Western military progress (or regression depending on your point of view) has been toward larger and more lethal units and weapons. In saying Western, I mean Europe, including Russia, and the US. The Chinese and North Koreans use basically the Soviet systems and their weapons platforms are either Soviet platforms or developments from Soviet systems. Generally, until Napoleon, Western wars were long, drawn out affairs involving very little actual fighting and that was often by mercenary troops. In fact, one of Zwingli's (an early Swiss Church Reformation leader) concerns was the fact that the Swiss mercenaries actually fought each other in the pay of various Princes and Kings. With the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, Europe started to see the advent of the "citizen" soldier and larger combat organizations. The culmination of this trend was the fall of the USSR. At that time, the US had almost 2 million active military organized to fight on the plains of Europe. That force went to Desert Storm and we learned that what we can find and hit, we could kill.

There is a story told in Army circles of an interview with an Iraqi tank battalion commander who said that after 30 days of bombing by the AF, he had 39 of his 42 tanks left. 30 minutes after the USA M1 tanks showed up, he had none. The tank's advantage over airpower was it could hit the target with lethal force. From that we could either learn that tanks are the answer, or we could learn that we need to improve the accuracy and lethality of air-delivered munitions. I think we are waiting for the answer. Some of the more radical airpower proponents believe that we are past the day of the tank. Some reactionary armor folk think the tank will never be obsolete. The answer is somewhere in between, but probably toward the airpower side if we include long range terminally guided artillery as airpower.

The performance of remotely delivered munitions has traditionally suffered because of the difficulty of accurate target acquisition for enemy assets very far past our own lines and then delivering lethal munitions both timely and accurately. For instance, studies done in the ‘70s by one of the Army’s program management offices found that hundreds of conventional high explosive artillery rounds were fired in WWII for each enemy casualty. The Army developed the Improved Convention Munitions (sub-munitions rounds) and the numbers dropped orders of magnitude. Another study found that the average turnaround time on an artillery fire mission cal from a forward observer was over 9 minutes. Improved communications reduced that significantly in the last thirty years.

In war, everything must be directed at destroying the enemy’s will to fight while limiting your own losses as much as possible. Thus the best commanders have always been “casualty” adverse. As Patton said, the soldier’s job is to give the other guy the opportunity to die for his country. If a combatant commander can destroy the enemy’s will to fight through airpower with few or no friendly losses, he has accomplished his mission.

Next post: Large unit warfare.