Is Air Force Above Today's Primary Military Mission?
As a followup to a series of postings suggesting having COIN-support
aircraft, Stephen Trimble at DefenseTech
blogs a recent pairing of apparent Air Force (sort of) and
Congressional interest. So, what's COIN? It IS the primary way of
fighting in our recent and ongoing wars.
The sign of Air Force interest, according to his quotes from an
article in
Air & Space Power Journal:
1. The USAF should remain focused on the non-COIN fight and let its
lesser-funded coalition partners do the COIN dirty work.
That's saying, institutionally, we think it's unimportant and we don't
want to do it ourselves; we'll deign to let an ally shoulder this
unimportant load.
COIN's short for CounterInsurgency. Strictly
speaking, COIN's about tactics of dealing with insurgencies like
al-Qaeda in Iraq. But, becuase of the way politics has fallen in the
Pentagon, it's in effect also taken on a usage (which Stephen Trimble
also seems to be using) of countering nasty, spread-out groups using
asymmetric warfare techniques against us.
Let's say you just happen to be a country that's fallen down on
doing occupation duties and militia/gangs are terrorizing the country.
Well, doing for the country's gangs would be another example of COIN
at work beyond the aforementioned al'Qaeda fight. As is/was the fight
against the Taliban and other Afghan Islamofascists. Basically, it's
a fight against enemies that will attack in small numbers without
armor, to accomplish attacks against people, infrastructure, or terror
targets.
Trimble suggested that Air Force already has a promising plane profile
that could be used as a start - antipersonnel aircraft, which are
designed to orbit slowly around battlefields and help kill enemy
infantry and other unarmored targets. Interestingly, that same kind
of plane also would've been handy in Kosovo if it'd been used; I've
never understood why not. It'd also be handy in other genocide
prevention missions.
I'd go farther than Trimble - as I see it, MOST new aircraft should be
specialized for that mission, since variants of that task are the most
common thing the US Armed Forces do, by far, today.
Very, very little flying time in recent wars is spent on air
superiority or bombing high-tech targets, which is what most USAF
planes are designed for, and the fraction is headed down over time.
The numbers of advanced air superiority planes in likely opponents is
also decidedly down. We need to keep SOME perpetually up-to-date air
superiority and high-tech bombers to outnumber opponents' arsenals,
but that'd still let you have probably most aircraft be more on this
time's real mission.
The
article does offer two defenses for it. The first is that there's
disagreement on what a COIN-support craft should be. That's true, but
it was also true of every aircraft USAF's ever built. The other
reason given is,
First, the USAF has operated with some success in COIN environments
before but has lost the peculiar capacities associated with COIN
following drawdowns or conversions after each conflict. This is an
unsurprising result, given the fact that budgets for unused tools are
a luxury not easily afforded in any era.
Yep, if you don't build anything and place bureaucratic constraints like
in Kosovo, you won't use it. So true! But to me the recent history
of war suggest we actually have more need for this than for JSF, say.
Posted by Jon Kay at December 19, 2007 03:01 AM
Interestingly, that same kind of plane also would've been handy in Kosovo if it'd been used; I've never understood why not.
All praise the Spooky and the Warthog! Seriously, Jon, both the AC-130U and the A-10 were used extensively in Kosovo, and many credit the AC-130 with being a very decisive factor there.
What we will see a good bit more of in the future is the use of unmanned aircraft for a greatly expanded scope of mission tasking. The technology is getting that good, and they're going to be much cheaper per unit than manned aircraft. (Not that they'll be cheap, you understand, but compared to the price tag of the nex-gen planes....)
They're already being heavily used in COIN roles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they're going to keep getting better.
