What History Tells Us About Trump’s Plan To Defeat Iran By Air

President Donald Trump called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” on March 6. But can he do that with U.S. air power alone? The answer is likely yes — if the Iranian people themselves are also the “boots on the ground.”

Air power advocates have promised decisive results since the Italian general Giulio Douhet authored “The Command of the Air” in 1921. Douhet theorized that, after achieving “command of the air,” air power could target an enemy’s “vital centers” to shatter morale and to force rapid capitulation.

Nazi Germany tested this idea when it terror bombed Rotterdam in the Netherlands during its 1940 offensive against France and the Low Countries, killing 1,150 people and accelerating the surrender of Dutch forces the same day.

Yet subsequent efforts to use aerial bombing for rapid effect in World War II failed — until the U.S. forced Imperial Japan’s surrender by dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Accuracy

This was largely because gaining “command of the air” was much easier said than done, and because bombing wasn’t very accurate.

In fact, the highest-ranking American officer killed in the European theater, Lt. Gen. Lesley J. McNair, was killed by the American heavy bombers of the Eighth Air Force in support of U.S. ground troops. The bombs fell short, killing more than 100 American soldiers and wounding more than 500.

Bombing accuracy is measured in circular error probable (CEP), which is the number of bombs that have a 50 percent chance of landing within a certain radius.

In WWII, U.S. bombers could achieve a CEP of 3,300 feet, meaning about 9,070 bombs totaling 2,268 tons of ordnance were needed to destroy a small target, such as a critical section of a bridge.

Less than a decade later, due to better bomb sights and radar, the CEP dropped by a third in the Korean conflict to 1,000 feet, meaning that the number of 250-lb bombs needed fell to 1,100.

Some 15 years later, during the Vietnam War, better navigation aids and training dropped the CEP even further to 400 feet, requiring only 176 bombs to service a target.

Iraq and Yugoslavia

In 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, I was called to active duty at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. It was there that a full-scale mockup of standard Iraqi defenses was laid out on the desert floor. The Air Force wanted a crack at busting up the bunkers, trenches, concertina wire, and mine fields, flying B-52s over the target to drop 500-pound bombs. After the smoke and dust cleared, it was discovered that the bombs made the Army’s job more difficult, not less: The wire wasn’t cut, the mines weren’t detonated, and, worse yet, the craters left behind made it more difficult to clear the mines.

More recently, air power did play a major role in the stunning victory over the large Iraqi army in 1991, but it was the massive blitz of ground forces that forced Iraq’s pell-mell retreat out of Kuwait on what became the “Highway of Death.”

Even with vast improvements over the decades, air power enthusiasts were largely forced to admit that air power was best used in support of ground forces, since no one can argue that having boots on the ground is a sure way to force an enemy to bend to your will.

Then, in 1999, NATO conducted a 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia to force the surrender of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević and the withdrawal of forces in Kosovo. There were no NATO boots on the ground. It was during that effort, on May 7, that a U.S. B-2 stealth bomber dropped five GPS-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese nationals. Bad intelligence was blamed. China still holds a grudge for this error.

Iran

This brings us to the present. Judging by news reports out of the Middle East, CEPs for American and Israeli aircraft and U.S. long-range missiles are routinely in the neighborhood of 30 feet or less, depending on the system. This means that depending on the target’s hardness, as few as two bombs would be needed to have a high confidence of destruction. This, combined with unparalleled intelligence, means that even mobile targets, such as missile launchers or regime leadership, can be identified and hit with a high degree of confidence.

The results can be seen most clearly in Iran’s rapidly declining outbound missile and drone fire — by Day 5, down 90 percent and 80 percent, respectively. This feeds a virtuous cycle, greatly reducing the number of costly missile interceptors needed to protect civilian populations and infrastructure. In addition, as Iran’s launchers and underground “missile cities” are destroyed, air sorties can be sent on other missions, such as further degrading Iranian command, control, and leadership.

The Kurds

And now, with the corrupt Iranian theocratic system of repression severely degraded, many Iranian Kurds, previously in exile in Iraq, look to be the first ground force to enter Iran. The roughly 10 percent of the Iranian population that is Kurdish lives on a fairly narrow strip of land in Iran’s northwest that, at its widest point, is about 200 miles from east to west, leaving the regime with a choice: send forces to push them back, risking them to Allied airpower, or allow the Kurds to take over, hoping to push them out if the U.S. loses patience someday. Even so, President Trump ruled out Kurdish involvement as unhelpful on March 8.

The Kurds might be followed by Azerbaijani forces, after Iran’s foolhardy strikes on its neighbor. Some 17 percent of Iran’s population is ethnic Azeri, occupying a swath to the east of Kurdish territory, running almost to the shores of the Caspian Sea and reaching within 100 miles of Tehran.

Doubts and Weapons Depletion

There are concerns about whether airpower alone can topple the theocratic regime, with critics pointing out that Japan only surrendered after the firebombing of Tokyo and the dropping of atomic bombs on two major cities. Further, that airpower seemed less than decisive in Iraq and Afghanistan. True. But there are two big differences: Iran has a central government vulnerable to attacks on its leadership — Afghanistan is a tribal land while in Iraq in 2003, restrictive rules of engagement and nascent technologies relegated air power to a supporting role.

Another worry is that American stocks of vital munitions, such as Tomahawk missiles and interceptor missiles, are being rapidly depleted. This was true in the opening hours and days of the conflict, but now, as Iran’s inventory of missile launchers has been severely attrited, the demand on air defense missiles has significantly declined. Further, with air supremacy over Iran’s skies, the most common munition now used by the U.S. and Israel is the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM). Inexpensive JDAM kits turn plentiful Cold War-era dumb bombs (500 to 2,000 pounds) into precision-guided weapons.

At some point, it is likely that the brutally repressive Iranian regime will be no longer able to hold back its own people — potentially replicating the gruesome fate of the long-ruling communist Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, who was executed by a people’s tribunal on Christmas Day in 1989, less than seven weeks after the Berlin Wall was torn down. Ironically, Ceaușescu had only a week earlier departed Bucharest for a state visit to Iran, where he met the successor to the Ayatollah Khomeini, one Ali Hosseini Khamenei, only six months into what would be a murderous reign of almost 37 years.

Thus, airpower — and the Iranian people as “boots on the ground” — may usher in the greatest change in global history since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.