Precision Bombing - Precision Weaponry and The Revolution in Military Affairs

Precision Weaponry and The Revolution in Military Affairs

In recent years, much has been made about the so-called "Revolution in Military Affairs," and whether, or not, an "RMA," in fact, really is underway. If one truly considers the implications of precision attack, it is clear that precision weapons, when coupled to the other great revolutions of this aerospace century, have transformed warfare, and, as a result, the question is not really one of "Does an RMA exist?" but, rather, "When did it begin, and what are its implications?" Tied to this, of course, are equally-surprisingly persistent questions about the use and value of air power, now more accurately considered as aerospace power. If nothing else, given the record of precision air power application, aerospace power advocates should not still have to spend as much time as they do arguing the merits of three-dimensional war and the value of precision attack to it. Modern joint service aerospace forces offer the most responsive, flexible, lethal, and devastating form of power projection across the spectrum of conflict, employing a range of aerospace weaponry such as maritime patrol aircraft, attack and troop-lift helicopters, land-based long-range aircraft, and battlefield rocket artillery systems. Service-specific aerospace power can often be formidable and, as such, over not quite the last ninety years, has transformed conflict from two dimensional to three dimensional, and has changed the critical focus of conflict from that of seizing and holding to one of halting and controlling.

In this regard, it is worth quickly reviewing a few salient points from the military history of this century. Within roughly a decade of the first flight of an airplane, aircraft were having an occasionally decisive effect on the battlefield. Within four decades, a nation—Great Britain—secured its national survival through air warfare. By the midst of the Second World War, three-dimensional attack (from above and below the surface) had become the primary means of sinking both vessels at sea and destroying the combat capability of armies on land. In fact, for the United States, this trend of inflicting losses and material destruction primarily through air attack continued into the postwar years for Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Bosnia, and other, lesser, contingencies. In particular, air attack directed against land forces has been especially powerful in blunting and destroying opponents on the offensive, whether in older experience—such as confronting Rommel in the Western Desert, or Nazi armored forces trying to split the Normandy invasion at Mortain, or at the Bulge (where German commanders credited Allied fighter attacks on fuel trucks and supplies as being the decisive factor in halting their drive), in the opening and closing stages of the Korean War, and confronting the 1972 North Vietnamese Spring Invasion—or, more recently, in destroying the Khafji offensive of Saddam Hussein in 1991. NATO's reliance upon air power in the present Balkan crisis should not be surprising, for, from the very earliest days, the NATO alliance saw air power as the linchpin of Western military strength, and the necessary off-set to the Warsaw Pact's huge military forces.

Given its historical underpinnings, we should not be surprised that the revolution in warfare that has been brought about both by the confluence of the aerospace and the electronic revolutions, and by the off-shoot of both—the precision guided munition—is one that has been a long-time coming, back to the Second World War, back, even, to the experimenters of the First World War who attempted, however crudely, to develop "smart" weapons to launch from airships and other craft. Used almost experimentally until the latter stages of the Vietnam War, the precision weapon since that time has increasingly come to first influence, then dominate, and now perhaps to render superfluous, the traditional notion of a linear battlefield.