By Air Force News Agency on Tuesday, April 16th, 2013
A few months after the D-Day invasion in June 1944, Gen. Dwight D.
Eisenhower surveyed the Normandy beaches with his son. “You’d never get
away with this if you didn’t have air supremacy,” then 2nd Lt. John
Eisenhower told his father. “Without air supremacy,” the elder
Eisenhower replied, “I wouldn’t be here.”
The United States won
air superiority in Europe by 1944 and the Pacific by the fall, won it in
Korea in 1950 and hasn’t lost control of the skies since. No American
service members on the ground have died from enemy air attacks since
three were killed during the Korean War more than 60 years ago.
Control
of the air gives a military power the opportunity to exploit height,
reach and speed, enabling informed decision-making, the ability to
strike freely at a distance, and the ability to maneuver unconstrained
by the limits of terrain or ocean, said Dr. Richard P. Hallion, former Air Force
Historian and senior advisor for air and space issues with the
Directorate for Security, Counterintelligence and Special Programs
Oversight.
“I go back to David versus Goliath,” said Hallion,
author of “Storm Over Iraq: Airpower in the Gulf War” and “Strike from
the Sky: The History of Battlefield Attack.” “There wasn’t a manhood
issue here demanding he engage in the close fight, where he could have
lost. Instead, David hit him with an aerospace weapon – a rock at a
distance. In the airpower era, that aerospace weapon is the airplane and
missile of today.”
When the North Koreans invaded the South in
June 1950, they did so with overwhelming military force, and initially,
without encountering immediate air attacks, Hallion said. Retired Marine
Corps Col. Warren Wiedhahn experienced combat in Korea as a private
first class, both with and without close air support.
During the
initial days of the Korean War, “there was no close air support, the
North Korean juggernaut moved very rapidly with their tanks, artillery
and infantry. They annihilated everything in front of them until there
was nothing left in Korea but the Pusan perimeter,” Wiedhahn said.
But
by then, robust air power forces – Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps –
assisted by British, Australian and South Korean airmen as well – were
taking a heavy toll on North Korean attackers, Hallion said.
“During
that period of time, the close air support was building up,” Wiedhahn
said. “The ships were coming in. The Air Force was flying. Now, all of a
sudden, we began to see aircraft.”
After participating in the Inchon Landing and helping to liberate Seoul, Wiedhahn also fought in the battle of the Chosin Reservoir a few months later. United Nations forces chased the North Korean army to the southern tip of South Korea until China sent more than 100,000 troops that surrounded about 30,000 U.N. troops.
“When we were up in the Chosin Reservoir, and the
Chinese decided to attack, we began to see air – mostly Navy and Marine
Corps (Vought F4U) Corsairs off of the carriers. That’s how I really
began to appreciate close air support. It (Control of the air) is
absolutely, positively vital.
After a 17-day battle in sub-zero
temperatures, the Marines managed to withdraw to the coast, where they
were evacuated in December.”
“Indeed, air power saved the Marines
from annihilation as they made their way from the reservoir down to the
coast,” Hallion said.
Five years after Wiedhahn retired as a
colonel in 1982, he talked with four of the Chinese he fought against in
the Chosin Reservoir during a visit to Beijing as part of his
Virginia-based Military Historical Tours organization. About 40 years
later, the sights and sounds of American aircraft were still engrained
in their memories.
“One of the greatest things we feared was your
airpower,” the Chinese told Wiedhahn. They said, they always moved at
night, and never moved when the weather was clear because of their fear
of our planes.
Air superiority and supremacy are two of the five
conditions in the air warfare spectrum, along with air paralysis, air
inferiority and air parity. There is actually a huge difference between
air superiority and supremacy that can be especially costly in war,
Hallion said.
“Air superiority is the absolute minimal condition
we should ever be prepared to fight with,” he said. “Air superiority
means that the enemy is still able to undertake air action against you,
but you are able to confound and defeat it. What we should really seek
is what we had in the latter stages of World War II and what we had in
the (Persian) Gulf War, where we had air supremacy, indeed, we had air
dominance. That’s where you so thoroughly dominate your opponent that
they are instantly confronted with air attack, and they are unable to do
anything about it.
“We had air supremacy, clearly, in the first
Gulf War because in that war, the Iraqi air force was simply unable to
intervene either against our coalition air forces or against coalition
surface forces. At the end of the Gulf War in 1991, by the second or
third week, the Iraqi air force was fleeing the country, and the air
action there was primarily intercepting aircraft trying to flee to Iran.
That’s
what happens when you have air supremacy, and in the best of all
circumstances, air dominance. You can then devote 100 percent of your
air effort to ensure that the people on the ground get the support they
need to prosecute the ground war.”
Gen. Charles A. Horner, who commanded all U.S. and allied air assets during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, credited the airpower dominance to the intelligence, preparation and training before the invasion.
“When
did we get air superiority? We had it before the war began because we
had the means to get it – the equipment, intelligence, training, and the
courage of the aircrews,” Horner said
.
“But do not get the idea
that gaining control of the air was easy. It was not a macho, no-sweat
operation. What turned into a turkey shoot in late January and February
started out as a bitter struggle; those first few days were the
hardest-fought, most-critical aspect of the entire war.”
Because
the Air Force has had almost an unprecedented control of the skies for
decades, it might be easy to forget how costly it was to achieve air
superiority, especially during World War II. In the European and
Mediterranean theaters alone, the U.S. lost 4,325 fighters and bombers
before D-Day, with 17,000 killed and 21,000 wounded or POW in the fight
for air superiority and didn’t achieve theater-wide supremacy until the
final days of the war.
More Airmen were killed in aerial missions
over Europe “than all the Marines who unfortunately died in the entire
span of World War II,” said retired Gen. David Deptula, who was the Air
Force’s senior intelligence community official when he was the
Headquarters Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance. Deptula was also the main attack
planner during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and a joint task commander
for Operation Northern Watch in 1998-99.
“If you take a look at
how many aircraft we lost in the Vietnam War – 2,781 Air Force and Navy
combined, that was against a fifth-rate power with only 206 fighter
aircraft. Why did that happen? Because, we were late in achieving air
superiority.
“It took us some 30 years to apply the air superiority lesson, but we did it in the form of
developing the F-15 (Eagle). But those F-15s first flew in 1972, and now some of them are more than 30 years old. In 1979, I flew F-15s at Kadena Air Base, Japan. In 2008, my son was flying the exact same tail numbers I did, but it was 29 years later, and that was five years ago.
Today,
we have a geriatric combat Air Force, and we badly need to recapitalize
it in order to maintain the advantage of air supremacy in the future.”
Without
control of the air, troops on the ground face many hardships and
hazards, as the late Gen. Bruce K. Holloway, vice chief of staff during
the Vietnam War, wrote in an article for Air University Press.
For
six decades, American troops haven’t had to experience “what it’s like
to lose mobility except at night; to be cut off from supplies and
reinforcements; to be constantly under the watchful eye of enemy
reconnaissance aircraft; to be always vulnerable to strafing and bombing
attacks; to see one’s fighters and bombers burn on their handstands;
and to be outnumbered, outgunned and outmaneuvered in the air,” Holloway
wrote in his article, “Air Superiority in Tactical Air Warfare.”
However,
there are some who aren’t convinced the Air Force’s decades-long
dominance of the air is a certainty, especially with recent cuts in
weapons systems such as the F-22 Raptor, which Deptula calls “the most
capable aircraft ever built specifically to achieve air superiority,”
and F-35
Lightning II. In 2009, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates called for
capping the original 722 Raptors to 187. Three years later,
across-the-board defense spending cuts have put the F-35 at risk.
“There
are newer threats out there, quite frankly, that could defeat the
aircraft that we currently have,” Deptula said. “That’s why the Air
Force works so hard to recapitalize those aircraft by building F-22s and
F-35s that can operate, using modern technology, to achieve air
dominance by networking capabilities with sensors that we never had in
the past.
“Our challenge in the future is we’re not going to have
time to do what we did in World War II – bring America’s industrial
might to bear over the time necessary to create the kinds of aircraft to
maintain our superiority advantage. It falls on Airmen of today, to
articulate the air superiority lessons of the past and to make the
Airman’s voice in the defense of our nation heard. Today’s Airmen need
to be unabashedly clear about the lessons of history in order to
maintain our capabilities in the future.”
As vital as Eisenhower
perceived air superiority to success on D-Day, some airpower experts
wonder if the day will come when the U.S. won’t have the control of the
skies needed for a crucial confrontation with another military power.
“I
think the greatest danger we face as a nation today is to assume that
air and space power is a God-given right to the United States of
America, and we will always enjoy it,” Hallion said.
“We see that
sometimes, unfortunately, in our sister services. They have labored so
long with perfect freedom of maneuver because of the American airpower
shield that we’ve put over their heads that I think many individuals
fail to realize that it is perishable. Air dominance is like freedom
itself – you have to constantly nurture it, care for it and invest in it
to ensure that you will still have it.”
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