Old-Timers Prove Invaluable in Afghanistan Air Campaign

Washington was awash in numbers last week as President Bush unveiled his 2003 budget, including $379 billion for the Pentagon--the largest increase since Vietnam.

But another set of numbers was not unveiled, even though it lies at the heart of far-reaching decisions that are being made about the future of U.S. military power. Far from being given to the public, these numbers are considered so sensitive that most senior military officers are not privy to them.

The numbers, compiled by the Combined Air Operations Center, or CAOC, in Saudi Arabia and obtained by The Times, set out in graphic detail exactly who did what in the air war in Afghanistan. More important, they reveal which weapons systems were most effective and efficient and which were not.

In an age when information is power, these numbers are potential “daisy cutters” in the struggle over slices of the defense budget pie. They are also ammunition for battles the Pentagon would prefer to fight in private.

According to CAOC statistics, in the 76 days of bombing between Oct. 7, when Operation Enduring Freedom began, and Dec. 23, when sustained bombing tapered off, the United States flew about 6,500 strike missions over Afghanistan.

It dropped about 17,500 munitions on more than 120 fixed target complexes and more than 400 vehicles and artillery guns. Fifty-seven percent of the weapons delivered were “smart”--that is, guided by satellites or lasers.

But within those gross numbers, what do the breakdowns show about the performance of particular kinds of airplanes and munitions? The U.S. Navy and the Air Force vied for dominance in the air war, and Afghanistan was a real-world testing ground for competing strategies and weapons systems.

In blunt terms, who won?

The answer is not simple, but it does suggest that military planners may need to reassess some present assumptions about what kinds of airplanes the United States will need in the future. It also suggests that the CAOC numbers are being guarded primarily for reasons of Pentagon politics, not national security.

To be sure, the data cannot stand alone as gospel truth. The CAOC did not have an easy software system to track missions and weapons despite the fact that such a program was developed for the Yugoslavia conflict. And even inside the Air Force, there are discrepancies and disagreements over some statistics, some of them not trivial.

Still, after making due allowance for the limitations on the data, some startling patterns stand out:

The U.S. Navy’s carrier-based planes flew 4,900 of the 6,500 strikes, or 75% of the total. But the Air Force, though flying only 25% of the missions, delivered 12,900 weapons--more than 70% of the total dropped in the whole conflict.

Does that mean the Air Force emerges wearing the white hat and deserves to get what it asks for in the defense budget? Not exactly.

It turns out that what delivered the goods for the Air Force in Afghanistan was not its hottest new thoroughbreds but a pair of draft horses left over from the Cold War: the largely unheralded B-1 and B-52 heavy bombers.

Together, those aging air warriors flew just 10% of the strike missions, but they delivered 11,500 of the 17,500 total munitions dropped in the air war. That’s more than 65% of the total, and a whopping 89% of all weapons delivered by Air Force planes.

Box scores like this are already being used in struggles over who gets what in the military of the future, including the age-old inter-service dispute over whether carrier-based planes are more valuable than land-based planes when access to overseas land bases is tenuous.

Bombers Versus Fighter Planes

Yet the most pointed questions raised by the CAOC numbers go to a struggle inside the Air Force itself, between advocates of bombers and advocates of fighter planes. Among the so-called fighter mafia, anything that might detract from buying new fighter planes is dangerous, given the current plan to buy two completely new short-range fighters--the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

And despite the results in Afghanistan--and Kosovo before it--there is no comparable, next-generation long-range bomber under development in the Pentagon.

“The Air Force is committed to short-range at a time that the strategic logic goes long-range,” says a defense industry analyst who believes that the lesson to be learned from Afghanistan is that heavy bombers are and should be recognized as the workhorses of modern air warfare.

The day-in and day-out use of the B-2 stealth bomber was the most militarily significant development of the 1999 air war in Kosovo. Firing satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAMs, these intercontinental bombers flew from the United States in all kinds of weather to target the most sensitive and protected targets. The $18,000 JDAM includes a special tail kit that uses global positioning satellite coordinates to steer a 2,000-pound bomb to within 14 yards of a target.

The B-2 was valuable partly because it could deliver precision weapons and evade radar. There was another, less widely understood factor: When it comes to overseas bases, which short-range planes depend on, host countries can and do impose restrictions on where U.S. planes can fly and what weapons they can carry.

After Kosovo, the B-2 was highly touted by the Air Force. After all, it represented what was new. But in Afghanistan, B-2s have flown just six strike missions. Taliban air defenses were so limited that “stealth” was not demanded. Instead, B-1 and B-52 bombers flying from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean shouldered the load.

And, although these bombers delivered the vast majority of the old-fashioned dumb bombs (about 6,300 500-pound bombs in enormous loads of more than 20 bombs per attack), they were also responsible for delivering almost half the guided weapons, including the low-cost, all-weather Joint Direct Attack Munitions.

JDAM is one of the few stars of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s new budget. Testifying last week before Congress in support of the $379-billion request, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said JDAM had “become the preferred munition” in Afghanistan, with almost 3,000 being used per month. The Pentagon request includes $502 million for 22,700 JDAMs at increased production rates.

B-1 Called ‘Not Viable in a Conflict Today’

The B-1 and B-52 get no such boost.

On the contrary, early last summer the Pentagon announced plans to cut the B-1 force from 93 to 60 airplanes and use the savings to modernize the remaining aircraft. Rumsfeld said the plane was “not viable in a conflict today” and was “headed toward expensive obsolescence.”

The B-1, built for low-altitude nuclear duty, was not used in conventional combat until December 1998, against Iraq. It then participated in Yugoslavia, generally with good reports. Despite the B-1’s dominance in Afghanistan, Air Force insiders argue that it was able to make such a contribution only because there was no threat from surface-to-air missiles.

Further, proponents of new fighters say the Air Force recently determined that it had enough bombers and that the current force would last well into the future.

In October, the secretary of the Air Force did direct a new study of long-range bombers, updating a 1999 white paper. That paper called for the bomber force to be reduced by 51 in 2002, to stabilize at 157 B-1, B-2 and B-52 bombers. The new study acknowledges the lessons of Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.

“Today’s bomber force is just as likely to strike point targets--or support ground troops--as is any fighter plane, especially in poor weather,” it says. The report calls for a variety of hardware and software improvements to keep the existing force capable and survivable.

But it concludes that “all three bombers should be structurally sound for the next four or five decades.”

In his State of the Union address, Bush made a point of saying America needs to “replace aging aircraft.” Apparently long-range bombers were not included.

And it’s probably a safe bet that no one at the Pentagon is hurrying over to the White House to share those CAOC numbers with him.

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William M. Arkin is a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington and an adjunct professor of the U.S. Air Force School of Advanced Airpower Studies. He is a consultant to a number of nongovernmental organizations and writes military analysis articles as a special correspondent for The Times.