Strategic Air Power in Desert Storm (review)

A detailed history of strategic airpower in the first Persian Gulf War is especially timely as the second Gulf War concludes. Major John Olsen of the Royal Norwegian Air Force with a Ph.D. from De Montfort University (England) does an excellent job of setting the stage for the first conflict and then discussing in authoritative detail the strategic air portion of that war.

Soon after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the U.S. commander in the region, General Norman Schwarzkopf, began military planning to liberate Kuwait. He rejected his staff's plan for a massive ground assault. Instead, he turned to the Air Force and asked for a strategic air plan that would produce results with less bloodshed. An obscure colonel named John Warden drew up such a plan, dubbed "Instant Thunder," that envisioned an overwhelming air attack against Iraqi centers of gravity: leadership, communications, transportation, electrical power, and weapons of mass destruction. Warden's emphasis on speed and power was reflected in his choice of a name—he wanted to distinguish his concept from the disastrous graduated response of Vietnam's "Rolling Thunder" air campaign.

The plan was briefed to Schwarzkopf who was delighted; he told Warden to sell it to his air deputy, Lieutenant General Chuck Horner, who had deployed to Saudi Arabia. "Instant Thunder" was soon adapted by Horner and his planners in theater who stretched it, shaped it, added more targets, and made it more practical. Even so, Warden's focus on Iraq's leadership remained. In its most optimistic scenario, "Instant Thunder" predicted that a powerful attack on Iraqi leadership, to include its command and control functions, would paralyze Iraq and ultimately lead to its withdrawal from Kuwait—without the necessity of a ground invasion.

Schwarzkopf and Horner quickly abandoned such optimistic thinking, assuming a ground effort would eventually be necessary. However, they wanted a lengthy air campaign to not only isolate and undermine Saddam's leadership, but to destroy the bulk of the Iraqi army. Their goal was to use airpower to "attrit" the enemy to below 50 percent of their assumed strength before a coalition ground assault took place.

Olsen argues that Warden and his cohorts, who remained in Washington throughout the war but continued to offer back-channel support to Horner's staff in theater, resisted the emphasis on Iraqi ground units—it violated their concept of strategic airpower. They eventually changed this view, but stressed that if the army was to be a key target, then the elite Republican Guard divisions should be the primary focus.

Even this emphasis was rejected. Schwarzkopf's ground commanders were more concerned with the Iraqi units to their immediate front—composed largely of poorly trained and equipped conscripts—than they were about the Republican Guards located far to the rear. The ground generals' first priority was to break through the Iraqi lines; they would cross the Republican Guard bridge when they came to it. As a result, airpower was focused on the front-line divisions, and the Guards were left largely intact. According to Olsen, this was a serious error because it pummeled the very units that might lead a revolt against Saddam, while sparing those that would be used to prevent such a revolt.

Overall, only two percent of the coalition air effort was directed at the leadership targets that Warden had thought so crucial, but Olsen says these strikes were disproportionately effective. Although Saddam survived, he was cut off from his military forces, resulting in a disjointed and ineffective response. Moreover, these strikes so undermined Saddam's authority that they spawned uprisings in both the Kurdish north and Shiite south. Unfortunately, the coalition did nothing to support these revolts, and they were soon crushed by the Republican Guards that had been largely spared from air...