PERSPECTIVE ON U.S. AIR POWER : The Peril of Force in Penny Packets : Using bombing as a tool of foreign policy depends on our willingness to do, and perhaps suffer, some savage deeds.

Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength, in part because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment. Francis Bacon wrote of command of the sea that he who has it “is at great liberty, and may take as much and as little of the Warre as he will,” and a similar belief accounts for air power’s attractiveness to those who favor modest uses of force overseas. Statesmen may think that they can use air attacks to engage in hostilities by increments, something ground combat rarely permits. Or, as in the case of our recent operations in Bosnia, that they can communicate resolve, send diplomatic signals and nudge negotiations along, all with a few well-chosen 500-pound bombs.

This rise in air power’s stock comes from its success in the Persian Gulf War, in which air power indeed made all the difference. American air operations crushed the Iraqi air-defense system, paralyzed the movement of Iraqi forces, deprived much of that country of electrical power and communications and inflicted losses amounting to perhaps two-fifths of the total number of tanks deployed to the theater. Although ground action necessarily consummated the final victory for coalition forces, air power had made the final assault as effortless as a wartime operation can be.

Reliance on air power has set the American way of war apart from all others for well over half a century. Other countries might field doughty infantry, canny submariners or scientific artillerists comparable in skill and numbers to America’s. Only the United States, however, has engaged in a single-minded and successful quest for air superiority in every conflict it has fought since World War I. Air warfare remains distinctively American--high tech, cheap in lives and (at least in theory) quick. To America’s enemies--past, current and potential--it is the distinctively American form of military intimidation. Small wonder, then, that the U.N. commander in Bosnia called on American aircraft to drop a few symbolic bombs on the Bosnian Serbs. Small wonder too, given the astonishing successes of the Gulf War, how dismayed many observers were at the tragic shooting down of two American helicopters by two American fighters over northern Iraq.

There are ill omens in both episodes. The tentative bombing of Bosnia demonstrates how easily statesmen can forget that air power has its greatest effect when used in quantity and in a compressed period of time. To use air power in penny packets is a mistake. The sprinkling of air strikes over an enemy will harden him without hurting him and deprive the United States of an invaluable, but intangible strategic asset--the menace of concentrated aerial bombardment. The Bosnian Serbs, not shocked by the bombing (which in the most recent case consisted of an attempt to drop four bombs, one of which was never released, two of which were duds and only one of which may have hit its target), reacted to it with contempt. More important, they found a suitable countermeasure, the snatching of U.N. hostages (although no political leader will yet use the term) against more serious attacks.

The Iraqi episode probably hinges on mistakes made by fighter pilots or air-space controllers. But it is the kind of accident that was waiting to happen in an area where the United States has flown more sorties since the Gulf War than it did during it. These operations (like the supervision of a “no-fly zone” over Bosnia) involve sending men in high-speed aircraft, with live munitions, into harm’s way. Sooner or later accidents, be they electronic glitches, bad weather or sheer misjudgment made by men accustomed to split-second decision-making, will happen.

The lesson of the Iraq episode is that if the United States wants to continue to use military power as a tool of foreign policy, it must steel itself for dreadful accidents of this kind. The lesson of Bosnia is, alas, the same lesson as that we should have learned from Somalia. To call the use of armed force “peacekeeping” or “humanitarian intervention” or “conflict resolution” is to avoid the simpler, uglier and more accurate term: war. Our intervention in Somalia led, ineluctably, to war with Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid, a war that we lost although his casualties were, at a conservative estimate, 50 times ours. Our intervention in Bosnia looks to become war with the Bosnian Serbs, a low-level, nasty and perhaps cheap war--although hardly so to the bereaved spouses, parents and children of service men or women who will pay the price. It is, of course, the President who is answerable to them, and not the secretary general of the United Nations.

In both cases, air power is an appropriate tool of our policy if indeed American policy-makers are convinced that the policies are important enough to mandate the use of force. But particularly in the Bosnian case, they should know that it is a tool of variable strength, depending greatly on the skill with which it is used. And that in turn means a willingness to do, and perhaps to suffer, some savage deeds. In particular, it is clear that the reaction of those exposed to U.S. air power is to seize hostages--whether U.N. peacekeepers or simply unarmed civilians. Inevitably, a strategically effective use of air power will lead to the deaths of innocents. That grim warrior Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman understood that in modern conditions one could not wage warfare yet spare all but uniformed combatants. “You cannot qualify war in harsher terns than I will,” he told the hapless leading citizens of Atlanta. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”

American leaders at the end of this century have indeed been vouchsafed with a military instrument of a potency rarely known in the history of war. But they will serve the country best by putting the fabulous successes of the Gulf War in a larger context, one in which the gloomy wisdom of Sherman tempers the brisk enthusiasm of those who see air power as a shining sword, effortlessly wielded, that can create and preserve a just and peaceful world order. They owe it to those they lead, and to their fellow citizens, to own up to the risks they wish the armed forces to run, to admit the bluntness of the instrument they intend to employ, and to use force effectively, if they intend to use it all all.