Historical Perspectives on Operational Environment Research and Objective Determination in Air Campaign Planning

Editorial Abstract: The process of planning any air campaign includes five steps: operational environment research, objective determination, identification of centers of gravity, identification of strategy, and development of the joint air and space operations plan. Lieutenant Colonel Wolusky focuses on the first two planning steps, using historical examples to illustrate important concepts for today’s air campaign planners. Although airpower is a rela-tively recent phenomenon, we can learn valuable lessons from past military campaigns, both ancient and modern.

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving.

ALTHOUGH AIRPOWER is a phenomenon of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, examples from past military campaigns show us the timeless quality of managing warfare. Xerxes, Alexander, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Frederick the Great, Mao, and Patton imposed their will on their enemies by brilliant planning before they used military force. We can apply the lessons learned from military giants of the past to modern air campaign planning.

When our leaders need airpower to support American strategic objectives, the theater combatant commander tasks the joint force commander (JFC) and the subordinate joint force air component commander (JFACC) to create an air campaign plan that embodies the “combatant commander’s strategic vision” and consists of “a series of related joint military operations that arrange tactical, operational, and strategic action to accomplish strategic and operational objectives within a given time and space.”¹ The joint air and space operations plan details how joint air and space forces will integrate to support the JFC’s campaign plan. The JFACC’s staff prepares the air campaign plan in five steps: operational environment research (OER), objective determination, identification of centers of gravity, identification of strategy, and development of the joint air and space operations plan.² This article examines the first two steps from a historical perspective.

Operational Environment
Research

No matter how enmeshed a commander becomes in the elaboration of his own thoughts, it is sometimes necessary to take the enemy into account.

—Winston Churchill

During OER, which gives the air campaign plan its context, planners gather information about our allies’ and enemies’ capabilities and intentions, doctrine, and the environment facing the joint or combined force—a process also known as intelligence preparation of the battle space. The JFACC staff tries to understand the enemy and his motivations; it also examines the perspectives of the United States, as well as those of allied and neutral countries, in relation to the enemy.

OER planners study the major players’ history, culture, military capabilities, leadership, geography, and weather. Of these factors, weather analysis is as important as it is unpredictable. The forces of nature have always haunted war planners. Gen Douglas Mac-Arthur had to master the tides at Inchon, South Korea; Gen Dwight Eisenhower had to hit the beaches in Normandy, France, when the clouds parted; and the Russian winter ravaged Napoléon’s retreating forces (400,000 men set out, but only 10,000 returned). To-day, the vagaries of cloud cover and dust storms affect our precision-guided weapons and modern fighter aircraft.

Planners must also analyze all parties’ command relationships, available forces, rules of engagement (ROE), applicable treaties and agreements, base-use rights, overflight rights, and logistics capabilities. For example, on 14 April 1986, in response to a terrorist attack on US servicemen in Berlin, the United States launched Operation El Dorado Canyon against targets in Libya. The strike package consisted of 24 F-111 fighters and five EF-111 jamming-support aircraft, flying out of bases in En-gland. The US aircraft carriers Coral Sea and America were in the Mediterranean Sea, ready to suppress Libyan air defenses with EA-6Bs and F/A-18s.³

The operation’s air planners had a problem with the Air Force component of the strike package. Taking the most direct route between the United Kingdom (UK) bases and the targets would require flying over France. However, France opposed the retaliatory raid and denied the United States overflight rights. Other routes over land required multiple overflight permissions from multiple countries. The only viable option was to route the strike package out to sea, where the United States did not need overflight rights. Unfortunately, the route around the Iberian Peninsula increased the flying distance to the targets by about 1,300 nautical miles each way, adding six to seven hours of flight time for the crews and requiring a tremendous amount of refueling support from tanker aircraft. The planners had to compensate for all of the logistics variables.⁴

Air campaign planners for Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan faced similar limiting factors. Because we lacked secure forward bases in the area of responsibility, F/A-18s flew 10-hour missions from carriers; B-52s flew 15-hour bomber missions from Diego Garcia; B-2s flew 44-hour sorties from the continental United States; and F-15Es flew grueling 15-hour sorties. The lack of secure forward bases will doubtless remain a major planning consideration for expeditionary air and space forces.

True OER synthesizes information from many disciplines. The air campaign planning staff absorbs vast amounts of it from the intelligence, logistics, and planning communities. Staffers also learn a great deal from open-source materials. For example, as an instructor at the infantry schools in Dresden and Potsdam, Germany, between the world wars, Gen Erwin Rommel studied enemy tactics for insights. In 1937 he published his thoughts in his book Infanterie greift an (The infantry attacks),⁵ which “sketched a revolutionary principle for the war of movement in which the infantry was given unheard of momentum and striking power through close cooperation with armored units.”⁶ An American Army officer named George S. Patton read the book with great interest.

Patton also read Achtung! Panzer! by armor pioneer Heinz Guderian, “in which he described with defiant candor the evolution of the new armored troops of the Germans.”⁷ Almost alone in the Army hierarchy, General Patton understood the Wehrmacht’s fantastic evolution in mechanized warfare. His study of open-source materials better prepared him to meet the Desert Fox and his Afrika Korps in battle. As he said to Comdr Harry C. Butcher, General Eisenhower’s aide, just before leading American troops against Rommel in February 1943, “I had spent years preparing myself for him, had read his Goddamn book a myriad of times, studied every one of his campaigns, and thought I had him pretty well sized up. It was the ambition of my life to chase him a bit, then seek him out personally in battle, and shoot him dead with my own hands.”⁸

However, information does not always allow one to understand the enemy’s capabilities. On the eve of the Battle of Britain’s air campaign in World War II, the British military was reeling from its humiliation at Dun-kirk, France. Joseph “Beppo” Schmid, leader of the Intelligence Branch of the Luftwaffe Operations Staff, assured Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring—the Luftwaffe commander—and Adolph Hitler that British air forces were out of date, that UK defenses were weak, and that aircraft production was low.⁹ Based on this information, Schmid, along with many of the Third Reich leaders, was certain that the British would sue for peace to avoid an invasion.

Instead of surrendering, however, the British created a layered air defense consisting of an observer corps (30,000 observers at 1,000 posts)¹⁰ and a revolutionary 51-station radar network.¹¹ The plots from these sources, “obtained from even the most remote post[,] could be transmitted to Fighter Command in less than forty seconds.”¹² This “weak” defense network enabled the 700 Hurricanes and Spitfires of the Royal Air Force’s Fighter Command to beat the Germans’ 760 serviceable Bf 109s in the battle for daylight air superiority.¹³ Ultimately, the Battle of Britain cost the Luftwaffe 1,887 aircraft and the Royal Air Force 1,547¹⁴—the German invasion of the British Isles never occurred.

Mirror imaging entails seeing an adversary as a mirror image of oneself. When planners mirror-image, they expect the enemy to react as the United States would to the same facts or events. In reality, the enemy’s motivations, objectives, and worldview seldom exactly reflect our own. At best, mirror imaging hampers planning—whether military or diplomatic—and, at worst, renders it useless.

For example, recall Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Pact with Hitler in 1938. Chamberlain, who simply did not understand the German dictator’s perspective, believed that accepting his territorial claims to predominantly German areas of Czechoslovakia would bring “peace in our time.” Far from satisfying the Nazis, however, the weak British reaction to the land grab became a major factor in Hitler’s decision to invade Poland in 1939. When his dream of uniting Europe under the Third Reich became clear, opponents with whom he had dealt at Munich and considered “worms”¹⁵ could not deter his war plans.

Examples of ethnocentrism, a belief in the inherent superiority of one’s own group and culture, accompanied by a feeling of contempt for other groups or cultures and a tendency to view them in terms of one’s own, abound in both ancient and modern times. In the Korean War, United Nations (UN) forces found themselves unprepared for “hu-man wave” attacks by forces of the People’s Republic of China and North Korea. During the Gallic Wars, the confounding tactics of the rebel leader Vercingetorix frustrated Julius Caesar. The former attacked from impenetrable marshes, refused to meet Caesar’s forces on open ground,¹⁶ and starved friends and foes alike in a vigorous scorched-earth policy.¹⁷ Similarly, Gen William Westmoreland could not respond decisively to the “revolutionary warfare” of the Vietcong, who followed Mao’s dictum that one should have no concern for “stupid scruples about benevolence, righteousness and morality in war.”¹⁸ These brutal tactics by an “inferior enemy” stymied the forces of the UN, the Roman Empire, and the United States.

Sometimes, we can better understand an enemy’s motivation by examining our past. The Christian Crusaders of the Middle Ages risked their lives to “rescue” the Holy Land, “with the assurance of the reward of imperishable glory in the kingdom of heaven.”¹⁹ The Crusaders’ fanaticism and brutality in the name of their holy cause bear a striking similarity to the jihad mentality of the terrorists facing the United States today in Operation Enduring Freedom. Although the terrorists’ attitudes are abhorrent to us, obviously at one time in the history of Western civilization, those same attitudes were very much a part of our culture. Understanding our own history can help us better understand our enemy and his attitude towards our war on terrorism.

Objective Determination

Men should either be treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injures—for heavy ones they cannot.

—Niccolò Machiavelli

Objective determination involves deciding what to accomplish in a campaign, thereby allowing one to focus on the desired end state. A good air campaign objective is clear, concise, attainable, measurable, and directly supportive of the JFC’s and president’s national security goals. Whether the objective is at the national (strategic), air-campaign-planning (operational), or tactical level (where engagements are planned and executed), every military operation should be directed to achieving these goals.

Strategic-level objectives are necessarily broad. August 1941 saw the drafting of Air War Plans Division 1 (AWPD-1), “Munitions Requirements of the Army Air Forces to Defeat Our Potential Enemies,” the first US strategic air war plan—the “basic blueprint for the creation of the Army Air Forces and the conduct of the air war against Nazi Germany.”²⁰ Following the Air Corps’s emphasis on unescorted bombers,²¹ the plan called for using daylight, high-altitude precision bombardment of German industries and required over 3,800 medium and heavy bombers for six months.²²

AWPD-1 planners identified four basic target systems: electric power, transportation, synthetic petroleum production, and the Luftwaffe.²³ They confidently presented an overall strategic objective that “leaned heavily toward victory through airpower, but which provided for air support of an invasion and subsequent combined operations on the continent if the air offensive should not prove conclusive.”²⁴ Eighth Air Force bomber crews faced the deadly realities of weather, aggressive fighter attacks, and flak as they put AWPD-1’s optimistic theories about unescorted bombers into practice in the skies over Europe.

A more recent example of strategic objectives driving an air campaign occurred during a press conference on 1 April 1999, at which Javier Solana, secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), outlined the political goals of Operation Allied Force: “First and foremost, we must stop the killing in Kosovo and the brutal destruction of human lives and properties; secondly, we must put an end to the appalling humani-tarian situation that is now unfolding in Kosovo and create the conditions for the refugees to be able to return; thirdly, we must create the conditions for a political solution to the crisis in Kosovo.”²⁵ Regarding the same operation, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen provided the operational-level goal: “Our military objective is to degrade and damage the military and security structure that President [Slobodan] Milosevic has used to depopulate and destroy the Albanian majority in Kosovo.”²⁶

Following the Air Corps’s emphasis on unescorted bombers, the plan called for using daylight, high-altitude precision bombardment of German industries and required over 3,800 medium and heavy bombers for six months.

After the United States traced the terrorist attack against American military members in Berlin to Libya’s Col Mu‘ammar Gadhafi, President Ronald Reagan gave military planners two strategic objectives: to deter future Libyan terrorism and to show the American public that his administration was willing and able to strike back. In the president’s words, El Dorado Canyon was designed to “make the world smaller for terrorists.”²⁷

At the operational level, the air campaign planning staff links the strategic to the tactical through the joint air and space operations plan: “Activities at this level link tactics and strategy by establishing operational objectives needed to accomplish the strategic objectives, sequencing events to achieve the operational objectives, initiating actions, and applying resources to bring about and sustain these events.”²⁸ A good example of this connection comes from the Gulf War of 1991. Hunting Iraq’s Scud missiles became a very important tactical-level operation because of its direct linkage to the strategic political objective of keeping Israel out of the war. The United States knew that if the Scud menace to Israel were not diminished, Israel would attack Iraq, resulting in the loss of some of the Arab members of the coalition. At the operational level, air campaign planners had to allocate missions to achieve these linked objectives. Admittedly, the Scud-hunting program was inefficient from a tactical perspective, but abandoning it would have jeopardized the entire campaign.

The United States knew that if the Scud menace to Israel were not diminished, Israel would attack Iraq.

Failure to effectively identify and link objectives can destroy a campaign before it begins. During the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe found itself saddled with an ineffective and ambivalent commander (Göring) and a supreme leader (Hitler) more interested in preparing to invade the Soviet Union. This situation made planning a coordinated air campaign impossible. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who commanded Luftflotte II staging from northeastern France and the Low Countries, complained bitterly in his memoirs that “in contrast to our previous campaigns, there was not one conference within the Luftwaffe at which details were discussed with group commanders and other services, let alone with the High Command or Hitler himself” (italics in original).²⁹ Kesselring received no tactical instructions, and no arrangements were made for a joint effort with the army and navy. The air campaign, which had no firm objectives, ultimately failed.

Objective determination involves constraints and restraints. A constraint obligates a commander to a certain military course of action. For example, in 1943 Soviet armored spearheads encircled Germany’s forces near Stalingrad. Hitler ordered Gen Friedrich Paulus, the commander, to hold the pocket despite heavy losses and an untenable military position. This constraint doomed the German Sixth Army and its 200,000 soldiers.

Often, time is a major constraint on military operations. During the Second Punic War, Hannibal found himself in an increasingly dangerous position, deep in Italy. He faced the Roman army, which outnumbered him two to one, on its home turf. Hannibal needed a quick and decisive victory, or his great expedition from Carthage and through Spain and over the Alps would fail. In 216 b.c., at Cannae, Hannibal drew eight Roman legions into the center of his line and executed a double envelopment, resulting in 70,000 Roman casualties to his 5,000.³⁰ Constrained by time, Hannibal turned urgency into victory.

Restraints place limits on a commander’s actions, as does the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). Today, the most significant overall restraint on military operations concerns the avoidance of collateral damage. Strictly speaking, LOAC prohibits “indiscriminate attacks,” defined in part as attacks in which incidental injury to civilians or incidental damage to civilian objects proves “excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”³¹—this is also known as the principle of proportionality. LOAC requires planners to avoid planning or to cancel an attack under circumstances that violate this principle.³²

In modern warfare, planners take great pains to avoid civilian casualties, but the principle of proportionality was never meant to prohibit them. Two factors give this issue paramount importance: (1) the technological leap to smart weapons and (2) continuous media coverage, the combination of which creates an unrealistic expectation of war’s efficiency and leads to intolerance of any civilian casualties.

Our enemies are well aware of the restraining impact of potential civilian casualties on our plans. During Allied Force in Kosovo, Serbian civilians painted red targets on themselves and congregated on key bridges over the Danube. During the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein placed civilians at key military targets to act as “human shields.” Planners have to consider such restraints when they examine legitimate military options.

Comprehensive, real-time data is undoubtedly a great asset to air campaign planners and commanders. It significantly enhances our ability to avoid collateral damage by allowing us to adjust to civilian population movements that occur in the time between planning and executing a military strike. However, it is not without its drawbacks and can even restrain a commander’s actions. For example, Operation Enduring Freedom has seen an incredible increase in data available to the JFACC. The forward-deployed combined air operations center (CAOC) was wired with as many as 100 T-1 lines, providing streaming video feeds from Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in the target areas, Global Hawk UAV surveillance information, and direct input from US special operations forces on the ground.³³ This data gave the JFACC the immediate ground picture necessary to move swiftly against time-sensitive targets in Afghanistan; however, it also gave the same information to US Central Command (CENTCOM) in Florida. On several occasions, CENTCOM overrode the CAOC’s call for strikes on newly identified targets.³⁴

In one notorious incident, concerns about collateral damage crossed eight time zones to restrain the JFACC in the CAOC. In October 2001, a Predator UAV³⁵ found Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, fleeing Kabul, Afghanistan, in a convoy. The UAV, operated by the Central Intelligence Agency, carried two Hellfire laser-guided missiles. However, the agency needed CENTCOM approval to “push the button.” The Predator tracked the convoy to a building where Omar and his entourage took cover. Rather than hit hard at the building, Gen Tommy R. Franks, CENTCOM commander, and his legal advisors would only allow the UAV to fire a missile in front of the building to see who came out.³⁶ Unfortunately for the war effort, Mullah Omar safely departed the rear of the building.³⁷

Fear of escalating a conflict is often a significant restraining factor. During the Korean War, armed forces of the People’s Republic of China and North Korea launched attacks against UN forces from bases in China north of the Yalu River. Nevertheless, General MacArthur was forbidden to use airpower to bomb these legitimate Chinese targets. This restraint stemmed from the fear that such operations would spark a nuclear war between the United States and the perceived monolithic Communist forces of China and the Soviet Union.

Fear of both collateral damage and escalation is a significant restraining issue in our nuclear war plans. At the height of the Cold War, the single integrated operational plan (SIOP)—the comprehensive US plan for nuclear conflict—contained approximately 16,000 targets and took 14 to 18 months to plan.³⁸ It was of the utmost national importance and shrouded in the highest security controls available. Actually launching nuclear weapons presupposes that deterrence has failed and that we must use devastating military force. A limited nuclear strike against a remote Siberian oil field might satisfy the restraint regarding collateral damage. However, the risk of escalation is implicit in the use of any nuclear weapon, no matter how remote the target area.

In addition to these restraints, SIOP planners are also limited by the US policy against using nuclear weapons in a first strike. They have the difficult task of determining how to ride out a nuclear, chemical, or biological attack, whether limited or comprehensive, and then plan for operations after the attack, using forces that may or may not exist in the postattack chaos.

Finally, ROEs, which give our forces a set of rules to ensure consistent action in unpredictable situations, serve as additional self-imposed restraints on military operations.³⁹ They are not intended to affect the fundamental right of self-defense; nor are they designed to carry criminal sanctions against people who fail to follow them. However, in rare cases, violating ROEs can result in criminal proceedings.⁴⁰

Difficulty Determining an Objective

I doubt seriously whether a man can think with full wisdom and with deep convictions regarding certain of the basic issues today who has not at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War and the fall of Athens.

—Gen George C. Marshall

Although vitally important, selecting an achievable objective for the end state oftentimes proves difficult. As General Marshall suggested, reading Thucydides’ account of the savage war between the Athenian Empire and the other city-states allied with Sparta remains instructive. When the war began in 431 b.c., neither side envisioned its duration (27 years), as well as the tyranny, destruction, and social upheaval to come. The Arab-Israeli wars, Iran-Iraq War, Soviet war in Afghanistan, Irish “troubles,” Chechnya occupation, and Vietnam War are all examples of military operations without workable end states. Every party to a conflict has its own desired end state, but unless it is achievable, protracted and interminable warfare results.

Formulating an attainable end state to a full-blown armed conflict is a complicated undertaking. In his analysis of Operation Desert Storm and war termination, John Fishel defines end state as “what the leadership desires the battlefield and the surrounding political landscape to look like when the war is over. . . . Moreover, end-states suggest descriptions, in fairly great detail, of national policy.”⁴¹ Some observers attribute America’s inability to fashion proper military end states to our traditional war strategy of annihilation⁴² and describe the US military’s application of the concept in a crisis as “haphazard.”⁴³

Peacemaking and peacekeeping operations have become the norm in the post–Cold War era. They present a challenge for military planners trying to formulate military objectives and fix a solid objective for the end state. In Somalia in 1992, Operation Restore Hope showed us just how wrong things could go when objectives aren’t clearly defined.

Launched under the auspices of the UN, the operation sought to prevent further starvation in Somalia caused by a food shortage, which rival warlords exacerbated by interfering with food distributions. The UN’s desired end state called for creating “an environment in which the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations can assume full responsibility for the security and operation of the Somalia humanitarian relief efforts.”⁴⁴ Under this vague guidance for the political objectives, Maj Gen Steven L. Arnold, military commander of Army forces in Somalia, could neither develop discrete military objectives nor a clear exit strategy⁴⁵ other than “to be able to eventually leave.”⁴⁶

Some people suggest that the operation failed because of the poor working relationship between the relief organizations and the military, as well as the joint task force’s fear of “mission creep.”⁴⁷ Shifting directions from policy makers and a fatal deficiency of tenable objectives forced the military to improvise from day to day and just “muddle through.”⁴⁸ The operation ended with 30 US soldiers killed in combat and 175 wounded, together with 13 noncombat deaths and one missing in action.⁴⁹ The UN lost 140 peacekeepers, and thousands of Somali citizens were killed.⁵⁰

The US military remembered the lessons it learned in Somalia. In 1994, when the UN decided to restore order in Haiti with Operation Uphold Democracy, the military put those lessons to use. It defined an operation for “quick withdrawal of the US forces and left the actual restoration of democracy to the United Nations,”⁵¹ quickly reducing the 22,000-member landing force assisting the UN to 2,400 troops.

The 1990s saw major peacemaking operations in the Balkans. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, after Bosnian Serbs began attacking Bosnian Muslims, the United States tried to deter further Serbian aggression by implementing Operation Deny Flight in 1993.⁵² This effort failed in the face of an increasingly defiant Serbian enemy willing to take 150 UN peacekeepers hostage to deter air attacks in this brutal civil war.

In 1995, after Bosnian Serb shelling of a Sarajevo marketplace killed many civilians, NATO began Operation Deliberate Force, designed as a “coercive catalyst”⁵³ to stop Milosevic from supporting the Bosnian Serb offensive. According to Gen Hal Hornburg, then a major general and director of the CAOC, air campaign planning started with the desired military end state of halting the Bosnian Serb army’s shelling of UN safe areas for Bosnian Muslims.⁵⁴ Gen Michael Ryan, retired, also a major general at the time, said the operation would achieve the political end state when the Bosnian Serbs “sue for cessation of military operations, comply with UN mandates, and negotiate.”⁵⁵ In September 1995, the Bosnian Serb government agreed to withdraw heavy weapons from the mountains surrounding Sarajevo and enter into peace talks, thus making Deliberate Force a success.

As we know, Serbian aggression in the former Yugoslavia did not end with Bosnia. Serbs next began attacking ethnic Albanian Muslims in Kosovo, a region of Serbia with a Muslim majority population. Like Deliberate Force, Allied Force used airpower to force President Milosevic to the bargaining table. A North Atlantic Council statement of 12 April 1999 effectively laid out the mission’s end state:

Allied Force convinced Milosevic “to withdraw thousands of troops, police, and paramilitaries while letting an international peacekeeping force enter Kosovo.”⁵⁷ The 78-day air campaign expelled the Yugoslav forces without a single NATO fatality or the need to launch a ground offensive. It proved that the effective use of airpower alone could attain an end-state objective.

Conclusion

There is no man more faint-hearted than I when I am planning a campaign. I purposely exaggerate all the dangers and all the calamities that the circumstances make possible. I am in a thoroughly painful state of agitation. This does not keep me from looking quite serene in front of my entourage. Once I have made up my mind, everything is forgotten except what leads to success.

—Napoléon Bonaparte

Advances in technology have increased the speed, lethality, and reach of military power. These same advances have also magnified the risks of miscalculation and have created immediate global awareness of mistakes. As a result, modern air campaign planners must be as “faint-hearted” as Napoléon when it comes to understanding the battle space and the fundamental goals of the campaign. But this is impossible without a thorough grounding in history, both ancient and modern.

Sound OER rests on a brutally honest and realistic view of our enemy, our allies, and ourselves. Equipment and tactics may change radically, but people and their motivations do not. Such underlying dynamics as tactics, ideals, and grudges—which do not appear from nowhere—affect every operation. Studying campaigns of the distant past gives war planners timeless insights into the practice of warfare. Examples from more recent military history show how potential allies or adversaries have fought (and will fight) wars.

Planners must focus on campaign objectives, from tactical to end state, as they develop every tasking. Goals may evolve as the campaign progresses, but targets chosen along the way must be directly linked to a defined objective. This vital connection between ends and means did not exist for the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain or for the UN forces in Somalia. These operations did not fail because the airmen or soldiers were lacking in some way. They failed, for the most part, because they lacked plainly stated, achievable objectives. We learned valuable lessons about defining and concentrating on objectives from these historical missteps.

Because operational environment research and objective determination are crucial components of air campaign planning, planners need a firm historical perspective to do them justice. Our great military leaders have long understood the advantage they have gained in the present by studying the past.

1. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Doctrine Capstone and Keystone Primer (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2001), 73, 78.

2. Campaign planning takes place before the region’s combatant commander dispatches military forces to an area of responsibility. See also Joint Publication (Pub) 3-56.1, Command and Control for Joint Air Operation, 1994; Air Force Doctrine Document (AFDD) 2, Organization and Employment of Aerospace Power, 2000; Joint Pub 5-00.2, Joint Task Force Planning Guidance and Procedures, 1999; and Air Campaign Planning Handbook (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Warfare Studies Institute; College of Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education, March 2000), on-line, Internet, 20 May 2002, available from http:// www.cadre.maxwell.af.mil/warfarestudies/jdacc/docs/handbook2000.pdf.

3. Billy R. Shrader, “Targeting National Security: The True Mechanism behind Effective National Coercion” (thesis, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell AFB, Ala., 1997), 53.

4. Col Stephen E. Anno and Lt Col William E. Einspahr, “Command and Control and Communications Lessons Learned: Iranian Rescue, Falklands Conflict, Grenada Invasion, Libya Raid,” Research Report no. AU-AWC-88-043ADA202091 (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air War College, May 1988), 49–50. The French Embassy in Tripoli and several of the neighboring residential buildings, although not targeted, were inadvertently bombed during the raid.

5. David Fraser, Knight’s Cross: A Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 98.

6. Ladislas Farago, Patton: Ordeal and Triumph (New York: Ivan Obolensky, Inc., 1964), 121.

9. John Ray, The Battle of Britain: New Perspectives: Behind the Scenes of the Great Air War (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1994), 36.

10. Derek Wood and Derek Dempster, The Narrow Margin: The Battle of Britain and the Rise of Air Power, 1930– 1940 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 152.

14. Stephen Bungay, The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain (London: Aurum Press, 2000), 368.

15. Williamson Murray, Strategy for Defeat: The Luftwaffe, 1933–1945 (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, January 1983), 28.

16. Lawrence Keppie, The Making of the Roman Army: From Republic to Empire (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1984), 85–95.

17. John Warry, Warfare in the Classical World: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Weapons, Warriors, and Warfare in the Ancient Civilizations of Greece and Rome (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 218–27.

18. Robert Thompson, “Revolutionary War in Southeast Asia,” Orbis, Fall 1975, 958.

19. Dana C. Munro, “Urban and the Crusaders,” Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History, vol. 1:2 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1895), 5–8.

20. Lt Col Barry D. Watts, The Foundations of U.S. Air Doctrine: The Problem of Friction in War (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, December 1984), 17.

21. Robert F. Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force, vol. 1, 1907–1960 (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, December 1989), 69.

22. Haywood S. Hansell Jr., The Air Plan That Defeated Hitler (Atlanta, Ga.: Higgins-McArthur/Longino and Porter, 1972), 78.

25. NATO, “Statement to the Press by the Secretary General at News Conference,” 1 April 1999, on-line, Internet, 20 May 2002, available from http://www.nato.int/ docu/pr/1999/p99-045e.htm.

26. Senate, Armed Services Committee, Prepared Statement of the Honorable William S. Cohen, Secretary of Defense, to the Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing on Operation Allied Force, 15 April 1999, 1, 106th Cong., 1st sess., 1999, on-line, Internet, 20 May 2002, available from http://www.senate.gov/~Earmed_services/statemnt/1999/990415wc.pdf.

28. Joint Pub 1-02, Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, 12 April 2001, 319, on-line, Internet, 20 May 2002, available from http://www.dtic. mil/doctrine/jel/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf.

29. Albert Kesselring, The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Kesselring, translation of Soldat bis zum letzten Tag (London: Kimber Publishers, 1953), 67.

30. Serge Lancel, Carthage: A History, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 389.

31. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol 1),” 8 June 1977, Article 51, “Protection of the Civilian Population,” par. 5(b), on-line, Internet, 20 May 2002, available from http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/93.htm.

33. Rebecca Grant, “The War Nobody Expected,” Air Force Magazine, April 2002, 36.

35. The RQ-1A Predator is a $40 million long-endurance, medium-altitude UAV used for surveillance and reconnaissance missions. It provides surveillance imagery from synthetic aperture radar, video cameras, and forward looking infrared that can be distributed in real time both to the frontline soldier and to the operational commander or worldwide in real time via satellite communication links.

37. Even with this degree of certainty, the leadership hesitated to strike at Mullah Omar. A senior military officer saw the failure to strike immediately as a symptom of “a cultural issue—a slow degradation of the system due to political correctness: ‘We want you to kill the guy, but not the guy next to him.’ No collateral damage.” Ibid., 38. Hesitancy led to one of the major lost opportunities of the war.

38. See Matthew G. McKinzie et al., The U.S. Nuclear War Plan: A Time for Change (Washington, D.C.: Natural Resources Defense Council, June 2001).

39. According to Joint Pub 1-02, ROEs are “directives issued by competent military authority which delineate the circumstances and limitations under which United States forces will initiate and/or continue combat engagement with other forces encountered” (380).

40. G. Anthony Wolusky, “Combat Crime: Rules of Engagement in Military Courts-Martial,” The Military Law and Law of War Review 38 (1999): 93–118.

41. John T. Fishel, Liberation, Occupation, and Rescue: War Termination and Desert Storm (Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 31 August 1992), 59.

42. Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), xxii.

43. Robert R. Soucy II, Kevin A. Schwedo, and John S. Haven II, “War Termination and Joint Planning,” Joint Force Quarterly, Summer 1995, 100.

44. Operation Restore Hope Lessons Learned Report (Fort Leavenworth, Kans.: Center for Army Lessons Learned [CALL], US Army Combined Arms Command [CAC], 3 November 1993), 1–14.

45. Maj Susan E. Strednansky, “Balancing the Trinity: The Fine Art of Conflict Termination” (thesis, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell AFB, Ala., February 1996), 25.

46. Lt Col Robert P. Pellegrini et al., “Somalia and the Five Rings,” Research Report (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air Command and Staff College, June 1994), 37.

47. Jonathan T. Dworken, “Restore Hope: Coordinating Relief Operations,” Joint Force Quarterly, Summer 1995, 14–20.

48. C. Kenneth Allard, “Lessons Unlearned: Somalia and Joint Doctrine,” Joint Force Quarterly, Autumn 1995, 105–9.

49. “U.S. Ends Mission in Somalia; Clans Sign Peace Deal,” Facts on File, 31 March 1994, 224.

50. Eric Ransdell, “Where the Warlords Still Rule the Roost,” U.S. News and World Report, 12 December 1994, 67.

52. Maj Michael O. Beale, Bombs over Bosnia: The Role of Airpower in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, August 1997), 19–30.

54. Lt Col Robert D. Pollock, “Roads Not Taken: Theoretical Approaches to Operation Deliberate Force,” in Deliberate Force: A Case Study in Effective Air Campaigning, ed. Col Robert C. Owen (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 2000), 434.

55. Briefing, Maj Gen Michael Ryan, COMAIRSOUTH and commander, Sixteenth Air Force, to USAF Corona Conference, USAF Academy, Colorado Springs, Colo., subject: Operation Deliberate Force, 1996, February 1996.

56. NATO, “The Situation in and around Kosovo: Statement Issued at the Extraordinary Ministerial Meeting of the North Atlantic Council Held at NATO Headquarters, Brussels, on 12th April 1999,” on-line, Internet, 20 May 2002, available from http://www.nato.int/docu/ pr/1999/p99-051e.htm.

57. Lt Gen William J. Begert, “Kosovo and Theater Air Mobility,” Aerospace Power Journal 13, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 11.

Lt Col Tony Wolusky (USAFA; MEd, Northern Montana College; JD, Golden Gate University) is the deputy staff judge advocate for Headquarters United States Air Force Academy. He previously served as the staff judge advocate for the 51st Fighter Wing, Osan AB, Republic of Korea, and for the 4409th Operations Group (Provisional), Riyadh AB, Saudi Arabia. He has also served as an associate professor of law at the Air Force Academy; chief of military justice, Hill AFB, Utah; senior area defense counsel, Ramstein AB, Germany; intelligence applications officer (human intelligence), Norton AFB, California; assistant professor of aerospace studies, St. Michael’s College, Winooski, Vermont; and ICBM crew commander, Malmstrom AFB, Montana. The author of several publications on military law, Colonel Wolusky was named outstanding career Air Force attorney for 1999 by the Judge Advocates Association.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.