Rescuing the military

National Review, Feb 14, 1986 by Richard Brookhiser

Colonel Kross took up these issues in his counter-blast, Military Reform: The High-Tech Debate in Tactical Air Forces (1985). The F-86, he notes, was in its day an expensive and "advanced' aircraft; its maneuverability was a result of new hydraulic flight controls. The reformers have fudged its kill rate; against Soviet pilots in the early days of the war, it achieved a margin of just under five to one, comparable to the kill rates of phases of the Vietnam War. There was a "readiness nadir' in the Seventies, but it was exacerbated by such factors as the price of oil, and maintenance crews' lack of experience with the new machines. Now, thanks in part to the reformers' hollering, readiness is improving. Finally, Kross argues, if the consensus for sustained defense spending is "fragile,' the reformers themselves bear a share of the blame.

A battle as bitter as any dogfight rages over the interpretation of an exercise conducted at Nellis Air Force Base in 1977 and 1978. The exercise, which had one of those winning military acronyms (AIMVAL/ACEVAL), pitted a force of "complex' planes--including F-16s and their even more complicated cousins, F-15s--against the Air Force's budget models--F-5s. The reformers tout the exercise as a humiliation of complexity. One on one, the glamor planes triumphed. But when the match-ups went to four on four --closer to actual dogfight conditions--the differences (in Fallows's words) "washed out.' No fair, says Kross; the conditions of the test imposed numerous unrealistic restrictions: all daylight flying; no attacks on "enemy' airfields; no surface-to-air missiles; above all, no beyond-visual-range identification permitted.

It is nearly impossible for a civilian whose experience of airplanes is limited to the Eastern Shuttle to evaluate these claims and counterclaims. Kross, however, makes a compelling point: that the establishment attempts to "think . . . beyond the limits of the visual dogfight.' The dogfight itself, Kross argues, has expanded. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, its F-15s and F-16s had a kill rate against Syrian pilots of 85 to one. Naturally, much of that mind-boggling margin was due to the difference in skill between Israelis and Syrians. But the Israelis also used beyond-visual-range radar and surveillance to set up their encounters. The dogfight isn't everything. Groundfire typically accounts for nine-tenths of all kills; suppressing it, Kross argues, requires planes armed with "smart' weapons (anathema to reformers). Enemies, finally, do not always oblige by attacking in sunny skies; during the classic badweather engagement, the Battle of the Bulge, Allied planes averaged one sortie per week.

The struggle over the fighter (like the struggles over dozens of other weapons, from the main battle tank to the aircraft carrier) is not simply a question of hardware or price tags. The question of the fighter is important to the military-reform debate because the early reformers themselves picked it as the clearest example of the rightness of their criticisms of Pentagon procedure. If the high-tech/ low-tech-fighter question turns out to be much less clear-cut than the reformers say it is, that is because it is in fact not ultimately a question of hardware or price tags. There will be times when only a clutch of F-15s and F-16s can do the job; times that require a swarm of F-5s. The proper mix of planes is, in other words, a strategic question--and a debatable one.