David Axe has an excellent article this morning at his War is Boring blog that is worth a careful read. Topic: the Air Force has decided that killing insurgents from the sky is the best way to go. Yes, I know. Surprising.

The tech-heavy, increasingly irrelevant Air Force is finally making a half-hearted effort to actually contribute to low-tech counter-insurgency fights. But it could do a lot more, according to Major Robert Seifert in a recent piece [ed: .pdf] for Joint Forces Quarterly. First up, the service needs to reconceptualize the enemy, Seifert writes:

Strategists yearn for a center of gravity to attack in order to crush the insurgency, and many claim there is none. They fail to see that the center of gravity is the individual insurgent and the location of his attack. For it is at that location alone, and only for a brief time, that the insurgent we struggle to define is an irrefutable enemy and a definable target. Strategists and tacticians both must look at each insurgent attack in the same light as our grandfathers looked at Germany’s war industry.

MAJ Seifert is a trained and skilled professional. He works at a training wing, producing AC crewmen and I’m sure he’s damned good at his job. But his perception of insurgency (or rebellion, or resistance, or guerrilla warfare) is skewed by his professional attainments. His job and training have taught him to kill people with airplanes, based upon the concept that after you’ve killed enough of them, they give up. Thus he references “Germany’s war.”

When you train people to use a hammer, all jobs look like nails.

It’s hard to define a “center of gravity” in a non-military organization because they don’t function in mass the way armies do. The unique thing about conducting a counter-guerrilla operation during an occupation is that there is a very good likelihood that every time you remove a guerrilla, you create one or two more. And I’ll bet that‘s even more pronounced in a tribal society like Iraq.

David Axe again:

Next, the Air Force must give more freedom to one of its most effective weapons, the AC-130 gunship, to go out and destroy this “industry.” Why gunships? Because they combine a wide range of sensors and weapons in a platform with a long loiter time. It’s a perfect combo for a low-threat environment. The problem is that the Air Force assigns gunships to orbit over specified ground units for hours at a time, whether or not those units are likely to come across any bad guys:

Gunships have their uses. They are great at zipping up a battalion of VC or NVA when your perimeter is under attack and you’re floating flares to keep track of them. That’s organized warfare, and Americans are fairly good at technological force multipliers. But we’ve forgotten the lesson the British never learned until after the Battle of Yorktown: you can’t really defeat a resistance in the field. You have to beat them in their minds and to do this you must remove one of the points of conflict: either make their lives measurably better by your occupation, such as by better paying jobs, improved social nets including better medical care and repaired infrastructure, or go away.

The “center of gravity” is in the mind of each Iraqi – all 23 million of them.

MAJ Seifert’s premise is a variation of the “Douhet Theory of Frightfulness” as that scheme of strategic bombing was termed by magazine writers in the 1930s. You can kill people from the air but you cannot make them give up without a great deal of killing. Minds and spirits are far more resistant than walls, as the Allies (and the Luftwaffe) learned during “Germany’s war.” Strategic bombing of Germany and its conquered territories began shortly after the war began in 1939 and continued right up to the bitter end in 1945. The Germans surrendered because the Red Army was in Berlin, not because their cities had been reduced to rubble.

MAJ Seifert:

My concept is no different than how police forces are used. Do cop cars sit in the same spot and defend a neighborhood? Or do they roam around looking for bad guys all the while being on call to EVERY citizen in their jurisdiction. Cops are the best weapon against bad guys and gunships are the best weapon against insurgents. Another example is F-15 employment. Do F-15s sit in the same spot defending a particular army unit against air attack or do they roam the skies looking for MiGs and waiting for AWACS to push them to the first indication of MiGs? The Air Force has perfected the art of air-to-air and is the reason the Iraqi Air Force wouldn’t even take off. Put the same effort and expertise into gunship employment and you’d start seeing insurgents that didn’t want to leave their houses.

So MAJ Seifert, lacking MiGs to prosecute, has determined that an AC-130 is the best answer to resistance. Look! He has Infrared available to spot people in the dark.

Insurgent or man walking to work? Man coming home from his cousin’s? Man going out to check his herd of goats? MAJ Seifert won’t know and must ask the ground commander to advise. The ground commander could as easily make the determination with a patrol.

David Axe’s articles never fail to teach me something about the business I thought I had left behind. Today’s article is well worth reading carefully. Part 2 will be published tomorrow and I will study it.

Looking at MAJ Seifert’s words make me realize once again how futile our technology was forty years ago in a country where the citizenry just wanted us to go home.