American Military History: Winning by air power

Factual Questions
1

I was watching a historical documentary on Vietnam that stated that the higher echelons of American command though that air power would quickly bring the NVA and Vietcong to their knees (within about 8 months). That through superior air power there was no real need to secure land and that vast land forces were unnecessary.

Since then, I would say that US military doctrine was focused very heavily on air superiority. I have seen it argued that there have been at least points in time where the US has believed that it could win wars almost exclusively through air power.

So:

1a - Is it true that US high command thought that air power could win the war in Vietnam almost by itself?
1b - In such a short period of time?

2a - Would you agree or disagree that US military doctrine has focused on winning through air power?
2b - Would you say that there have been points in time where the prevailing attitude is that air power, almost by itself. can win wars?

3 - If these are true, what are the historical origins of this attitude? Is the success of air power in the Pacific?

I am hoping for factual answers, if maybe somebody is very familiar with military literature. I’ve read some Keegan on WW2, but I mainly read about pre-industrial history. I certainly would prefer if this wouldn’t turn into a discussion on the pros/cons of the F-35 except as it pertains to this question on doctrine.

2

1a - Is it true that US high command thought that air power could win the war in Vietnam almost by itself?
1b - In such a short period of time?

No, and no.

The US has, at least since WWI, been a global player. However, the population of the US is extremely isolationist in its views. As long as something is happening “over there”, the general population of the US doesn’t want to get involved. The US was quick to aid Britain in WWII with supplies and munitions, but was very reluctant to enter the war until Pearl Harbor forced us into it.

In Vietnam, the same isolationist attitude was there. People didn’t want to get involved in some war in some country that a lot of people couldn’t find on a map. Kennedy followed Truman’s policies on the cold war though, and there was a fear that if we didn’t get involved in Vietnam then communism would spread throughout Asia and we’d have a big problem on our hands. Kennedy didn’t just jump into the war though. Instead, there was a slow buildup of our involvement. We didn’t jump in with an air war plan. The plan was to let the Vietnamese do the bulk of the fighting. We would help just enough to make sure that the “evil commies” didn’t win.

That strategy worked about as poorly as you’d expect, and Johnson escalated things quite a bit after the Gulf of Tonkin. At no point did we jump in thinking that this would be a quick war. The strategy throughout the war was that we would keep escalating until they gave up, and both Kennedy and Johnson severely underestimated the will of the North Vietnamese.

2a - Would you agree or disagree that US military doctrine has focused on winning through air power?
2b - Would you say that there have been points in time where the prevailing attitude is that air power, almost by itself. can win wars?

I would disagree. The US has a definite focus on air power and achieving air superiority as a major part of its strategy. In Vietnam, they didn’t think that they needed to hold land with ground troops as they had in earlier wars, although they still thought attacking with ground troops was definitely necessary. That strategy didn’t work, and one of the clear lessons of Vietnam was that you need to hold ground in order to win.

The first Gulf War started out with a very large air war phase, and that worked well. It was followed by a ground phase though, and that ground phase had always been a part of the plan. The second Gulf War was focused from the start as a ground war, mostly to save money.

3 - If these are true, what are the historical origins of this attitude? Is the success of air power in the Pacific?

WWII, Korea, Vietnam, pretty much every war has proven the benefits of achieving air superiority. Once you have air superiority, you can bomb the other country at will and there’s not much they can do about it. You can’t actually win without troops on the ground, though. Every war we were in during the 20th century proved that over and over.

3

Air power is a great way to destroy enemy concentrations at little risk to your force. But as mentioned upthread it isn’t everything. The whole purpose of air power- and artillery and armor- is to break up enemy forces so they can’t mass enough to resist or threaten your ground troops. Air power is a great tool but not a winning strategy.

4

It has been argued that the NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a war won through air power. Up until then the military belief often stated was that armies don’t surrender to airplanes. Even the intervention in Bosnia only resulted in the signing of peace accords and the deployment of a large peace keeping force.

5

At the peak of fighting in 1968, the U.S. had 536,000 troops in Vietnam, the South Vietnamese army had 820,000 and the other allies (Korea, et al) had another 65,000 or so. That’s about 1.4 million troops.

Given the buildup in forces from 1960-1968, anyone who thought air power alone could win the war, they obviously didn’t think so for very long.

6

What do you mean by “High Command”? The military leadership has never believed that, even the USAF in its most deluded moments. Political leadership has, either sincerely or through ideological blinders.

7

Air superiority alone doesn’t assure victory, but it’s much better for assuring you don’t lose.

8

The historical origin is primarily Giulio Douhet, an Italian General and author of The Command of the Air (link is to a pdf of a 1998 reprint of the 1942 English language translation of the 1927 second edition of the book originally published in 1921), he advocated that future wars would be won entirely by airpower.

Strategic bombing in WW2 proved that he was wildly optimistic about the effect of bombing on civilian morale and the tonnage of bombs needed to even damage an enemies war economy.

9

Air power is analogous to cavalry (especially light cavalry) in the past.

Cavalry was extremely useful for 1) reconnaissance 2) screening 3) strikes against critical rear targets 4) Tipping the balance of the battle at a critical point 5) going after broken enemy formations. Remember the highway of death in Iraq? Highway of Death - Wikipedia That’s a case of making the enemy formation break, the enemy turning back and fleeing and using light cavalry to go after it. You can find the equivalent way back in Ancient times.

In addition, light cavalry armed with stand-off weapons (ancient bows, WWII rockets, today’s missiles) was useful to incentivize the enemy to disperse into less dense formations so that your heavy, more concentrated formations would have an easier time having local superiority. Note that this requires the heavy/land force to combine its action with the cavalry/air force. If you use your archer cavalry/air force to make the enemy disperse without combining it with a concentrated heavy/land force, the enemy will disperse and take some casualties but not much more will happen.

If you find that cavalry/air is very useful in some cases, you might easily enough make the mistake of overextending its projected utility by thinking that it can replace the heavy/land force.
As to the origins, it likely lies in part in:

  1. WWII. Air bombing was useful in reducing German’s strategic ability to continue the war and the decisive action which made Japan capitulate involved 2 bombers

  2. the US has an overwhelming advantage in air power. If you’re a Vietnam general/secretary of defense/US president and you have plenty of air power but not very much latitude in terms of how many US casualties will be tolerated, air power seems very attractive. You might easily engage in wishful thinking that you can replace US casualties with air power to a greater extent than you actually can.

10

I don’t concur with this. With the advent of the atomic bomb and air power, in the late 1940s and 1950s, there was a significant school of thought in the Air Force that air power alone could rule the day. The “revolt of the Admirals” in 1949 was largely about the Air Force efforts in that regard.

Per wiki:

"Said Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson:

There’s no reason for having a Navy and Marine Corps. General Bradley tells me that amphibious operations are a thing of the past. We’ll never have any more amphibious operations. That does away with the Marine Corps. And the Air Force can do anything the Navy can do nowadays, so that does away with the Navy."

11

I would say the OP’s timing is off. It’s arguable that the US military DID believe air power alone could win wars. This would be slightly after WWII, when they figured nuclear weapons could be used like conventional bombing had been. It was a short-lived belief.

12

Air superiority and air power are two very different concepts.

Air superiority is a term of art meaning a local condition in space and time where one side controls access to the air, effectively preventing the opposition from using its aerial weapons there and then. It’s inherently transient unless one side is overwhelmingly stronger than the other. Which was not true in the air over NVN, but was over SVN and has been in all subsequent US air combat.

Air power is the much larger and more woolly concept of applying combat power against the enemy using aerial weapons. The term refers to both the war-fighting and the war-deterring value.
Nowadays the recognition is that air power provides a way to apply force to an opponent with much less political backlash in the US and with potentially less backlash from the opposition locals or from your and their allies. It’s getting the job done with a “light footprint”. Where “the job” is not necessarily taking and holding territory or regime change, but is coercing the opposition forces and their leaders to behave more like you want them to.
No discussion of Viet Nam-era strategic decision making is complete without understanding the deep parochialism of the three main US services. “Joint” was a joke in those days and each service was eager to demonstrate that they alone would be decisive in the battle. So that henceforth each would enjoy favor in the annual budget and in manpower, prestige, toys, etc.

As such many in the top echelons of USAF believed (before the combat actually got going) they could quickly subdue the North Vietnamese. Or at least coerce their government into a settlement.

How much they persuaded the JCS and how much they in turn persuaded the DoD civilians in charge and how much they in turn persuaded the NCA is a complicated question. Whose answer varied over time with the ebb and flow of both the combat, and the internal politics.
In the event the politicians, for reasons both sound and stupid, kept a pretty tight leash on the application of air power. As such that provided the USAF leadership with the intellectual excuse to believe that “Air power *would *be decisive, if only the NCA would let us use it. We’ve been indecisive thus far only because we’re fighting with one hand tied behind our back.”

The convenient excuse let them wear blinders years after it should have been obvious to unbiased observers that the air power tech of the day wasn’t able to be decisive against those opponents in that location.

OTOTH, as alluded above, the Iraq “highway of death” demonstrated pretty clearly that current tech airpower can be decisive at least sometimes in some circumstances. Decisive as to battles, if not as to whole wars.

I have no doubt that we could have pursued an airpower-only strategy the rest of the way to decapitating the Iraqi government. Followed by observing from the outside the economic and sectarian collapse into ungoverned chaos and carnage much as it really happened. But this time without our Army interspersed between and betwixt all the starving and fighting Iraqis.

I take no position here on whether this alternate history would look better overall from 2016’s POV. There would be upsides and downsides to whatever happened.

13

AIUI, airpower wasn’t as effective in the past because of the inaccuracy of it, but in today’s precision-guided era it can make an enormous difference. Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek wrote an article to such effect shortly after 9/11. In fact, IIRC, airpower has made *the *critical difference in turning the tide against ISIS in Iraq.

14

Thanks very much for the replies so far. To be clear, this isn’t about whether air power is good, useful or whether ground troops are necessary. It is about the origins of the military doctrines on air power supremacy, if there is any, and it seems based on the replies there is some.

I did some reading on my own last night. I read quite a bit about Operation Rolling Thunder. What I read focused mainly on what it was, it successes and failures. I’m interested on the doctrinal basis for Rolling Thunder and in particular the viewpoints of those behind it and those opposed to it, if there was any. Similarly if anybody can recommend some books/online material on those post-WW2 viewpoints that would be great (if you can recommend some names to google, anything like that, detailed answers VERY welcome as well). I found a really interesting speech/presentation from a general during the Vietnam war, but I cannot find it anymore otherwise I would share the link.

15

It all goes back to Douhet. Following the experiences of World War One, he argued that all future wars would be defensive stalemates on the ground, and that therefore strategic air power was the only way to fight and win. Because radar hadn’t been invented yet, he presumed that bombers could surprise attack before any warning or defense could be mounted, and that bombing would be devastatingly effective (especially since almost everyone presumed gas would be used in the next war).

Of course World War Two disproved most of Douhet’s theories. For awhile atomic bombs were thought to tip the scales enough to revive his doctrines, but then paradoxically nuclear weapons became so powerful that they made themselves obsolete for actually conducting warfare.

As noted earlier, institutions tend to develop a self-interest in their own preservation, the USAF being no exception.

16

Sure air power will do it for you. If you’re willing to leave a radioactive wasteland below.