will accept this definition. There are many terms in this debate: "precision strike," "precision engagement," "global attack," "EBO operations," and "three-dimensional war," to cite some. Each has its own set of principles and definitions. "Presicion firepower" seems to best capture the issue's essence. For a discussion of the whole genre, see Daniel Goure and Christopher M. Szara, ads., Air and Space Power in the New Millennium (Washington, DC: Center for Strategical and International Studies (CSIS), 1997). For strategists who are somewhat less certain of precision firepower's ability to achieve strategic results, see Benjamin S. Lambeth, The Transformation of American Air Power: A Rand Research Study (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Airpower and Coercion in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Jeffery A. Jackson, "Globe Attack and Precision Strike," in Air and Space Power in the New Millennium (Washington, DC: CSIS, 1997).