Air University Review, September-October 1986
What are the most important dates in the history of American air power? That is one of those intriguing questions for which there are no right or wrong answers, only opinions. Popular choices might include dates for the Wright brothers' first flight, General William "Billy" Mitchell's demonstration bombing of the battleship Ostfriesland (or his court-martial), any year in either of the world wars, or the dates for a number of significant events in space exploration. Few of us would include among our choices the year 1965, even though that fateful year marked a dramatic turning point for American air power. In 1965, American air power began the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign in North Vietnam. Before that campaign began, American airmen were convinced they understood how best to use air power to achieve decisive results in war. Since 1965 and the failure of the Rolling Thunder campaign, American airmen have been unsure of their beliefs, and the Air Force has wandered in a doctrinal wilderness.
The doctrine that the U.S. Air Force embraced so confidently as 1965 began can be traced directly to its godfather, General William "Billy" Mitchell, the firebrand prophet of air power. Although Mitchell's views changed significantly over time, the culmination of his doctrinal thinking is found in his statement before the House Committee on Military Affairs just four days after he resigned from the U.S. Army in 1926. Mitchell claimed that air power could strike directly the enemy's "vital centers" of production which were essential to the enemy's warmaking capability. In essence, Mitchell advocated the use of air power to wage economic warfare, to destroy the enemy's means of production, and thus to destroy the enemy's capability to wage modern warfare.1
Mitchell's court-martial just months before his resignation from the service was a crushing blow to American airmen. In spite of the obvious dangers to their own military careers, the young airmen who were Mitchell's apostles continued to preach his version of air power doctrine. During the 1930s, the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama, was the center of air power doctrine development. The faculty members were the heirs of Mitchell's ideas, many having served with Mitchell during the turbulent 1920s. It is not surprising that the concepts developed by the Tactical School faculty were elaborations of Mitchell's seminal ideas. A lecture by Captain (later Lieutenant General) Harold L. George best summed up the Tactical School concepts:
... nations are susceptible to defeat by the interruption of [their] economic web. It is possible that the moral collapse brought about by the break-up of this closely knit web would be sufficient; but connected therewith is the industrial fabric which is absolutely essential for modern war.2
The ideas promulgated by the Tactical School faculty were encouraged and then made acceptable by technological developments. While Mitchell's ideas often seemed fantastic in the 1920s, the development of high-speed, long-range, heavy bombers in the 1930s gave the pronouncements of the Tactical School considerable credibility. Moreover, these revolutionary ideas spread and took hold because they were broadcast in a school environment in which the students were the most promising officers in the Army Air Corps. Perhaps more important, members of the faculty of the Tactical School were the best of the best, many of whom went on later to important senior command and staff positions during World War II.3
The Army Air Corps (later the Army Air Forces) entered World War II with a doctrine that emphasized the decisive role of strategic bombardment in modern warfare. The other roles of air power were not ignored in the doctrine, as the Tactical School "readily acknowledged the usefulness of air forces in support of surface forces."4 However, the spotlight was on strategic bombardment because the airmen believed that striking the enemy's "vital centers" could lead to quick and decisive victory. This belief, inherited by airmen and emphasized over the years, helps explain why the United States entered World War II with the two best heavy bombers in the world (the B-17 and the B-24) but could not field a first-class fighter aircraft until 1943.
Strategic bombing doctrine was put to the acid test against both Germany and Japan. The results have been a subject of considerable controversy since 1945. Skeptics pointed out that victory had been neither quick nor easy and noted that in spite of heavy bombing strikes of the Axis "vital centers," victory had still required the defeat of the deployed Axis armies and navies. Airmen, however, saw the results differently and believed themselves vindicated. They took particular pride in the results of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, an exhaustive study conducted by a "blue-ribbon" panel that gathered much of its evidence from on-the-scene investigations. As the Summary Reports of the Bombing Survey reveal, the panel concluded that Allied an- power had been decisive in Western Europe and had brought the enemy's economy to virtual collapse. In regard to Japan, the verdict was much the same; the survey panel concluded that the Japanese would have Surrendered before the end of 1945 even if atomic bombs had not used.5
But the atomic bombs had been used. Their destructive capacity seemed to offer airmen the ultimate tool for strategic bombardment. Mated with long-range bombers to form "atomic air power," airmen believed atomic weapons would bring the ideas of Mitchell to complete fruition.
The Korean War challenged the principle of strategic bombing, but the American military establishment considered the struggle in Korea to be an aberration, a war in which the military was hamstrung and frustrated by timid civilian leadership. The only lasting lesson gleaned from that conflict was expressed in the angry call for "No more Koreas!"
In the Korean aftermath, the newly independent Air Force produced its first doctrinal manuals amid attempts by the Eisenhower administration to reduce defense spending. Administration officials believed (encouraged by airmen) that atomic air power was a method of preventing or fighting wars on the cheap. As a result, the entire national defense structure relied more and more on nuclear weapons and air power to deter not only major wars but also more limited assaults on American vital interests. By 1956, Air Force Secretary Donald Quarles was professing the idea that if one could deter a general war, one could also deter or win small wars. Further, Quarles made a not-too-subtle threat by declaring, "From now on, potential aggressors must reckon with the air-atomic power which can be brought to bear immediately in whatever strength, and against whatever targets . . . 6
Air Force basic doctrinal manuals published during the 1950s reflected the continuing belief in strategic bombardment as the most decisive use of air power and as a tool usable across the spectrum of conflict. The refrains of Mitchell and the Air Corps Tactical School were repeated again and again in the context of a nuclear world and were encouraged by the continuing policies of the Eisenhower administration. In 1957, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson told Congress that " . . . we are depending on atomic weapons for the defense of the nation. Our basic defense policy is based on the use of such atomic weapons as would be militarily feasible and usable in a smaller war."7
The Air Force was the beneficiary of such attitudes, and it received more than the lion's share of the defense budget during much of the 1950s. The Strategic Air Command became the dominant command within the Air Force. The tactical air forces reflected the trend as they became ministrategic commands equipped with fighter-bombers designed to deliver nuclear weapons. Even aircrew training missions in the tactical air forces concentrated on nuclear weapon delivery.
In spite of the interest of President John F. Kennedy in "unconventional" warfare, Air Force doctrine remained almost unchanged between Kennedy's inauguration in 1961 and the start of Rolling Thunder in 1965. The 1964 version of basic doctrine, the doctrine with which the Air Force would enter the Vietnam War, paid only lip service to anything more than general or tactical nuclear warfare. Very little had changed since 1961, when General Curtis LeMay could say, "I think we have been consistent in our concepts since … 1935. Our basic doctrine has remained generally unchanged since that time."8
Two fundamental, if unstated, assumptions formed the foundation for that doctrine. The most fundamental assumption was that American wars would be fought to destroy the enemy. The objective of strategic bombing was to destroy the economic and social fabric of a nation in order to destroy the enemy's ability and will to continue the fight. This most fundamental assumption fit nicely with the traditional American view of war as a crusade waged to destroy a well-defined enemy.
The second major assumption undergirding Air Force doctrine was that America's enemies would be modern industrialized nations. Strategic bombing was based on the idea of destroying the enemy's ability to produce the wherewithal of modern war. It was economic warfare geared to the destruction of the vital production facilities of an industrialized state. Even the interdiction mission, regarded throughout the development of air power doctrine as the second most important air power mission (a poor second, however), assumed that the enemy would be a modern industrialized state. Traditional interdiction efforts featured attacks on rail yards, highway and rail bridges, and other presumed transportation chokepoints typical of industrially sophisticated states.
The decision in 1965 to bomb North Vietnam led directly to a clash between civilian perceptions and objectives in the war and military advice about how to best conduct the war (doctrine). Moreover, neither of the two basic assumptions of Air Force doctrine proved valid in Vietnam. The results were twofold: first, the initiation of Rolling Thunder, a bombing campaign in North Vietnam far different from that recommended by the military; second, the creation of a crisis, of sorts, for American air power doctrine.
For a variety of reasons, the American objective in Vietnam––particularly in the bombing campaign––was not to destroy North Vietnam. The basic American military objective was to "get Hanoi and North Vietnam (DRV) support and direction removed from South Vietnam"9 In 1965, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara defined General William Westmoreland's objective in South Vietnam by asking Westmoreland "how many additional American and Allied troops would be required to convince the enemy he would be unable to win."10 In regard to objectives in the North, Rolling Thunder was part of an overall program to coerce and entice the North Vietnamese into abandoning their efforts. Senior government officials viewed the bombing campaign as a method to signal resolve to the North Vietnamese while slowly increasing the pressure as carefully controlled and graduated attacks increased in intensity and struck more and more important targets.
The military, meanwhile, had been planning a very different kind of bombing campaign since early 1964. Eventually codified in CINCPAC OPLAN 37-64, the plan called for a crushing attack on 94 targets, each of which was selected on the basis of three criteria: reducing DRV support for operations in South Vietnam, limiting DRV capability to intervene directly in the South, and destroying the DRV's capability to continue as an "industrially viable state."11
The criteria for selecting targets on the 94 Target List and the JCS plan for striking those targets indicate clearly that the Joint Chiefs desired to wage a classic strategic air campaign against North Vietnam and a complementary interdiction campaign. The proposed method of attack was to gain air superiority by attacking the principal enemy airfields; destroying the enemy's petroleum, oil, and lubricant facilities; and then destroying the enemy's industrial web. At the same time, interdiction efforts would destroy those war materials already en route to South Vietnam. In essence, the military planned to take the World War II air campaign in Europe and transplant it twenty years later into North Vietnam.
The conflict between American civilian perceptions and objectives and American military doctrine continued throughout the Rolling Thunder campaign. Air power doctrine called for the massive application of strategic bombing to destroy the enemy and its warmaking capability. The senior government leadership sought not to destroy but to persuade the enemy to cease and desist. President Lyndon Johnson characterized the dilemma as the difference between seduction and rape.12 Throughout the Rolling Thunder campaign, the military pressed again and again for permission to increase the intensity of the bombing and to strike more important targets. Eventually this permission was granted, but slowly and gradually as Washington kept a tight grip on every facet of the campaign.
The second major assumption of American air power, too, was called into question in the Vietnam situation. Vietnam was anything but a modern industrialized state. The North Vietnamese industrial economy was tiny even by Asian standards, producing only about 12 percent of the country's total gross national product. There were but a handful of major industrial targets. When the first targeting studies were done by the JCS, analysts found only eight industrial installations worth listing. The industry that did exist made only minor contributions to North Vietnam's military capabilities. Most of its military equipment, including all of its heavy equipment, was imported.13
Rolling Thunder continued through mid-1968. The President kept a tight personal control on the campaign, slowly increasing the bombing pressure and expanding the list of targets that the airmen were allowed to strike. But those targets which the military considered most vital in Hanoi and Haiphong remained off limits, as did important interdiction targets close to the Chinese border. The campaign against approved targets was something less than overwhelming as the President imposed pauses in the campaign to allow the North Vietnamese to seek a negotiated settlement without losing "face." In the end, Rolling Thunder did not achieve its objectives. It did not "seduce" the North Vietnamese to the conference table, and it did not convince the North Vietnamese that they could not win. One must also wonder what kind of American resolve it signaled to the North Vietnamese.
In the aftermath of Rolling Thunder and the Vietnam War, recriminations have flown from two directions. Airmen have blamed the failure of the bombing campaign on timid civilian leadership that would not "turn air power loose" in 1965 as it was turned loose during the intensive bombing of the Linebacker campaigns in 1972. On the other hand, airmen have been accused of not understanding the nature of the war, the nature of the enemy, and the restraint required to wage limited war and keep it limited.
Although airmen resist the thought, a few of them have been known to voice the suspicion that their traditional doctrine was irrelevant in Vietnam. The two fundamental assumptions of air power doctrine were clearly incorrect in the Vietnam situation. The object of the war was not to destroy the enemy, and the enemy was not an industrialized state. There is also no empirical evidence that had Rolling Thunder been conducted differently (i.e., if air power had been "turned loose"), the outcome would have been materially different. In any case, President Johnson was not about to give in to the wishes of the airmen in 1965, despite the fact that the same proposals for a short, sharp bombing campaign of great intensity were offered to him over and over again. It seemed that airmen were so mesmerized by their doctrine that they had little else to offer even though the foundations of that doctrine were not relevant in Vietnam and even though it quickly became obvious that they would not be allowed to execute their doctrine.
In the aftermath of the war, there is also the lingering suspicion that the war in Vietnam was not an aberration that can be passed off with a simplistic call for "No more Vietnams!" At least in some of the professional military literature, there is the growing realization that such "revolutionary" wars are not just conventional wars writ small. Rather, they are qualitatively different from conventional wars, just as conventional wars are qualitatively different from nuclear wars. Even worse, many experts believe that such "revolutionary" wars are far more likely to demand American involvement (in some capacity) than are any other kinds of conflict.
The result of the confusion and suspicions about the role of air power in the war against North Vietnam has been two decades of confusion for Air Force doctrine. Before 1965, right or wrong, airmen thought that they knew how best to use air power in war. Air Force doctrinal manuals published since the end of the Vietnam War reveal that, since 1965, airmen have been unsure of themselves, to say the least.
The first thing one notices about post-Vietnam basic doctrinal manuals is that the Air Force has largely ignored the war in Vietnam. The manuals concentrate almost exclusively on theater-level "conventional" warfare and are clearly centered on the European case. The attempt to forget Vietnam is not limited to doctrine. Consider, for example, that thirteen years after World War II, the Air Force had published an exhaustive seven-volume official history of the war written and edited by respected historians. Thirteen years after the end of the American combat role in Vietnam, the official Air Force history has yet to be written, with the exception of a few isolated volumes on disparate subjects.
The second thing one notices about the basic doctrinal manuals published during the 1970s is how muddled Air Force thinking became about some of the most fundamental tenets of warfare. Even the venerable "principles of war" were not exempt from tinkering. The time-honored principle of "economy of force," for example, was interpreted in economic terms rather than stated in traditional terms of mission priorities––a particularly vexing change when one considers that the traditional interpretation of economy of force is singularly important to the effective application of air power. The unmistakable impression of such gaffes was that the Air Force was not serious about its doctrine and that those who wrote the basic doctrine manuals were ill-equipped to do so. General Mitchell and his heirs at the Air Corps Tactical School would have been appalled.
The third thing one notices about the basic doctrinal manuals written in the 1970s is that they contain very little information useful to airmen in the field. They appear to be written for use by harried Air Staffers involved in never-ending budget battles within the Pentagon. Although disappointing, this trend in doctrinal "development" was not altogether surprising. The long struggle in Southeast Asia had diverted funding for new weapon systems, making budget monies for modernization programs very urgent needs for all of the armed services after the war. The culmination of the trend was the so-called comic-book basic doctrinal manual published in 1979. This manual was visually appealing but wallowed in generalities, unsubstantiated assertions, and irrelevant quotations. It was a triumph of form over substance, an air power doctrine manual that contained almost nothing about the nature of war, the art of war, or the employment of air power.
The year 1979 was the nadir of Air Force doctrine. The basic doctrine manual published in that year clearly reflected neglect, misunderstanding, and general confusion. The years since 1979 have been marked by considerable progress, spurred on by a fortunate confluence of events that were, perhaps, a reaction to the doctrinal muddle. The encouraging events may have gained impetus from the publication of the first balanced and scholarly military histories and critiques of the war in Southeast Asia as the 1970s drew to a close.14
A review of the professional journals beginning about 1979 reveals a spate of critical and thought-provoking articles centering on Air Force doctrine. Younger officers began challenging the current dogma, calling into question not only what the doctrine espoused but also how the doctrine was formulated. Not all of the "young Turks" agreed with one another, but they created in the professional journals, particularly the Air University Review, a climate of intellectual ferment.
At Air University, which had once been the center of Air Force doctrine development, both Air War College and Air Command and Staff College began implementing revolutionary changes in their curricula. The theme was to "put war back into the war college" (and the command and staff college). The study of military history, theory, and doctrine––which had virtually disappeared from both schools––suddenly reappeared as subjects of primary focus. In addition, Air University formed a new organization, the Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research, and Education, which has as its primary mission the development of original thought about the use of air power and is charged to assist the Air Staff in the development of doctrine.
Meanwhile, the Air Staff began assembling a team of more qualified personnel (comprising at least in part, graduates of the revamped Air University schools) to direct doctrine development efforts and produce the doctrine manuals. The quality of these personnel has continued to rise to this date. One of the direct results of this effort was the publication of the 1984 version of Air Force basic doctrine. Although this latest version of the manual has many serious flaws, it is a quantum improvement over the 1979 version.
The improvement is noticeable and admirable, but the Air Force remains in the doctrinal wilderness. Strangely, however, our experience in the wilderness, particularly since 1979, has had a beneficial side. Amid the confusion, accusations, and suspicions that surrounded air power doctrine since 1965, perceptive airmen have begun to realize that war is not the simplistic affair visualized by the pioneers of air power doctrine. Wars are not homogenized happenings fought against one kind of enemy with the same kinds of vulnerabilities. We have begun to realize that there are no magic answers which air power can deliver and that, in fact, war is a multifaceted phenomenon fought in three dimensions.
The years in the wilderness have led to intellectual ferment and turmoil. We are asking questions about the very nature of warfare rather than limiting our investigations to air power alone. We are now arguing about how our doctrine should be written, about whether we should have different doctrines for different kinds of wars, and about how to integrate Air Force doctrine with the doctrines of other services. In short, we are beginning to seek answers to the truly difficult questions, questions rarely asked twenty years ago. Today, the most pressing need is to continue the ferment and encourage the debate. There are those who would stifle the debate to protect their own bureaucratic positions and political interests. However, those seeking a more effective force realize that the intellectual ferment must be encouraged and the dialectic process must continue. The agenda for the debate remains crowded, and the subject matter continues to be difficult and contentious.
After two decades in the wilderness, do we know where we are? Yes, we do––we are still in the wilderness. But we are beginning to get our bearings so that we can find our way out. Perhaps in the foreseeable future, we will again be as confident as we were before 1965 but without the naivete' of that earlier era.
Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research, and Education
Maxwell AFB, Alabama
Notes
1. Robert Frank Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: A History of Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force 1907-1964 (Maxwell AFB, Alabama: Air University Press, 1971), p. 28.
2. Major General Haywood S. Hansell, Jr., The Air Plan that Defeated Hitler (Atlanta: Higgins-McArthur Longino and Porter, 1973), pp. 32-33.
3. Hansell, in The Air Plan, lists several such faculty members, including the later Lieutenant General Harold Lee George, Major General Robert Olds, Brigadier General Kenneth L. Walker, Major General Claire L. Chennault, General Muir S. Fairchild, and, of course, Hansell himself.
4. Hansell, p. 6.
5. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (European War) and (Pacific War) (Washington: Government Printing Office, 30 September 1945 and July 1946), pp. 22 and 26 respectively.
6. Futrell, p. 227.
7. Ibid., p. 232.
8. Ibid., p. 405.
9. William Bundy, "Draft Position Paper on Southeast Asia" (29 November 1964), The Pentagon Papers (New York Times Edition), edited by Gerald Gold, Allan M. Siegal, and Samuel Abt (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), pp. 373-78.
10. General William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), pp. 373-78.
11. United States-Vietnam Relations 1945-1967 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1971), vol. IV, chap. 3, p. 3.
12. Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), pp. 264-65.
13. Raphael Littauer and Norman Uphoff, editors, The Air War in Indochina (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 37.
14. Two of the best books to appear at this time were Guenter Lewy's America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press) and Dave Richard Palmer's Summons of the Trumpet(Presidio Press), both published in 1978.
Colonel Dennis M. Drew (B.A., Willamette University; M.S., University of Wyoming, M.A., University of Alabama) is Director, Airpower Research Institute (ARI), Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research, and Education (CADRE), Maxwell AFB, Alabama. He has served as ARI's Deputy Director for Research, chief of the Strategy and Doctrine Branch and the Warfare Studies Division at Air Command and Staff College, and missile operations staff officer and missile combat crew commander/instructor and evaluator in Strategic Air Command. Colonel Drew is author of Nuclear Winter and National Security: Implications for Future Policy(1984). He is a Distinguished Graduate of Air Command and Staff College and a graduate of Squadron Officer School and Air War College.
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.
Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor