The Nation’s Airy Navy

I’m going to do something I very rarely do. In this post I will quote William J. Luti’s Wall Street Journal op-ed in full:

Poets may not strike our Operation Epic Fury Navy pilots as aviation visionaries. But in the 1830s, Alfred Tennyson penned an astonishingly accurate portent of events: “For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see / Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be . . . / Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew / From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.”

As I wrote in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings 34 years ago, “the English poet laureate could not, of course, have predicted the extent to which the nation’s airy navies would dominate the nature of war in the 20th century. Nor could he have appreciated the paralytic effect the modern extension of his ‘ghastly dew’ would have on a Middle East nation and its million-man military machine.” That was the Desert Storm air campaign.

Epic Fury is the technological and tactical offspring of Desert Storm, whose air campaign was history’s first attempt to achieve the political and military aims of war from the air. Until now, Desert Storm was the closest the U.S. had come to achieving the visions of the early air-power prophets. These men—Gens. Giulio Douhet, Billy Mitchell, Hugh Trenchard and Alexander de Seversky—theorized, if a bit prematurely, that seizing command of the air was essential and even sufficient for victory.

And as air-power legend and retired U.S. Air Force Col. John A. Warden III aptly described in his 1991 essay “Applying Air Power in the 21st Century,” Desert Storm was history’s first example of what he called hyperwar—war that capitalized on high technology, unprecedented precision, strategic surprise through stealth, tactical surprise through defense suppression, and the “ability to bring all of an enemy’s key operational and strategic nodes under near-simultaneous attack.”

It was also, as Mr. Warden theorized, history’s first “inside to outside” war. Past conflicts—due largely to a considerable lag between U.S. doctrine and technology—began with the outermost defensive ring and painfully worked toward the innermost ring of the capital, he wrote. Even World War II’s famed U.S. Norden Mark XV bombsight wasn’t accurate enough to target precisely an enemy’s industrial capacity to wage war. Hence the mass fire-bombing raids over Japan and Germany, which killed hundreds of thousands.

Epic Fury is Desert Storm on steroids. Today we’re flying fewer sorties than Desert Storm but attacking more aim points with each sortie. Only about 10% of Desert Storm munitions were precision-guided. Today some 90% are. The tactical skill with which our aviators and missile defenders are using advanced U.S. tech is astounding. Particularly impressive is our dismantling of Russian and Chinese-supplied advanced air-defense systems. The implications for deterrence are immense.

The revolution in American technology introduced in the Desert Storm air campaign partially solved this challenge. Due largely to the 1970s’ development of the “offset strategy”—using American technological superiority to offset the Soviet Union’s numerical advantage—we were able to penetrate Iraqi air defenses with stealth and defense suppression to put short-range precision-guided weapons on targets that mattered.

Desert Storm shocked the Chinese communists. No longer could the Politburo rely on centuries-old doctrine of strategic withdrawal from the periphery to the interior, seeking better ground from which to repel an invader. It also complicated their plans for Taiwan and the South China Sea. By demonstrating our ability to break through air defenses and “go downtown” on day one, we forced the Chinese to adapt their strategy.

What we lacked in Desert Storm was standoff capability, meaning weapons that allowed America to attack targets from a safe distance. The Chinese knew it. Recognizing that geography still matters, they extended their defensive periphery seaward, initially to the first island chain, from Japan to the South China Sea, and then to the second chain and beyond. They began a decades-long pursuit of a new doctrine supported by new weapons to prevent the U.S. Navy and Air Force from operating within their extended periphery.

This created near-panic in the U.S. defense establishment. Visions of Chinese forces sinking American carriers as we approached China’s extended periphery filled U.S. analytical salons. But American military and tactical ingenuity was already on the case. By 2000 we had fielded the first generation of precision standoff weapons and further honed our missile defenses, electronic attack, and penetrating stealth capability. Our next generation of ground- and air-launched extended-range standoff weapons will help cement our competitive advantage inside China’s—or any adversary’s—defensive periphery.

Like geography, numbers still matter. China’s unprecedented military buildup demonstrates the military maxim that quantity has a quality all its own. President Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget begins the urgent task of building more ships, aircraft, weapons and unmanned systems to deter this threat.

Operation Epic Fury will show if we are edging closer to the early air-power prophets’ vision or if air power in support of maneuvering ground forces remains the key to victory. We don’t yet know the answer. What isn’t in question is that Epic Fury has restored American deterrence. Should deterrence fail, the Chinese communists should be afraid, very afraid.

I want to emphasize that I continue to oppose this war on legal, moral, and prudential grounds. That said, there is no substitute for actual combat application for proving military doctrine and on a day-by-day basis our military is verifying the soundness of our military doctrine in Operation Epic Fury.

On a similar basis Russia’s doctrine has been found wanting in Ukraine. It is learning but very slowly. China’s military doctrine is almost completely unproven. That’s what the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership should fear.

China has the ability to expand the size of its fleet and to build missiles and drones. Those capabilities far exceed ours. That has been demonstrated. Whether the People’s Army has the ability to use them is a great unknown.