Airpower, Afghanistan, and the Future of Warfare: An Alternative View - Assessing the Air-Ground Relationship, Precision Strike, Change in Land Combat, Force Intensification, Doctrine Impact

This excellent report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. The "Future of Warfare" means increasing the emphasis on air support to the joint fight. The USAF continues to promote the importance of air superiority, acquiring aircraft and training pilots to attain air dominance. American Airmen do not want a long engagement to gain air superiority in the event of battle with a major power. On the other hand, American air-power has reached new levels of effectiveness with night-and-day, all-weather, stealth, and precision bombing sustained with surprisingly sensitive surveillance-and-reconnaissance capabilities for target identification and battle damage assessment. The enforcement of the "no-fly zones" over Iraq, known as Operations Northern and Southern Watch, during the 1990s—as well as the wars in Bosnia, Operation Allied Force in 1999; in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001; and in Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003—highlighted the singular effectiveness of airpower to predominate in some joint and combined forms of war. Lt Col Craig D. Wills examines this rather new application of airpower in the long-running history of direct support of ground-combat operations—an activity long declared by thoughtful Airmen as doctrinally unsuitable for airpower. Now it seems that this air support to ground forces can be considered a core mission function.

Wills maintains that the twentieth-century argument between air and ground proponents has changed significantly since the Gulf War and that it comes down to the relative importance of the ground or air in the mix. It is more than just using air as a supporting component to the ground forces—if this is true, current force organization and employment are adequate. However, if the air predominates in combat operations, then, as Wills puts it in his first chapter, joint-operations doctrine needs to be rethought. A changed balance "will affect the military at every level . . . force structure, organization, weapons acquisition, doctrine, and training".