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Offensive Air Power, Strategic Bombing and Preparation for the Ground Offensive

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Offensive Air Power, Strategic Bombing and Preparation for the Ground Offensive GW-7 Air Offensive June 28, 2016 Page 481 Chapter Seven: Offensive Air Power, Strategic Bombing and Preparation for the Ground Offensive The offensive air campaign during the Gulf War was so successful that it raises important questions about the role that offensive air power can play in determining the outcome of future wars. The Gulf War was the first war where that air power was able to play a critical role in defeating a well-positioned ground force before supporting ground attacks began. It was also the first war in which aircraft had sufficiently advanced avionics and weapons to destroy large numbers of dug-in armor and artillery weapons Air power played a critical role before the ground war began. From January 24 until February 24, 1991, Coalition air forces were able to focus on destroying theater and military targets like the Iraqi ground forces in the Kuwaiti Theater of Operations (KTO), Iraq's elite Republican Guards units, its air bases and sheltered aircraft, and its hardened command and control facilities. At the same time they struck repeatedly at strategic targets like military supply depots and biological, chemical, and nuclear warfare facilities. Iraq's only ability to retaliate consisted of launching modified Scud missiles against targets in Saudi Arabia and Israel. By the time the ground war began, Iraqi ground forces had been hit by more than 40,000 attack sorties. While studies since the war indicate that these strikes were substantially less lethal than USCENTCOM estimated at the time of the war, the corrected US estimates still indicate that Coalition air power caused the desertion of as many as 84,000 Iraqi personnel, and destroyed 1,385 Iraqi tanks, 930 other armored vehicles, and 1,155 artillery pieces. They also indicate that air strikes severely damaged Iraq's nuclear reactor facilities, three chemical and biological weapons production facilities, and 11 storage facilities, 60% of Iraq's major command centers, 70% of its military communications, 125 ammunition storage revetments, 48 Iraqi naval vessels, and 75% of Iraq's electric power generating capability. It had cut Iraq's flow of supplies to the theater by up to 90%. As has been discussed in Chapters Four and Five, this achievement is particularly striking because the Gulf War exposed serious -- but correctable -- problems in the way that the US had trained for the AirLand battle and in many aspects of its C4I/BM capabilities. It is also striking because of the transitional nature of much of the technology used in the air offensive, and because of problems in the strategic bombing effort and attacks on Iraqi ground forces that also are not likely to be repeated in future wars. Copyright Anthony H. Cordesman, all rights reserved. GW-7 Air Offensive June 28, 2016 Page 482 It is important to preface any examination of the lessons of the air war, however, with several caveats. First, future wars may not involve a scenario in which air superiority can be achieved in a matter of days, and where air forces can conduct a battle of attrition throughout the battlefield and the enemy's homeland virtually without challenge. Second, the air war was fought over an open desert, although under difficult weather conditions. This makes the analysis of the individual trends and lessons in the offensive air campaign particularly important. While history does repeat itself with alarming frequency, such repetition is scarcely a basis for planning military forces and action. The Overall Structure of Coalition Offensive Air Power Experts on air power and different air forces within the Coalition have used a number of different terms to describe the ways in which air attacks were structured and offensive missions were categorized and executed. In broad terms, however, the Coalition's offensive air strikes fell into five major groups: (1) the air attacks designed to win air supremacy described in the previous chapter, (2) attacks on Iraq's Scud missiles and weapons of mass destruction which are described in Chapter Eleven, (3) air attacks on strategic civilian targets and military targets in the rear, (4) attacks on the forces in the KTO which were designed to prepare for the land battle, and (4) air strikes in support of the land battle.1 The overall structure of the Coalition's offensive air effort is summarized in Table 7.1, although such figures should be approached with caution. While percentages of sorties give a rough measure of the weight of effort, they say little about the quality of that effort. Hardened targets and targets deep inside Iraq were much harder to attack. Similarly, there is no real separation between civilian and military in modern war. Many C4 targets were military, as were many lines of communication (LOC) targets. The Coalition had considerable success in attacking all of these target categories during the Gulf War, and more success than air power achieved in previous wars. In each case, however, studies since the Gulf War have shown that air power did not reach the level of performance claimed during and immediately after the war, and that the Coalition experienced operational problems and complications. Some of the reasons for these problems have been covered in the previous discussion of intelligence, targeting, and battle damage assessment. This analysis focuses on lessons in terms of the effectiveness impact of the strategic bombing effort, the effort to attack Iraqi ground forces before the war, and air attacks on Iraqi ground forces during the conflict. Copyright Anthony H. Cordesman, all rights reserved. GW-7 Air Offensive June 28, 2016 Page 483 Table 7.1 UN Coalition Air Strikes by Mission During Desert Storm Type of Mission or Target Number of Strikes Flown Percent of Total Strategic - Largely Civilian Leadership 260 0.6 Electric Power 280 0.6 Oil/Refinery/Fuel 540 1.3 Telecoms/C4 580 1.4 LOCs 1,170 2.8 Total 2,830 6.7 Strategic - Largely Military Military Industry 970 2.3 Nuc/Chem/Bio 990 2.3 Scuds 1,460 3.5 Naval Targets 370 0.9 Total 3,790 9.0 Counter-Air Airfields 2,990 7.0 Air Defense (KARI) 630 1.5 Surface-to-Air Missiles 1,370 3.2 Total 4,990 11.8 Against Iraqi Ground Forces 23,430 55.5 Total Categorized by Mission 35,040 82.3 Uncategorized (Largely against ground forces) 7,200 17.1 Total 42,240 100% Note: Some statistics ignore the unallocated sorties, and produce different figures. There are unexplained errors in the source material, which talk about a total of 35,018 allocate sorties, and 5,660 which could not be categorized. Source: Adapted by the author from data in Eliot A. Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey: Volume II, Part II, p. 148. Airpower in Transition: The Role of Key Weapons and Technologies Technology played a critical role in shaping the effectiveness of offensive air power during the Gulf War, although it is difficult to put the impact of given technologies in perspective. The Gulf War involved the most advanced mix of technologies ever used in air warfare, but much of this technology was "transitional" in the sense that the US planned to acquire much more effective aircraft, avionics, and weapons in the future. While television coverage of the war often gave the impression that all of the air systems the Coalition employed were actually part of a high technology force, most Coalition offensive missions were flown by aircraft with avionics that had important limitations, and most mission Copyright Anthony H. Cordesman, all rights reserved. GW-7 Air Offensive June 28, 2016 Page 484 dropped unguided or "dumb" bombs. Even many of the aircraft that delivered precision munitions did not have the all of the highly sophisticated attack avionics or survivability necessary to achieve consistently accurate delivery of their weapons. As a result, any lessons drawn from the use of offensive air power during the Gulf War must be viewed from the perspective that the Gulf War occurred at time when offensive air technology was evolving towards much more sophisticated and capable forces. This was particularly true in the case of the US. Many of the C4I/BM systems, aircraft, and munitions that US air units used during the war were in the process of change when it occurred, and the war has since led the US to accelerate many of these changes. US air forces are already very different from the forces employed during the Gulf War. Other air forces -- including those of Britain and France are also making important changes in their offensive technology. In fact, the impact of the Gulf War in accelerating the transition to new offensive air technologies are equally important lessons of the war as the impact of any of the technologies actually employed during the conflict. No Aircraft is Smarter than its C4/BM system This transition is particularly important in terms of battle management capability. As Chapters Four and Five have shown, the Coalition had to use a C4I/BM system with many limitations. The US provided advanced capability to characterize and target radar and other emitters, but the C4I/BM systems available were not capable of transmitting much of this information with anything like the efficiency of systems under development. Imagery and SIGINT data rarely reached the combat unit in a useful form. Even the most advanced strike aircraft operated under the constraints imposed by the system's limits in "netting" and "connectivity". While the C4I/BM system used in the Gulf War was the most modern and effective system ever used in air warfare, critical gaps existed in theater communications and reconnaissance capability.
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