Allies and Airpower in Libya

Abstract

The 2011 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention in Libya was a success in several important respects: it helped topple Muammar Qaddafi's 42-year-old regime without the deployment of ground forces, with very low levels of collateral damage, and no NATO casualties. (1) The Libyan intervention exploited the synergy of precision airstrikes and local allies fighting on the ground, making the deployment of foreign ground forces unnecessary. The successful overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, following a similar strategy (but with a greater emphasis on Special Operations Forces (SOF)), led a number of observers and analysts to herald the coming of a new way of war, known as the (2) Proponents of the model point to its ability to achieve military success with a significantly lower cost in blood and national treasure than previous conventional operations, lt should be noted that success here refers to operations against the opponent's conventional forces, not to the target state's prospects for long-term stability. In this respect, the jury is still out on Libya, with the government struggling to consolidate its rule. (3) An important debate has emerged regarding the conditions under which the Afghan model is effective and, therefore, the extent to which it serve as a template for future operations. In particular, the author and strategist Stephen Biddle warns against learning the wrong lessons from Afghanistan, arguing that the campaign succeeded primarily due to the parity in military skill of local US allies and the Taliban/al Qaeda fighters. (4) In his view, precision airpower and SOF cannot compensate for a major imbalance in the skill of ground forces. (5) This analysis leads Biddle to claim that, and Iran, for example, are poor candidates for the Afghan model: Who is the trained local opposition in Syria or Iran? (6) It appears that Libya would also be an unpromising candidate for the Afghan model due to the absence of a trained local opposition identifiable at the outset of the intervention. Consistent with this observation, Biddle expressed concern about the viability of the intervention in Libya, expecting that the outcome could easily be a drawn-out, grinding stalemate. (7) Understanding why the poorly skilled opposition prevailed against superior government forces in Libya promises insight on the debate regarding the broader applicability of the Afghan model. This is critical not only for scholarly debates on the evolution of warfare but also for effective policymaking. As the United States tires of fighting drawn-out, troop-intensive wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan, future interventions are likely to mimic the Libyan experience. It is imperative that lessons-learned from the Libyan campaign be incorporated into any informed discussion of policy options related to the ongoing crisis in Syria. The evidence presented in this article provides important qualifications to the main positions in the debate. The existing analyses of the Afghan model assume interventions will be short, which was the case in Afghanistan. The prolonged nature of the Libyan campaign, however, points to time as a critical element of the model. Time affected battlefield outcomes in Libya through two mechanisms. First, it made possible the attrition of Qaddafi's forces through precision airpower--although, airpower did not make close ground combat irrelevant. The process of attrition over time enabled unskilled rebel forces to make substantial progress against his ground forces. Second, time provided breathing room for the fledging opposition force to become more skilled. The primary lesson emerging from Libya is if an air campaign is sustained for a sufficient period of time, depending on the interveners' political will, it has the potential of tilting the balance in favor of a particular side, even if they are initially outmatched. It appears that there is a qualified positive answer to Biddle's question, can the [Afghan] model trump a major skill imbalance? …