War Without Rules by Robert Spalding

Author:Robert Spalding [Spalding, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

GOING FURTHER THAN AIR-LAND BATTLE

. . . The actual battlefield conditions were quite a bit different from what people had envisioned beforehand. “Desert Storm” was basically an “all-air,” no-“ground” campaign that lasted several dozen days, and they barely got to use “Desert Sword,” which was displayed at the last moment, including that beautiful “left hook,” for only 100 hours before wrapping things up in a huff. The ground war . . . was like a concerto which winds up hastily after the first movement is played. Douhet’s [Italian Gen. Giulio Douhet, air war theorist in the 1920s] prediction that “the battlefield in the air will be the decisive one” seems to have achieved belated confirmation. However, everything that happened in the air over the Gulf far exceeded the imagination of this proponent of achieving victory through the air. Whether in Kuwait or Iraq, none of the air combat involved gallant duels for air supremacy, but represented an integrated air campaign that blended all the combat operations, such as reconnaissance, early-warning, bombing, dogfights, communications, electronic strikes, and command and control, etc., together, and it also included the struggle for and occupation of outer space and cyberspace.

At this point, the Americans who proposed the “Air-land battle” concept have already gone quite a bit further than Douhet, but even so, they will still have to wait several years before they understand that, once they resort to the theory of integrated operations in real combat, the scope will go far beyond what they initially envisioned, extending over a broad and all-inclusive range that covers the ground, sea, air, space, and cyber realms. . . . [The Gulf War] is destined to become the starting point for the theory of “omni-dimensional” combat proposed by the elite of the U.S Army when they suddenly woke up. . . .

Not only that, but the “air tasking order” also provided a model for a kind of organizational command for all subsequent combat operations. One “order” represented an optimal scheme for combining the combat forces among the service arms, and the complexity and success of its trans-national combinations was where it really shone. In this respect alone, it was already far beyond the range of what was envisioned by the architects of the “Air-land battle” theory. This is to say that the U.S. unintentionally ushered the God of War into an open area in which she had never set foot.

This section and the next explain the colonels’ conclusion that air war has become dominant over land war, just as Douhet had predicted. In fact, the suddenness of air power’s dramatic success relative to land power caught the American military establishment by surprise. We spent the years after Desert Storm failing to appreciate the new value of air power—not merely in direct combat but also in what the colonels call “communications, electronic strikes, . . . outer space and cyberspace”—all of which are key areas of unrestricted warfare. While the United States saw the success of air power in Desert

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