Dan Halutz is the first IDF chief of staff who is not a soldier. He is a military aviator. I had missed that, but a statement attributed to a “senior officer” of the IDF in a New York Times story today caused me to look at IDF leadership. The “scales” have fallen from my eyes. “I believe in AIR POWER,” the officer told the Times and Halutz is likely to be the officer who was interviewed.
He has no ground forces experience at all. He reminds me a bit of Rumsfeld, the one time naval aviator and opponent of the use of sizable ground forces. Like Rumsfeld he is a proponent of “modern” warfare, gee-whiz techno- equipment and disdainful of big, heavy armored forces. He has re-organized the armed forces so that the ground forces no longer report directly to him.
Someone will say that Chaim Laskov had been head of the Israel Air Force (IAF) before becoming chief of staff in the early ’50s. This is essentially irrelevant as a comparative situation. Laskov was not a pilot and was a ground force commander and a founder of the IDF Armored Corps before he became head of the air force.
Halutz is an ally of right wing political forces in Israel and an extreme proponent of the “Air Power” ideology that has been an active force in military affairs ever since it was enunciated by the Italian fascist Giulio Douhet in the ’20s. The doctrine was taken up by Hugh Trenchard in Britain, Mitchell in the U.S., and the pre-war 2 German Luftwaffe. It persists in many air forces today.
The “Air Power” ideology in its purest form holds that ground forces have largely been made obsolete and useless by the invention and development of aircraft and other air delivered weapons, missiles, etc.
“Air Power” theorists believe that this is true at the tactical, operational and strategic levels.
In Lebanon the IDF appears to be following a strategy at all levels that is entirely dictated by “Air Power” theory.
At the tactical and operational levels of war, Israel seems to be intent on destroying Hizballah south of the Litani River and north of Metulla to some unknown depth. Thus far, just about all the attacks against Hizballah have been made by air weapons and artillery. These weapons are inherently indiscriminate in their application, especially in the hands of “Air Power” theorists who typically want to “make the rubble bounce.” This is especially true if the aforesaid airplane enthusiasts see that their theories are not yielding the desired result. If you still believe in “surgical strikes,” look at the pictures from Lebanon.
The IAF is “leafleting” all of south Lebanon urging citizens to leave their homes and flee northward. They appear to be intent on “herding the cats” away from their border through the use of aerial firepower. They know that Hizballah is a LEBANESE Shia guerrilla army with its roots in the Shia portion of the Lebanese population. Most of the people of the south are Shia, and the IDF knows that if they remain where they are they will support the Hizballah guerrillas both now and in the future. Indeed, the guerrillas, are, in many cases, villagers from this area. In any event, the present IDF effort to “cleanse” the south of guerrillas by fire will fail. The IAF and its associated heavy artillery simply lacks the weight of fire needed to drive this enemy from its prepared positions in the stony ground of South Lebanon. The actual ground maneuver attempted thus far is a joke and typical of the role imagined by “Air Power” advocates for ground forces. “Maroun al-Ras” is a tiny village less than a mile from the Israeli border, and no amount of fancy graphics on TV “gushed” over by retired generals can alter the fact that its capture is an insignificant achievement that has had and will have no effect on the amount of fire going into northern Israel.
At the strategic level, the IDF under Halutz is following classic “Air Power” theory which holds that crushing the “Will of the People” is the correct objective in compelling the acceptance of one’s own “will” by an adversary or neutral. With that objective in mind, all of the target country is considered to be one, giant target set. Industry, ports, bridges, hospitals, roads, you name it. It is all “fair game.” In this case the notion is to force the Lebanese government and army to accept a role as the northern jaw in a vise that will crush Hizballah and subsequently to hold south Lebanon against Hizballah. Since Lebanon is a melange of ethnic and religious communities of which Shia LEBANESE are a major element and since many Lebanese Shia are supporters of Hizballah, the prospect of getting the Lebanese government to do this is “nil.” As for the Lebanese Army, the US attempted for two years (1982-84) to re-structure and re-train the Lebanese Army to make it a “national” non-sectarian force only to learn when this army was committed to battle in 1984 against Druze and Christian forces, that it simply fell apart. The US then abandoned the effort. Nothing much has changed in Lebanon since then.
Bottom Lines:
-Air Power and artillery will not decisively defeat Hizballah or force it to withdraw from rocket range of Israel.
-The Lebanese government and army are not what the Israelis have once again dreamt of and they should have known that. The policy that Israel is following is truly a triumph of hope over experience.
-An international force that will fight Hizballah in the south to disarm it is a pipe dream. Who will do that? The only realistic candidate would be France in terms of military capacity. This would be a major irony of history.
Bottom Line Advice for Israel: Occupy the ground or expect to suffer the effects of failure.
There is a fascinating article on this Rumsfeldian genious here based on some Haaretz interviews.
Here’s a nice fragment from the Haaretz inverview:
The British and the USA of course, were the originators and by far the most efficient practioners of unrestricted air warfare on civilian populations with the stated intent of “breaking the enemy’s will to resist.” As ‘Bomber’ Harris and Gen. Curtis LeMay demonstrated, this strategy did lead to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths — but whether the effect was either justified or substantially shortened the war efforts in Germany, Japan or South Vietnam is still debated and debatable. It seems quite clear that whatever the other results may have been, “breaking the enemy’s will” was certainly not one of them.
In addition, the development of increasingly technical means of air warfare — such as dropping precision munitions from high altitudes on ‘approved targets’ coupled with the virtual displays used and the lack of interaction of pilots with the results of their actions — seems to lead to an increased detachment and dissociation on the part of pilots and crew, as indicated in the answer from the airman quoted above.
At least the answer from the helicopter door gunner in Vietnam in Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” was more involved and more honest in a way: when asked “How could you shoot women and children?” He replied, “It’s easy. You just don’t lead them as much.”
This all has to stop.
There’s no way we can support allies or administrations who think it’s an appropriate and justifiable tactic to relentlessly bomb civilian infrastructures including hospitals, churches, powerplants, bridges, etc., leaflet entire areas of a sovereign country and instruct them to flee (on what roads? since they’re mostly destroyed) and then rocket cars, trucks, and minivans containing the fleeing civilians.
Madness…
.
Under his command, execution of extra-judicial assassinations in Gaza and the West Bank occupied territories. Defended the bombing of an appartment building killing 16 civilians including nine children by F-16 precision strike, dropping a one ton bomb to take out a ‘terrorist’.
Controversy lasted through appointment cycle as new chief of staff, ended before the Israel Supreme Court where he lied out of the dilemma.
Pilots have no concern or responsibility for consequences of target where the bomb is dropped. The leadership is culpable, let the protesters come to me, according to Dan Halutz. Iranian descent!
Excellent qualification for indictment before a war crimes tribunal.
● Why we Refuse – Avihai Becker
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
Patrick,
This is one of my absolute favorite subjects, one I’ve been writing about for over ten years.
As you obviously know, airpower theorists got their foot in the door after WWI with the promise that never again would the major nations have to fight a horrible ground war of attrition. That this has proven wrong time and time again has done little to curb their enthusiam for their mission or message.
Over years of continued study and writing about warfare, I’ve come to the conclusion that what is true of airpower is true of all types of warfare. It really is an inferior method of conducting foreign policy, and unintended consequences more and more negate any “gains” a given war produces.
Looking forward to more discussions along these lines. Thanks for the fine essay on the subject.
Jeff, Wicks Murray, professor emeritus from Ohio State University, has studied about and written on the effectiveness of air power for some 40 years. One of the first things he mentions in his classes is that air power is one of the bloodiest, loss-riddled forms of combat known to man. That’s for the folks conducting the air campaign. The attrititon rates are actually higher than was seen among the infantry on the Western Front in WW1. It just seems cleaner because the bodies appear far away in drips and drabs. Oh, and the casualties happen to service people who have higher ranks, so it appears more “noble” than with just conscript grunts buying the farm. What’s worse is that the air campaigns are generally ineffective unless their being applied directly to a choke point in the enemy’s logistics or industries, like the bridges over the Seine before D-Day or the attacks on the German ersatz petroleum planst. Israel cannnot apply sufficient mass to break Hisbollah’s will, cannot destroy any critical targets and cannot avoid civilian casualties. It will be a replay of the German Blitz against Britain in 1940-1941, which only further tempered British will to destroy Nazi Germany.