Document created: 9 January 04
Air University Review, March-April 1972

The Evolution 
of Air Warfare

Major General Robert N. Ginsburgh
Major Edd. D. Wheeler 

It has been said wisely that the world is a scene of changes. Yet, in scanning the history of land and naval warfare, one finds it remarkable how slowly the changes evolved. Twenty-five hundred years ago the Greeks marched into battle to the slow music of flutes. In World War II, the British mounted their ground attack at El Alamein to the slightly more stirring music of bagpipes. In both cases the soldiers walked into battle. Similarly, some naval practices have changed little. Athenian seamen of the fifth century B.C. perfected ramming and boarding tactics, thus influencing the British as late as 1911 to build battleships with ram bows.

The history of air warfare has been less barnacled by convention. Of course, this is true partly because its history is relatively short. More important, though, it is true because air power is a creature of change, especially as change is realized through technology. The effect of technology on warfare is the subject of many pale clichés, and we hope not to repeat them here. What we would like to do is to assay the changes wrought in the evolution of warfare, particularly air warfare, by examining five of its rudiments: strategy, tactics, command and control, weaponry, and mobility.

By looking at each of these factors, one can see air power as having added several new dimensions to warfare. The changes can best be described as revolutionary rather than evolutionary in nature. So great has been the impact of these changes that they have affected our lives both in war and peace—and in the indeterminable region between war and peace that is one of the hallmarks of the modern era.

strategy

The army’s traditional approach to strategy has been to defeat the enemy on the battlefield. This objective has been uppermost in land commanders’ minds since ancient times. It recently was given colorful expression in Vietnam by an Army colonel, who urged his men to find the enemy, “then pile on.” Likewise, the historical naval objective has been to close with and defeat the enemy’s main battle fleet. Admiral Dewey sought out the Spanish squadron at Manila Bay for just that purpose. The Air Force, too, has held essential in warfare the destruction of opposing air forces. For example, in preparation for the invasion of Fortress Europe, General Arnold declared to the commanders of the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces: “My personal message to you—this is a must—is to ‘Destroy the Enemy Air Force wherever you find them, in the air, on the ground and in the factories.’”¹

Arnold’s directive is telling, for it mirrors a major change in strategic thinking. It reveals that the defeat of the enemy is to be achieved in areas besides the field of battle. The objective of air strategy is to defeat enemy forces both in and beneath the skies. Thus, air power is, as Douhet affirmed fifty years ago, “the offensive weapon par excellence.”² It is pre-eminently an offensive weapon not only because it can attack land and naval forces almost at will but also because it can circumvent them and strike directly at the enemy’s capacity to wage war by destroying his industrial, logistical, and administrative centers. If demanded, the cutting edge of air power could even be laid against the very threads which hold a culture together as a viable society. Herein lies its most awesome power and its greatest use as a deterrent force.

During the First World War, Churchill said of Admiral Jellicoe that he was the only man who could lose the war in a single day—or, as Jutland was actually fought, in a single night. The same can be said today of air commanders of major powers, except the stakes are now not merely losing a war but losing a civilization. It was Charles Lindbergh who, even before the atomic age, said:

Aviation has, I believe, created the most fundamental change ever made in war. It has abolished what we call the sense of warfare. It has turned defense into attack. We can no longer protect our families with an army. Our libraries, our museums—every institution which we value most, is laid bare to bombardment.³

The gravity of this statement, made more grave by the passage of the last 35 years, is enough to fill us as airmen not only with a deep sense of vigilance for our country but with an abiding sense of responsibility to civilization as well.

The modern naval arm also possesses this profoundly strategic capacity, although perhaps on a somewhat reduced scale. Interestingly, however, the navy derives almost all its potency as a strategic offensive force from air power, that is, from carrier-based aircraft and submarine-based missiles. Without its air and missile arms, the power of today’s navy, like that of past navies, would be limited largely to the coastline.

tactics

For land and naval warfare, what is written large is also written small; and tactics, like strategy, has evolved at a snail’s pace. In 216 B.C., Hannibal fought a battle of annihilation at Cannae and won a victory over the Romans through use of the double envelopment. The Russians haplessly failed to learn the meaning of this lesson, for 2100 years later at Tannenberg they suffered a catastrophic defeat by falling prey to an almost identical maneuver. In our own century, the parallels between the tactics of near trench warfare in Korea and those in Europe during the Great War are striking. One writer even observes that the only two significant tactical innovations in Korea were “the combat helicopter and the revival of infantry body armour.”⁴ Of those two, only the helicopter can be regarded as true innovation, for use of armor can be traced back at least forty-five centuries.

Naval tactics also have been slow to change. The hit-and-run tactics employed against the Spanish Armada were not too different from those used against Mark Anthony at Actium, although in the 1600 years between those engagements the sail had replaced the oar and the sword had largely given way to the cannon. More recently, the battle for Leyte Gulf in the Second World War saw the U.S. fleet execute successfully the “crossing the T,” a tactic owing much to the genius of Lord Nelson and the early nineteenth century.

Tactics in the air, however, have experienced revolutionary development. The first significant application of air power was the balloon, which was used for reconnaissance in the ancient quest for the high ground. Incidentally, the evolution of air power in America has been quite as fortuitous as many events in our history. Had it not been for the personal interest and foresight of two Presidents, the air role might have been established much later; and having been established, it might have enjoyed a considerably less meteoric development. President Lincoln impressed upon an unbelieving Union Army the tactical value of military balloons, and Teddy Roosevelt’s robust fascination with the Wright brothers’ experiments gave the necessary impetus to military aviation in this country several years after Kitty Hawk. Thus, the wisdom in Billy Mitchell’s opinion that “changes in military systems come about only through the pressure of public opinion or disaster in war”⁵ might be modified to account for the value of influential supporters at the highest levels of government.

At any rate, with the coming of powered flight in the first decade of this century, events moved slowly at first, then rapidly. Within months after the start of World War I, airplanes were used for reconnaissance and “regulation of artillery.” Airmen soon were flying in close and blazing away at air or ground targets with hand weapons. But matters did not stay that simple for long. Machine-guns were mounted, flying formations improvised, and by 1917 as many as 100 planes were engaging in single aerial battles. In the great Somme offensive a year later, the Allies launched almost 2000 planes in support of their drive. Even so, the decision—or, more accurately, the indecision—at Somme came in the mud rather than in the air. The war ended before air power could be decisively proven in tactical situations, but the air had become an area of battle no less than the ground and the sea. The idea of air supremacy and strategic bombing as decisive factors in warfare had been born and would be developed in the postwar years by pioneers in several countries, notably in the United States by the Army Air Corps leaders.

World War II and later conflicts witnessed the greatest tactical changes in the evolution of air warfare. In a general sense, air tactics added the new dimension of vertical assault to the traditional modes of warfare. Further, as it grew toward full and equal partnership with the other services during the Second World War, the air arm dissolved the neat compartmentalization of tactics (and strategy) into land and sea operations. Warfare became three-dimensional.

In a specific sense, to list only the most obvious examples, air power enabled the “so few” of the Royal Air Force to win the Battle of Britain, helped prevent numerically inferior U.S. forces from being overwhelmed in Korea, and in both Korea and Vietnam has permitted U.S. ground and naval forces to operate free from the ravages of enemy air attacks. Progress in the evolution of air tactics has allowed large bodies of ground forces, covered and supplied from the air, to fight their way out of enemy entrapments. More significant even, as seen in an important lesson of Vietnam, properly conceived air tactics can prevent such an envelopment from ever occurring.

Without attempting a cumbersome catalogue of achievements, one can say, prosaically perhaps yet revealingly so, that air tactics have evolved so fast and so far as to change utterly the face of warfare. The complete decisiveness of air tactics allowed the Israelis to win the Six Day War in 1967. Indecisiveness about the employment of air tactics is one reason we associate the Bay of Pigs with the word “fiasco.” Yet we do not make euphoric claims for the absolute efficacy of air tactics in warfare. For example, the defenders of Dien Bien Phu doubtless could not have been saved in the last days of the siege by conventional air tactics using conventional weapons. They might have been saved, however, if the French had possessed greater air power in Indochina and had brought it to bear in force before the final death spasms of the siege. By that time, an eleventh-hour move by aircraft from American carriers was hardly the answer. But certainly the defense of Khe Sanh is instructive on this point. Because of American air power, that Vietnam outpost, rather than proving another Dien Bien Phu, provided the chance to attract and kill more than ten thousand of the enemy. This lesson—the need to employ air power in force, in time, and at points of our own choosing—holds special meaning today, as the Air Force assumes the residual element role in protecting our forces as they withdraw from Vietnam.

command and control

The third element to be considered has been discussed widely since the term became familiar in the days following the Cuban missile crisis. Actually, the concept of command and control can be traced back at least to the time of Alexander the Great, who had an elaborate communications system of battlefield messengers and signaling procedures using smoke and fire. His chief methods of command, though, were by voice, trumpet, and spear movement. The Mongols later made their contribution by introducing black and white signal flags. Field telegraph was used extensively during the Civil War; yet military communications remained generally crude up to the time of the Second World War. This fact is remarkable in light of the veritable revolution that took place in communications during the late nineteenth century: within twenty years, Bell invented the telephone, Marconi the wireless telegraph, and Edison the radio vacuum tube. Despite these advances, however, communications were notoriously poor during the Spanish-American War, and even into the 1930s U.S. officers were required to know semaphore. Use of messengers and signal flags was standard practice at the outbreak of World War II. 

Today, it is well known that command and control extends “from the White House to the American servicemen in the remotest corners of the world.”⁶ Not so well known are the implications of this system. They are immense. Imagine, for instance, the meaning to history had President Madison been able to notify General Jackson at New Orleans that battle with the British was unnecessary, since peace had been declared two weeks earlier. The result would very likely have been no Jacksonian era.

The implications of modern command and control systems are no less staggering. When the President can communicate directly and almost instantaneously with U.S. forces in the field, the way is paved for experiencing great advantage—and under some circumstances great harm. Advantage can come from removing decision-making power from the heat and irrationality of the trouble spot, where actions might tend to be precipitate, to a place where the problem can be studied by experts, in perspective and the cool of reason. Such an approach is essential in situations that might easily lead to an undesired confrontation. However, harm can also be the bitter fruit of such practice. This is especially likely when too much psychic distance is achieved and the experts are so far removed from the focal point of action that they lose touch. We do not necessarily learn to “tell the dancer from the dance” by leaving the ballroom.

In any event, the speed of communications in the command and control system has deeply influenced our national policy. The use of air power, already attractive for its speed, flexibility, and range, is made even more attractive when it can virtually be brought to bear on crises as they begin to develop. A case in point is President Johnson’s response to the situation in the Dominican Republic. Having received a series of urgent cables from the American Ambassador, the President was able to discern at once the urgency of the moment. His response was, of course, to land Marines from the fleet offshore and later to airlift in military forces to protect American lives and property in the face of violence and disorder. Within days the government was convinced that the revolution had been subverted by Communists—a matter that became a disputed point of fact. The President later credited U.S. intervention with allowing the revolutionary leaders to return to prominent roles, thereby lessening chances for a Communist take-over. 

“Time,” the great commanders Wellington and Nelson agreed, “is everything.” The wise and decisive use of time is a chief justification of command and control. Through this system the President is given time to comprehend the situation and judge the appropriate action. This being done, he can communicate his decision to his commanders at the speed of light. If, however, the decision is to be implemented, the command and control system must be made survivable to the lowest echelon. One of the main tasks today is to concentrate on this problem of survivability. It will avail us nothing to be able to turn on bulbs at the speed of light if the lamp itself is destroyed.

weaponry

Destruction in warfare is a direct function of weaponry. Man’s first weapon was probably the stick or club, which was quite effective at close quarters but obviously limited in range. Major advances in range and destructive power came with the rock, the sling, and the bow and arrow in the late Stone Age. One could now strike out many yards and, if a good shot, inflict casualties as quickly as he could reload. Still, change in ground weaponry was slow, and it was thousands of years later at Crécy (1346) before the bow came into its own as a decisive instrument of war. The English longbow had an effective range of 250 yards and could be fired about as quickly as any weapon to appear until the time of the Gatling machine gun some 500 years later.

The twentieth century has witnessed a rapid increase in ground firepower, but the weapon range of the individual soldier is still scaled in hundreds of yards, while artillery reaches out thousands of yards. The modern army attains farthest extension through its air arm, with use of the helicopter. Although the helicopter’s range is measured in hundreds of miles, it, like land weapons, is highly vulnerable to attack from the air and ground.

By way of comparison, the range of our strategic aircraft and missiles is intercontinental, leaving no point on the earth’s surface inaccessible to them. And their destructive power is many times greater than that of the largest conventional artillery piece.

As for naval weaponry, the dominant vessel for 2100 years was the galley, which was essentially nothing more than a troop carrier. Even long after the advent of gunpowder and the broadside cannon, destruction at sea was achieved mainly by the ramming and boarding of seaborne armies. Well into the nineteenth century the most common weapon for sailors was the sword or cutlass. The appearance of the torpedo, the rifled cannon, and the ironclad marked significant advances in naval weaponry. But the greatest advances came in this century with widespread use of the submarine, which conceptually dates back to sketches by Leonardo da Vinci, and the more modern aircraft carrier. The German U-boat offensive very nearly took Britain out of World War I, while Pearl Harbor will always serve as a grim reminder of the destructive power of the undetected carrier. Both these weapons continue to pack a lethal offensive punch; today, however, we think of the aircraft carrier and the ballistic missile submarine as weapons of aerospace warfare as well as naval warfare weapons.

It is difficult to guide a discussion of air weaponry between the Scylla of triteness and the Charybdis of panic. In popular thought, the subject is usually reduced to talk of “nuclear holocaust” and “the bomb.” This approach, of course, is not new. As Noble Frankland observes, “Bombing has throughout its history evoked a powerful emotional response and about it . . . people have tended to prefer to feel than to know.”⁷ We must pierce this fog of language and emotion if anything substantial is to be said.

Two facts clearly concern the evolution of air weaponry. First, the capacities of offensive air vehicles have increased faster than those of the defense. In the early days of aviation, slow-moving dirigibles and aircraft were relatively easy targets for faster aircraft—and at low altitudes, even for ground fire. Between the world wars came the promise that “the bomber will always get through,” and in World War II most of them did. Even in the disastrous raid on Schweinfurt, about 70 percent of the bombers penetrated to the target. The advent of missiles and nuclear weapons has vastly complicated the task of the defense. In order to save the defended target, it is necessary to destroy all the attacking vehicles. If the attack is massive and executed by sophisticated aerospace weapons, the defense’s task is close to impossible.

This is not to say that air defense has become superfluous—only exceedingly difficult. For now, the crest of technology is being ridden by the offense. But technology, whose hallmark is radical and sudden change, might unexpectedly alter the present tide at any time. To save ourselves from such an undertow, the defensive guards must be kept on duty.

The second point concerning air weaponry relates to its vast potential destructive power. It has evolved from the hand bomb, to the high-explosive “block buster,” to the nuclear “city buster.” Nuclear weapons, as the wise affirm, “have not radically altered the trend of international politics”;⁸ but their immense destructiveness has altered the trend of warfare. Advances in air weaponry have made the idea of nuclear war so terrible that it is thinkable only after declaring it unthinkable. Even so, the dreadful potential of air weapons and our years of nuclear advantage did not bring us peace. We can only hope that the time of nuclear parity will not bring us war. The potential destructiveness of air weapons must be kept precisely that—a potential.

mobility

The last element to be discussed, that of mobility, can be treated with appropriate dispatch. Land and naval forces have always shared a common range of speed. Until fairly recent times, the unopposed army or navy could push forward at three to five miles per hour. With mechanization and various forms of the internal combustion engine, this figure has been raised perhaps tenfold. In the last 5000 years of recorded warfare, then, man has learned to move between points A and B in two and a half hours rather than in an entire day. Yet he remains encumbered by two immutable facts. First, speed and maneuverability are inhibited by an opposing force, especially for surface forces, which must operate on a two-dimensional plane. Second, the laws of nature dictate the medium in which these forces move. Soldiers do not walk on water, and ships do not steam over hill and dale. Thus, terrain and the opposition allowing, armies have access to only 30 percent of the earth, leaving the rest of the surface and the ocean depths to the navy.

Both nature and technology have been kinder to air mobility. Nature allows us a medium, the atmosphere, which impinges upon every point of the earth’s surface. In a purely theoretical sense, that medium projects outward to the regions of near and deep space. The regions of space do not necessarily represent Air Force domain, but they do represent infinite stretches in which infinite maneuverability might be exercised. Space is not our private ocean, but it is the abstract sea upon which we border and the vast approach which is ours to guard. For this task, the greatest possible mobility is required.

Technology has given air forces great mobility. The Wright brothers’ “Flyer” attained a speed of 30 miles per hour. The fastest modern jet craft has increased that figure by almost a hundredfold.

Although our overall air mobility is great, we need ever to improve it. Like Lewis Carroll’s figures, we must go faster in order to stand still. This is especially true since the adversary who wants to remove us permanently from Wonderland can be as unreasoning as the Mad Hatter.

In conclusion, we would leave you with these three thoughts. First, air power is potentially decisive. Its flexibility can permit the necessary concentration of effort and firepower either in support of friendly surface forces or as an independent thrust against hostile surface forces. Air power can control the air as well as deny land and sea forces control of the earth’s surface. Because of this potentially pervasive power, the Air Force acts as one of the nation’s primary deterrents against both limited and general war.

Second, the unique capacities and vast importance of air power demand that it receive our constant attention and vigilance, not only in this country but also abroad. A radically improved Soviet tank or cruiser would not tip the present balance of power; however, a decidedly superior Soviet missile or antimissile might.

Lastly, in terms of strategy, tactics, command and control, weaponry, and mobility, air power has worked a revolution in the evolution of warfare. In seventy years, the space of a single lifetime, man has soared from Kitty Hawk to the Sea of Tranquility. Yet, in the evolution of warfare, at least, things will never be tranquil again. Because of air power, to borrow from Lord Grey, new lights and ideas have appeared all over the traditional modes of warfare; they shall not be extinguished in our lifetime.

Office of Air Force History

Notes

1. Quoted in Robert F. Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: A History of Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force, 1907-1964 (Maxwell AFB, Alabama: Air University, 1971), Vol. 1, p. 139.

2. General Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Sheila Fischer (Rome: Rivista Aeronautics, 1958), p. 13.

3. Charles A. Lindbergh, “Revolutionary Change Wrought by Aviation,” Air Corps News Letter, 20 (February 15, 1937), p. 13.

4. “Tactics,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 1963 ed.

5. Quoted in Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), Vol. 1, p. 24.

6. “Can Vulnerability Menace Command and Control?” Armed Forces Management, July 1969, p. 40.

7. Noble Frankland, “The Combined Bomber Offensive: Classical and Revolutionary, Combined and Divided, Planned and Fortuitous,” in Command and Commanders in Modern Warfare (USAF Academy, n.d.), p. 283.

8. Raymond Aron, On War, trans. Terence Kilmartin (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1968), p. 3.

Contributors

Major General Robert N. Ginsburgh (USMA; Ph.D., Harvard University) is Chief of Air Force History. He previously served at West Point, the Council on Foreign Relations, Air University, Hq USAF, Offices of Secretaries of the Air Force and Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, State Department, National Security Council, and NATO. He is author of U.S. Military Strategy in the Sixties (1965) and the editor of U.S. Military Strategy in the 70’s (1970) and The Nixon Doctrine and Military Strategy (1971). He is a graduate of Air University’s three professional schools, Industrial College of the Armed Forces, and National War College.

Major Edd D. Wheeler (USAF; Ph.D., Emory University) is Executive Officer, Hq 7/13AF (PACAF), where he has also been command historian. He has been a Titan II missile crew commander, a missile programmer of Officer Personnel at Hq SAC, and a faculty member at Air Force Academy, Major Wheeler, a Distinguished Graduate of Squadron Officer School, has also completed Air Command and Staff College, Industrial College of the Armed Forces, and Air War College. He has published articles in several professional journals.

Disclaimer

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.

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