War Is Boring

Counterinsurgency Aircraft

Iraq’s narrow focus on fighting insurgents has also allowed it to field an air force specifically tailored for the purpose. The small but rapidly expanding force is dominated by transport and surveillance aircraft, rather than by the expensive fighter jets that are most numerous in the U.S. Air Force.

“There isn’t a lot of, you know, air-to-air combat in a counterinsurgency,” David Kilcullen, an advisor to U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, explained in a May press conference. “But, actually, airpower has got a critical role in surveillance, transport, targeting of precise targets, interdicting or isolating areas of the battlefield. It’s got a whole range of functions.”

The “targeting of precise targets” that Kilcullen describes requires relatively low-tech aircraft that are slow enough for their pilots to actually see targets and that can “loiter” over the battlefield for hours at a time. In August, Baghdad expressed interest in acquiring a propeller-drive attack plane for this purpose.

“The capability from a fixed-wing perspective to deliver a kinetic kill capability, we’re in the middle of those discussions right now,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Allardice, senior trainer for the Iraqi air force, said in a Sept. 6 press conference. He added that it would be more than year before the aircraft entered combat.

The U.S. military, for its part, abandoned fixed-wing counterinsurgency aircraft in the early 1990s in favor of fast jets designed during the Cold War for high-speed attacks on Soviet tank formations. This decision was taken against the advice of a widely hailed 1989 Air Force study authored by Maj. Richard Newton that advocated a mix of high- and low-tech to better meet a broad range of security challenges, including insurgencies.

“There is always the danger that technology will make one’s doctrine obsolete,” Newton wrote, quoting historian Richard Hallion. “Although maintaining our place on the leading edge of technology is critically important, we should not ignore an appropriate mix of older and leading-edge technology for the insurgency environment.”

“The prevalent attitude among Air Force leaders and planners seems to be that preparations for and successful deterrence of World War III mean we will have no trouble ‘stepping down’ to combat at the low end of the spectrum. . . . The problem is that shifting to [counterinsurgency] is not a matter of ‘stepping down’; it is a matter of sidestepping to a new environment.”

The Air Force took a tentative step towards “side-stepping” to the counterinsurgency mindset when it released a much-maligned “irregular warfare manual” in August. “Irregular warfare is sufficiently different from traditional conflict to warrant a separate keystone doctrine document,” the manual posited. But nowhere in the manual did the service advocate re-equipping with airplanes specifically designed for defeating insurgent fighters.

So when Iraq’s propeller-driven attack planes enter service sometime in 2008 or 2009, the nation will boast a capability that even the mighty U.S. military lacks.

Part one here. Original piece here.

Related:
Air Force got it all wrong
Navy got it wrong, too 
How to build a bazillion armored trucks
Iraq: short on logistics

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