Making Revolutionary Change: Airpower in COIN Today

Abstract

Much of the reporting on the Iraqi and Afghan wars focuses on the ground dimension....The fact remains, however, that Iraq and Afghanistan are air wars as well, and wars where airpower has also played a critical role in combat. --Anthony H. Cordesman (1) What a difference a year makes. idea that airpower would be playing a critical role in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would hardly have been predicted in December 2006, when the Army and Marine Corps issued a completely revised--but airpower lite--counterinsurgency (COIN) manual commonly known as Field Manual (FM) 3-24. (2) Complimentary reviews appeared in unlikely venues such as New York Times Review.(3) What seems to have captured the imagination of many who might otherwise be hostile to any military doctrine were the manual's much-discussed Zen-like characteristics, particularly its popular Paradoxes section. (4) This part of the manual contained such trendy (if ultimately opaque) dictums as sometimes, the more force used, the less effective it is and some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot. (5) These maxims helped create the perception that the new doctrine was a kinder and gentler form of COIN that largely eschewed the concept of killing or capturing enemy fighters as a means of suppressing an insurgency. (6) Supporting this interpretation the fact that FM 3-24 favors deploying enormous numbers of forces--20 per 1,000 residents (7)--each of whom, according to the manual, must be prepared to become ... a social worker, a civil engineer, a school teacher, a nurse, a boy scout. (8) Further, as popularly understood, the aim of this revamped force was not to confront the insurgents themselves, but rather to win hearts and minds of the indigenous population. (9) To do so, the manual prefers a low-tech approach compatible with traditional Army culture that has individual soldiers engaging in close, personal contact with the target. In FM 3-24's interpretation of COIN, that target a country's populace. All of this discussion left little theoretical room for the role of airpower. FM 3-24's examination of airpower confined to a brief, five-page annex that essentially conceives airpower as aerial artillery. Accordingly, airpower discouraged not just because the use of force generally disdained by the popular interpretation of the manual's theory, but also because of the mistaken idea that air-delivered munitions are somehow more inaccurate than other kinds of fires. (10) In perhaps no other area has the manual been proven more wrong by the events of 2007. As this article will outline, the profound changes in airpower's capabilities have so increased its utility that it now often the weapon of first recourse in COIN operations, even in urban environments. As to weapons' accuracy, by early 2008 Human Rights Watch senior military analyst Marc Garlasco made the remarkable concession that today airstrikes probably are the most discriminating weapon that exists. It important to underline that the manual's flawed conclusions about airpower are not the result of nefariousness or service parochialism. Rather, FM 3-24 draws many of its lessons from counterinsurgency operations dating from the 1950s through the 1970s. While this approach remarkably effective in many respects, it inherently undervalues airpower. revolutions in airpower capabilities that would prove so effective during 2007 were unavailable to counterinsurgents in earlier eras. writers of FM 3-24 were stuck with antiquated ideas about what airpower might contribute to a joint COIN effort. In any event, many welcomed the kinder and gentler approach to COIN as being a near-total reversal of the less-than-successful strategy then in effect in Iraq. In early 2007 one of FM 3-24's principal architects, General David H. Petraeus, arrived in Iraq as the senior US commander, and the manual quickly became known as The Book on efforts there. …