Summary: Paradigmatic Changes in Air Warfare
Friedrich Korkisch
Evolution in military technology is an ongoing process which none of the services, least of all the air force, can escape. It equally extends operational possibilities, changes tactical procedures, and provides new command and control options. It is evident that in leadership practice and application of air power the lines between strategy, operation, and tactics have become blurred. The key question here is no longer about the role of the air force and the assets it is to employ, but rather whether political goals can be reached by air warfare alone or to what extent air warfare is to be integrated into overall military efforts.
The new keyword is air power, by which one understands the sum total of the militarily employable potential of a state, including civil structures. It would be a mistake to reduce air power to merely defensive air warfare, because only balanced offensive and defensive capacities are able to ensure success. Modern air warfare has the following characteristics: In air warfare the one with offensive capacities will win the day. Fighter aircraft employed in defensive action no longer determine the outcome of one’s air operation.
To maintain air superiority against an offensive enemy requires large quantities of assets. Numbers are more important for the defender than for the attacker who, today, is favored by offensive technologies that are slightly more advanced than defensive technologies.
In air warfare smart pilot actions will help optimize the strength of one’s air power.
While good guided missiles cannot make up for weak avionics, good avionics may well counterbalance weaknesses of guided missiles. In general, Western fighter jets with their avionics are superior to the airtoair missiles of potential enemies. Likewise, there is a quantitative and qualitative superiority of Western fighter aircraft, which was further enhanced by the Eurofighter "Typhoon”.
In air warfare decisions are made by airtoground operations, for which precision guided munition (PGM) is of particular advantage. It has replaced conventional "unintelligent” bombs. A lack of PGM stocks on part of the Europeans became evident during Operation "Allied Force”.
Air warfare is increasingly being shifted into night time, necessitating the modification of tactical procedures.
It is the aim of air war planning to determine the maximum impact on the enemy. This is done by engaging the politicaleconomic center, the socalled center of gravity. The selection of center targets leads to numerous target categories varying from country to country. What they always include, however, are the political and military commands, strategic weapon systems, force concentrations, and weapons of mass destruction.
Air war planning is generally a very consuming business. While the planning itself is centralized, the execution is decentralized, and there is a clear tendency toward stricter control of the execution, necessitated by political interventions, multinational force planning, set priorities, or target selection. The objectives of an air war are determined on the political level, while on the operational level military experts decide on threat, timeframe, assets, and composition of forces. The commanders work out the conditions for the tactical environment as well as the operation order for the wings and squadrons. One of the most critical mistakes that can be made in this context, as was the case in Vietnam for instance, is to leave the selection of targets to the politicalstrategic command, i.e. to steer it on a level above the purely tactical one.
Air war planning always has to count on imponderabilities, such as changed political situations, planning errors, problems resulting from the employment of new offensive and defensive weapons on part of the enemy, or inadequate reconnaissance. Battlespace Awareness serves to recognize unexpected developments, warn against surprises, and develop a feeling for the situation. This makes a timely data flow indispensable with.
The fight for air superiority is a multifaceted key operation aimed at gaining air supremacy, i.e. destroying the enemy’s air power. Equally, information superiority, as it nowadays presents itself in the Network Centric Warfare concept, is crucial to a successful campaign. Realtime transmission of target data, data management, and data evaluation will have a great impact on the character of an air campaign, because with their help it will be possible in the future to use other platforms than fighter jets in air warfare.
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