Since World War II, air power has been the distinctively American way of war. Conversely, the maturation of air power has been coincidental with the rise of the United States has history’s “sole superpower.” Yet now the future supremacy of American air power is an open question. Not so long ago this seemed inconceivable. In the wake of Operation Desert Storm, the Air Force commissioned Eliot Cohen, head of the strategy department at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, to lead the “Gulf War Air Power Survey,” in conscious imitation of the bombing surveys of World War II. Cohen disappointed the service’s most zealous enthusiasts, but nevertheless reported in a landmark article in Foreign Affairs: “No other nation on Earth has a comparable power, nor will any country accumulate anything like it, or even the means to neutralize it, for at least a decade and probably much longer.” There was, he concluded, a “mystique of U.S. air power.” So what’s gone wrong? To begin with, our enemies, current and potential, have taken note and taken steps particularly to try to neutralize the effects of American air power. The closest student has been the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Almost since the ink was dry on Cohen’s essay, the PLA has both been devising ways to limit the U.S. ability to use its air power in East Asia. The Chinese have invested heavily in long range, land-based air defenses, but perhaps the most challenging Chinese capabilities are those that attempt to restrict American access to air bases in the region or to effectively employ carrier-based aviation. The prime mission for China’s growing arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles is to target airfields around the region — especially those in Japan — and, in concert with the Chinese navy’s expanding submarine force, hold U.S. carriers at risk. On a lesser but still worrisome scale, Iran has made similar investments with Israel as well as the United States in mind. Its air defenses will soon make it very difficult for Israel to target its nuclear facilities, which also have been dispersed and hardened to diminish their vulnerability to airstrikes. Second of all, U.S. armed forces find themselves embroiled in wars that naturally dissipate the effects of air power. Attacking irregular enemies from the air is inevitably a whack-a-mole enterprise. Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants are hard to find and they don’t sit still for long. When we can find prime targets, such as Abu Musab al Zarqawi in Iraq or Baitullah Meshud just recently in Pakistan, they prove to be of lesser and brief value; indeed, the air power concept of “leadership” or “high value” targets needs rethinking. Even if we were lucky enough to at last kill bin Laden, it’s getting harder to argue that this would produce anything like a decisive effect in the so-called “long war.” A corollary is that the amazing precision of American air power has become something of a liability and an addiction: Precision air power has oriented our military and our strategy making around the finely measured application of force in an almost self-defeating paradox. Even Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan, as steely-eyed a warrior as can be imagined, has put increasing restrictions on air power, lest the public relations blow-back exceed the value of killing Taliban. Cohen’s air power prescription — “When presidents use it, they should either hurl it with devastating lethality against a few targets or extensively enough to cause sharp and lasting pain” — would seem to be too heavy a medicine for today’s sensibility. Finally, and perhaps most critically, the United States has failed to invest enough to preserve the mystique of dominant air power. Rebecca Grant of the Lexington Institute, one of the foremost experts on the subject, has itemized the decline of the U.S. Air Force in several recent articles. In sum, it’s been “all downhill” since Desert Storm: The size of the fleet is much reduced and much older, and new aircraft too few. The termination of the F-22 Raptor and the delay and reduction in the numbers of F-35 mean that, as Grant puts it, America’s “air dominance plan could not be deader than it is at this moment.” But while the Obama administration is putting the final nails in the coffin, the wasting illness of U.S. air power has been in the making through the Clinton and Bush II years. Cohen concluded his survey with the observation that it was “in the American interest to retain” the mystique, but we have let it evaporate.
Thomas Donnelly, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is one of four defense experts who contribute monthly columns to The Washington Examiner.
