Airpower on the Rise?

We’ve covered here before the inter-service debate over the role of airpower in counterinsurgency operations. For some background information, check out this article in Air Force magazine, and this post at Small Wars Journal. There seemed to be a pretty good consensus that the counterinsurgency model laid out by the Petraeus Doctrine would see airpower demoted to a supporting role–transport, surveillance, reconnaissance, but only very rarely direct engagement with the enemy. Last month David Kilcullen, COIN adviser to General Petraeus, spoke on the issues surrounding this debate:

I think here in Iraq, there’s a number of sort of airpower writ-large functions–air reconnaissance very important, aerial surveillance, both by manned and unmanned vehicles, is critical, it gives us this, if you like, unblinking eye that allows us to understand what’s going on in the environment; the use of fast air combat power for interdiction and strike is important, it’s more important in desert areas and underpopulated rural areas than it is in cluttered, sort of target-rich environments like in cities, where you can really do a lot of damage to the civilian population. So we don’t tend to use airpower heavily inside cities. Having said that, if we do need to, we certainly do draw on that capability. And we do tend to use sort of cannon and direct strafing activity, rather than necessarily going straight for the kill-box approach, where you deluge an area in high-explosive. I think the other really important function is transport and mobility….

That comment seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Air Force that the new team in Baghdad did not see airpower as critical to combat operations there. But now the Tank points to this story from the AP: