Lessons from the first century of air warfare

Contemporary Review, Dec, 2003 by A.D. Harvey

All sustained strategic bombing campaigns, moreover, depend on a disproportion between the economic resources of the attacking and defending sides. It was essentially sheer weight of numbers that enabled the USAAF and RAF, despite mortifying losses, to overwhelm German day and night defences in 1943-45. No doubt it was an error on the Germans' part not to invest more heavily in air crew training and the mass-production of night fighters at an earlier stage, but they were heavily committed to a losing war on the Eastern Front throughout the Anglo-American strategic air offensive. Similarly it was shortages of material resources as much as lack of forward planning which caused the Japanese to have insufficient numbers of 120 mm anti-aircraft guns, high-altitude fighters and night fighters with airborne radar to confront America's B-29s when they began their attacks in 1944. It is possible that the effectiveness of the B-52 raids in Afghanistan derived almost entirely from the demoralization resulting from being attacked by an enemy whom one lacked any means of striking back at: in many ways the air assault in Afghanistan in 2001 was simply an upscaling of the RAF's 'police' campaign against the recalcitrant villagers in Iraq in the 1920s. On the other hand well-equipped air defences can be a serious worry for an attacking air force, as in the Schweinfurt (17 August 1943) and Nuremberg (30 March 1944) raids and over Hanoi in December 1972. One should be very careful of the lessons to be learnt from using a powerful air force to attack the cities of a country that lacks the military resources to defend itself: throughout history the most serious wars have been between nations that were more or less evenly matched.

4. Air Defence

As already pointed out, Germany in 1943-45 was essentially overwhelmed quantitatively in a race for production, though it also failed to overtake the British in their qualitative lead in electronic devices: but there had been no way Germany was strong or productive enough to overwhelm British defences in 1940-41. Obviously some weapon systems are more effective than others, but the efficaciousness of air defence measures depend basically on the gap between the technological/industrial investment and output of the competing sides.

It might be noted that bombing campaigns that depend on secondary missions to suppress anti-aircraft artillery or surface-to-air missiles, which appear to be a feature of Allied operations in the Gulf, imply a huge preponderance of strength on the attacking side. Where the two sides are equally matched missions to suppress enemy air defences are likely to be very costly.

In a short campaign between forces unevenly matched in terms of technological skills and investment, the stronger side might suffer significant losses as a result of the weaker side making ingenious use of cheaper weaponry. An instance of this is the employment of grenade-launchers against American helicopters in Somalia in October 1993, as well as in the last few weeks in Iraq. In the long term it will always be possible to improvise tactics for employment against improvised weapons but there is no escaping from the basic fact about multi-million dollar aircraft: if they can fly they can crash.