Splendid Sorties, Tangential Targets : War: Big air statistics suggest much is being accomplished. But little of that reduces the need for a ground offensive.
So long as the war continues as an air offensive alone, with no significant ground action, we can chart progress--up to a point--by keeping track of the sorties and target numbers. In the confused ground war of Vietnam, not only the infamous “body counts” but all statistics were grotesquely misleading, except for American casualty figures. By contrast, in the Iraqi air war, numbers can actually be meaningful--and U.S. casualties will continue to be insignificant so long as the pressures for a ground offensive are resisted.
Before the fighting started, roughly 20,000 separate “point” targets of some value were identified in Iraq. A few hundred were large, soft buildings, such as major government centers and weapons factories. They were easily found and easily hit but impossible to destroy with a single bomb or missile, no matter how accurate. Some were were small, hard targets, notably command bunkers that can be hit only by precision weapons. Their warheads, however, may not be large enough to destroy hard targets with a single hit--or even several. The rest of the targets, the vast majority, were mobile and therefore hard to find, such as tanks, anti-aircraft missile vehicles and the truck-mounted Scud missile launchers.
So far, the United States and its allies have flown roughly 24,000 sorties, more than one for each point target. But just over half were air-defense patrols, reconnaissance flights, refueling missions and so on, leaving about 12,000 offensive sorties. By no means were all of them flown against the point targets, for that number includes hundreds of repetitive attacks to cut air-base runways whenever they are repaired, and a greater number, including B-52 sorties, aimed at “area” targets, such as Iraqi troops. Making a (very) rough allowance for this, that leaves perhaps 9,000 sorties flown against point targets, mostly by fighter-bombers with just two precision-guided weapons each. If we accept the early claim by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf that 80% of the bombing missions were effective--and that may well be an overestimate--it would give us a total of 14,400 weapons successfully sent against 20,000 targets.
We could therefore conclude that at present the air bombardment was almost three-quarters done--68% completed, to be (excessively) precise. But, of course, many targets must be hit by more than one effective weapon to be destroyed. Allowing for this by estimating that it takes one aircraft sortie (with more than one weapon) to destroy one point target on average, we can calculate that an additional 16,000 point-attack sorties remain to be flown, or 41,600 sorties in all, unless the ratio of non-offensive sorties is reduced, as it should be: Much air patrolling is mere routine, since the Iraqis are not attacking. At the average sortie rate so far, that would imply that three more weeks of bombing would be needed to finish the job if cloud cover does not interfere. That assumes--as one must now assume--that Hussein will not have surrendered before then, and will instead remain defiant in one of his bunkers while almost every military installation and weapons site throughout Iraq is wrecked, along with civilian power supplies, water works and so on.
The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi infantry troops now entrenched behind dense minefields cannot be effectively attacked by scarce guided missiles, only by massed air raids with ordinary unguided weapons and, specifically, cluster bombs. What counts against such area targets is not precision but volume. B-52 heavy bombers--more than 30 years old but with 26,000-pound payloads--have indeed been employed since the start of the war but only in small numbers.
Much has been said of the precision of the visually guided weapons whose lethal impact can be videotaped aboard the launch aircraft, in some cases, to be shown on our TV screens for an unprecedented look at war from the missile’s own point of view. Laser-guided bombs can be just as successful, as can cruise missiles launched from warships.
Such are the much-publicized splendors of video warfare. Less has been heard of its miseries. First, most of these weapons are expensive--$1.3 million per cruise missile and up to half a million dollars for TV-guided missiles. Even the cheapest of the guided weapons, the glide bombs guided by laser homing, cost more than $100,000, compared with the $2,000 of an ordinary, unguided, 2000-pound bomb. Hence, the total number of guided weapons available is not huge.
Second, most guided weapons have rather small warheads, 1,000 pounds for the costly cruise missiles, not more than 2,000 pounds for the largest laser-guided bombs. Thus, for all of their splendid accuracy, missiles and glide bombs often perforate rather than destroy their targets (that is good enough to destroy aircraft shelters, as it turns out, and we’ve seen the result in the mass flights of the Iraqi aircraft to Iran.) Moreover, each precision weapon must be carefully released individually. They cannot simply be dropped in a fast pass over the target. Therefore, aircraft carrying them cannot be loaded up to their payload limits at any given range. Instead of carrying 8,000 or 10,000 or more pounds of bombs according to type, fighter-bombers with two guided weapons each are delivering only 4,000 pounds of high explosives, at most. Finally, the very precision of the new weapons limits their psychological effect.
True, no purpose would be served by terrorizing Iraqi civilians by bombing indiscriminately in the scattered style of the second world war, because they have no influence whatsoever on Saddam Hussein’s decisions.
Yet the extraordinary effort now being made to avoid civilian casualties by using only precision weapons is leaving Baghdad intact, except for the specific buildings here and there actually perforated by missiles or guided bombs. If members of Saddam Hussein’s entourage saw ruins all around them every time they left their bunker, that might induce them to do something about the man now obviously determined to fight to the end.
Yet none of these limitations have affected the air offensive as much as the choice of targets--the very essence of any air strategy. Aside from the obvious targets of any bombing offensive--air defenses and Scud-type missiles first of all, and the factories, assembly lines, laboratories and depots of the Iraqi military-industrial complex--a sharp distinction can be made between ground-war preparing targets, and ground-war avoiding targets.
The Republican Guard units that have been bombed from the start, and indeed all Iraqi ground forces, are clearly targets whose disruption, if not destruction, would make the U.S. Army’s envisaged offensive into Iraq that much easier. By contrast, the air attack on the supply trucks that feed the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi troops in Kuwait would make any dislodgement offensive unnecessary in due course. An interdiction campaign would not be easy, for systematic cratering and truck-hunting on the main Basra-Kuwait highway would merely divert Iraqi supply traffic to secondary roads and then, no doubt, to desert tracks. But round-the-clock air strikes against all transport within a wide corridor between Iraq and Kuwait would cut off Iraqi troops from resupply, leaving them to choose between desertion south into Saudi Arabia or retreat north back into Iraq once their food stocks were exhausted. Some claim that the Iraqi forces in Kuwait started the war with only four days of food in hand; others claim that they had much more.
What is certain is that interdiction has not been seriously tried so far--an inexplicable omission until one recalls that the Iraq war, air operations very much included, is being conducted under the direct command of an Army officer whose deputy is also an Army officer and who reports to the President through Colin Powell, another Army officer. Blessed as we are by an Army (and Marines) that very much want to fight, we must accept that their desire to conduct an armored offensive is only natural. But the imputation may be grossly unfair. Perhaps the President would not be content with the U.N.-approved war aim of ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait--which air interdiction alone would reliably achieve. If he positively wants to finish off Saddam Hussein and his regime, he must have a ground offensive probably all the way to Baghdad. In that case, he is well served by the current arrangements in which Army officers are in charge of an air campaign.
