troops. A sailor will often have a better understanding of airpower, because he thinks in terms that are theater wide and involve maneuver as an essential element. But the simple truth that too many soldiers and sailors ignore is that they cannot maneuver, prevail in battle, or even survive if they are subject to attack from powerful air elements. Likewise, their success in battle is facilitated increasingly by airpower; and in some instances, such as the Kosovo campaign, airpower is the only element required. This a bitter pill for some land and sea advocates to swallow; they work hard at belittling airpower and at marginalizing those who seek to understand better how we should fight in the future.
If airmen have a problem, it is that too often they fail to understand the needs and doctrines of their land and sea counterparts.
It is incumbent on airmen to understand and appreciate how land, sea, and now space warriors see their respective worlds and how they believe they should employ military power. This is because airpower has become the enabling force for all forms of military power, whether it is providing air cover for ships, close air support for embattled troops, or platforms that carry sensors to detect the enemy moving to battle or hiding in urban areas, or simply by providing the means for rapid movement of men and equipment. Before airpower came of age, armies and navies were created to fight their counterparts. After the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkans, it is apparent that the employment of military force has become much more complex, and must be thoroughly integrated. Most importantly, this integration must come with a view that exceeds the narrow visions solely of land, sea, air, or space advocates. Transformation is about breaking away from outmoded doctrines and challenging the intellectual capabilities of those who plan and execute military operations.
We have made some advances in transforming military capabilities and operations. In Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, close coordination between air and land forces allowed the defeat of a large, well-equipped force by a smaller less heavily armed coalition made up of U.S. Special Forces supporting the forces of local warlords. This new model was successfully expanded in Operation Iraqi Freedom, when an airman, Lieutenant General Buzz Mosley, commanded air and land elements used to keep the Iraqi Army off balance in the desert expanses of western Iraq. This broke the tradition — or perhaps myth — that only leaders with experience as soldiers could command land forces.
Elsewhere in Iraq, land commanders with far less experience employing airpower sent a large force of Apache gunships against Iraqi divisions defending the southern approach to Baghdad. Because they did not understand how to employ these elements, the raid was unsuccessful, and all the gun-ships were hit with ground- to-air fire, while inflicting little or no damage on the Iraqi tanks and artillery. Most airmen would have known that the helicopters needed fixed-wing support to suppress the enemy antiaircraft fire and to gain the air superiority needed for the slow-moving helicopters to survive.
This lack of appreciation and understanding underscores the reasons behind the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in the 1980s, and the Rumsfeld Transformation efforts after the turn of the millennium. Transformation took the joint team approach inherent in the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reform Act to new levels of intensity.
COMMAND AND CONTROL
In every major military operation since the Vietnam War, U.S. forces have operated as a joint force. Yet problems remained, primarily in the areas referred to as command and control. In military terms, “command” often translates to mean ownership; “control” tracks what a force is doing and how commands are relayed. The underlying basis for debates about who has command is that previously noted failure of land, sea, air, or space elements to trust one another.
If I am a land commander and I have command of airpower, then I know it will be there when my land forces need support. Unfortunately, this attitude may actually be shortsighted, for the airpower may be used to destroy the enemy attackers even before they can start to engage the friendly land forces. In Desert Storm the land forces’ surface-to-air radar-guided Patriot missiles were placed under my command as the air-component commander. My job was to make sure no Iraqi aircraft could drop bombs on our Coalition ground forces.
But in the second war in Iraq, owing in large measure to the cruise missile threat posed by Iraq, the land commander retained control of these weapons. In the event, the cruise missile launch sites were quickly overrun in the opening days of the war, and the Iraqi Air Force, having learned its lesson in 1991, did not challenge our air superiority team of radars and fighter aircraft. Many have concluded — given the nature of the threat and the tragic mistakes resulting from the kind of control in place — that the air-component commander, General Mosley, should have been given command of the Patriots. If that had been the case, it is doubtful that the Patriots would have shot down two allied aircraft by mistake, killing their crews. Another time, because of confusion over the rules of engagement and faulty operations by Patriot crews, a defense-suppression F-16 armed with radar homing missiles destroyed a Patriot radar when it illuminated the aircraft. Fortunately, no one on the ground was injured.
Because land forces often still believe they are the main element in the battle and therefore must own all other elements deployed to the fight, the issue of command is still argued strenuously — especially by older officers. Younger officers, however, are much more attuned to how best to organize efficiently and to coordinate land, sea, air, and space operations on a trust not ownership basis. On those occasions when the Services do have command issues, the effects are likely to be worse when the forces of other nations are brought together with ours.
Because they do not require stringent command or ownership arrangements to accomplish their missions, air and sea forces normally find it easy to operate together. Land forces, however, normally do require stringent command arrangements, and as a result geographical separation is used to resolve difficult command issues. This works in wars with orderly, linear battle lines. But it cannot work in modern wars where the battlefield is increasingly chaotic and high-speed maneuver takes the place of orderly arrangements of forces. The maintenance of order inhibits speed, which is now the vital element in achieving dominance over your enemy. Furthermore, in future wars like those in Kosovo and Afghanistan, where coalition ground forces are of greater importance than those of the United States, command of U.S. ground forces may be delegated to foreign generals… a situation our military has forcefully resisted since Pershing led the American Expeditionary Force in 1917.
The command aspects of warfare will continue to challenge our coalition military and political leaders as each new conflict is addressed. The control of military operations is also fraught with issues that must be resolved.
In every war since Vietnam, control of air operations has relied on capabilities fielded by the United States. During Desert Storm our allies were collocated with U.S. Air Force squadrons so that our communications and computer systems were available for all the Coalition partners’ use. This is how we transmitted the Air Tasking Order and received the intelligence from postmission debriefings. In the air, control nodes included the E-3 Airborne Warning And Control System (AWACS) aircraft that provided traffic control, information updates, and the means for the Tactical Air Control Center to recall or re-task individual sorties. All Coalition aircraft were equipped with Identification Friend or Foe, IFF, transponders… although only U.S. forces had the classified coded devices needed to provide absolute identification of friendly aircraft. However, since the air component commander had weapons- release control of the radar-guided surface-to-air missiles and air-to-air fighters, the coded signals were not needed and no friendly aircraft were shot down. Contrast this with the second Iraq war, where a British Tornado and a U.S. F/A-18 were downed by our own Patriot missiles operating under control of the ground forces, and you can see clearly why having good control of air operations capabilities is critical.
Command and control of air operations extends into all aspects of the battle. Due to the potential for killing our own troops, close air support of ground forces requires exacting control measures. In both Iraq wars and in Afghanistan, our own air attacks caused the needless deaths of U.S. and Coalition forces. The two most frequent errors: either the attacking pilot misidentifies our forces, or our forces on the ground provide the pilot with the wrong target coordinates. But a new problem was encountered in Afghanistan, when troops on the ground provided the attacking pilot with their own location rather than that of the Taliban fighters they were trying to target. This came about because they misunderstood how the laser-ranging Global Positioning Satellite system processed its information. They took readings on the enemy position, but transmitted their own location to the attacking pilot, who programmed his guided weapons with the friendly position coordinates and fired.
In this age of advanced information systems and precision munitions, we obviously must increase our ability to closely control air operations. Unfortunately, command and control issues are not always well understood. Or
