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Thank you for your assistance

Airpower and the Cult

of the Offensive

Carter

COLLEGE OF AEROSPACE DOCTRINE,

RESEARCH, AND EDUCATION

AIR UNIVERSITY

Airpower and the Cult

of the Offensive

JOHN R. CARTER

Major, USAF

CADRE Paper

Air University Press

Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama 36112-6610

October 1998
Disclaimer

Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied within are solely those of the

author, and do not necessarily represent the views of Air University, the United States Air Force,

the Department of Defense, or any other US government agency. Cleared for public release:

distribution unlimited.

ii
CADRE Papers

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iii

Contents

Page

DISCLAIMER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii

FOREWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

THE NATURE OF OFFENSE AND

 DEFENSE FOR AIRPOWER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

AIRPOWER AND THE IDEOLOGY

 OF THE OFFENSIVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

ROYAL AIR FORCE, 1918–38 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

ISRAELI AIR FORCE, 1967–73 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

UNITED STATES AIR FORCE, 1953–65 . . . . . . . . . 65

IMPLICATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

Photographs

Lord Hugh M. Trenchard and

Maj Gen William E. Kepner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Giulio Douhet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Lord Hugh M. Trenchard and Maj Gen Ira C. Eaker . . . 36

Caproni Aircraft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Handley Page Bomber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

Hugh M. Trenchard and Col Edward J. Timberlake . . . 48

v
Page

B-47 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Brig Gen Haywood S. Hansell Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

Generals Hoyt S. Vandenberg,

Matthew B. Ridgway, and Lauris Norstad . . . . . . . . 69

Maj Gen Nathan F. Twining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

B-52 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

B-36 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

First Launch of the Minuteman

Solid-Propellant Missile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

Brig Gen William “Billy” Mitchell . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Maj Gen Frank M. Andrews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

Gen Curtis E. LeMay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84–85

Polaris Submarine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

vi
Foreword

Dogmatic belief in the dominance of the land offensive

influenced decisions that resulted in years of futile bloodletting on the Western Front in World War I. Termed the cult of

the offensive by scholars of the Great War, faith in the offense

became so unshakable in pre-1914 Europe that military

organizations dismissed as irrelevant numerous indications of

its waning power in the face of technological developments

favoring the defense. As we know, the belief that airpower is

inherently offensive is a recurrent theme in airpower history

and doctrine. Given the predilections of airmen for offensive

operations, could a cult of the offensive perniciously trap

airpower doctrine and lead to similarly disastrous

consequences?

By drawing on selected historical experiences of the air

forces of Great Britain, Israel, and the United States, Maj

John R. Carter Jr. employs a comparative perspective and

rigorous case study methodology to offer a detailed examination

of that question. He begins by establishing the theoretical

background necessary for case study analysis. Airpower

defense is defined as those operations conducted to deny

another force’s air operations in a designated airspace.

Airpower offense consists of those operations in the airspace

defended by another, or operations conducted outside of one’s

own actively defended airspace. Major Carter dissects the

relationship between offense and defense to discover that

airpower defense enjoys neither an advantage of position nor

of time. He thus concludes that traditional Clausewitzian

views relative to the power of the defense do not apply to

airpower. The author next describes those factors that may

inject or reinforce a preferential bias for offense into airpower

strategy and doctrine. Major Carter defines a cult of the

offensive as an organizational belief in the power of the offense

so compelling that a military organization no longer evaluates

its offensive doctrine objectively, which leads to his

examination of the ramifications postulated to result from an

offensive ideology.

Drawing on the histories of three services—Great Britain’s

Royal Air Force from 1918 to 1938, the Israeli Air Force from

vii
1967 to 1973, and the United States Air Force from 1953 to

1965—Major Carter offers three case studies to determine if

the cult of the offensive applies to air forces. He concludes

that cults of the offensive have indeed influenced airpower

doctrine in the past, and that detailed offensive planning and

a critical evaluation of capabilities provide two methods for

avoiding this potential trap.

Originally prepared as a thesis for Air University’s School of

Advanced Airpower Studies (SAAS), Airpower and the Cult of

the Offensive was subsequently selected by the Air Force

Historical Foundation as the best SAAS thesis for academic

year 1996–97. Major Carter’s work represents a significant

contribution to the growing body of scholarly literature on

military aviation, and we are pleased to make it available to a

wider audience of airpower thinkers and practitioners.

JAMES R. W. TITUS

Dean of Research

Air University

viii
About the Author

Maj John R. Carter Jr. (BS, Duke University; MAS, Embry–

Riddle Aeronautical University), a senior pilot with 2,700

hours in O-2 and A-10 aircraft, is director, Commander’s

Action Group, Headquarters Air Combat Command at Langley

Air Force Base (AFB), Virginia. A distinguished graduate of the

Reserve Officer Training Corps program, he was commissioned

a second lieutenant in the Air Force in May 1982. After

completing undergraduate pilot training at Laughlin AFB,

Texas, he was assigned to Shaw AFB, South Carolina, as an

O-2 pilot and forward air controller. In 1986 he was

reassigned to the 354th Tactical Fighter Wing (TFW), Myrtle

Beach AFB, South Carolina, as an A-10 pilot. He graduated

from the USAF Fighter Weapons School in 1990 and returned

to the 354th TFW as a squadron weapons officer. After

deploying to Operation Desert Shield, he was reassigned to the

10th TFW, Royal Air Force Alconbury, United Kingdom. He

returned to Operation Desert Shield as his squadron’s

weapons officer and subsequently led 41 combat missions

during Operation Desert Storm. He was assigned to Nellis

AFB, Nevada, in 1991 as an instructor pilot in the A-10

Division of the USAF Weapons School, where he completed his

tour in 1995 as the operations officer.

Major Carter is a graduate of the USAF Weapon School

(where he received the Robbie Risner Award), Air Command

and Staff College, and in 1997 the School of Advanced

Airpower Studies, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. He is married to the

former Melissa Kline, and they have two children, Robert and

Hannah.

ix
Introduction

I am tempted indeed to declare dogmatically that whatever

doctrine the armed forces are working on now, they have

got it wrong. . . . Still it is the task of military science in an

age of peace to prevent the doctrines from being too badly

wrong.

—Sir Michael Howard 

Chesney Memorial Gold Medal Lecture

3 October 1973 

Since a complete understanding of the conditions of future

conflict lies beyond the horizon of any strategist, those called

upon in the future to execute doctrine formulated today will

likely find it lacking. The degree to which doctrine fails to

anticipate the actual conditions of combat may spell the

difference between victory and defeat. That military

organizations entrusted with the preservation of national

security will strive to develop usable doctrine appears

self-evident, as does the assertion that future conflict will hold

some surprises despite the best efforts of planners, especially

if a nation enters an unexpected conflict. It is surprising that

doctrine sometimes turns out to be thoroughly inappropriate

for even an anticipated, foreseen conflict. Obviously no

organization sets out to develop a flawed doctrine, but despite

the best of intentions, some doctrines lead to tragedy for the

armed forces employing them. To help avert such future

tragedies, Airpower and the Cult of the Offensive offers

insights about how to avoid one possible cause of “badly

wrong” doctrine.

The military doctrines of the European powers in 1914

erred terribly by underestimating the power of the defense.

Several authors, notably Stephen Van Evera and Jack Snyder,

have examined the antebellum characteristics of the major

European powers’ World War I military organizations. They

label the myriad causes and effects of their extreme faith in

offense over defense in spite of contrary evidence “the cult (or

ideology) of the offensive.”1 The experience of World War I

1
appears to demonstrate that one way to get doctrine badly

wrong is to overestimate the power of the offense.

The relationship between offense and defense has long

intrigued military theorists. Antoine Henri Jomini and Carl

von Clausewitz addressed the relative strengths and weaknesses of offense and defense in their major works. 2 One of

the first airpower theorists, Giulio Douhet, claimed that no

defense against aircraft was possible.3 While acknowledging

the possibility of defense, both Air Force Manual (AFM) 1-2,

United States Air Force Basic Doctrine, the US Air Force’s

(USAF) first doctrine publication, and Air Force Doctrine

Document (AFDD) 1, Air Force Basic Doctrine, its current version

of its basic doctrine, assert that airpower is inherently

offensive.4 Can the cult of the offensive perniciously trap

airpower doctrine, and, if so, what are the identifiable symptoms

that an offensive bias may have skewed one’s airpower doctrine?

Answering that question is central to this study. This thesis

provides a theoretical background and examines three cases to

test the hypothesis that the ideology of the offensive can trap

airpower doctrine. After examining the nature of offense and

defense as they apply to airpower, the author offers reasons

military organizations may prefer offensive doctrines. He

identifies the elements and implications of the cult of the

offensive and investigates a historical case to determine if the

airpower doctrine under study was trapped by the cult of the

offensive. The author infers from the case study data symptoms

strategists may use as indicators that their doctrine properly, or

improperly, estimates the effectiveness of the offense. He reviews

the empirical findings and discusses the implications.

The use of evocative words such as trap and cult requires

some additional explanation, lest the reader be misled by the

choice of terminology. This thesis discusses some implications

of organizational theory for military organizations, in

particular the influence organizational forces can exert on the

formulation of military doctrine. For comprehensible, logically

justifiable reasons military organizations usually prefer

offensive doctrines, and such natural attraction to offense is

not what is meant by a cult of the offensive. Where exactly one

draws the line between the customary, militarily useful appeal

of the offense and a cult of the offensive are necessarily vague.

CADRE PAPER

2
However, the difference is important. The use of cult is

meant to describe, not indict. When doctrine depends on

immediate offense for success either without regard to

observable improvements which have significantly

strengthened the defense, or when known political limitations

prevent the use of the offense, one perceives a critical

discontinuity between offensive doctrine and reality. It is this

discontinuity, which occurs when offensive preference

continues, or even strengthens, in the face of known

limitations or obstacles to offensive action, that is

investigated as being possibly attributable to a cult of the

offensive. A cultic belief in the success of the chosen

offense, despite readily available evidence to the contrary,

characterizes such instances.

Similarly, the use of trap indicates that preference for

offense could make one’s doctrine susceptible to a cult of the

offensive. As demonstrated in 1914, belief in the efficacy of

offense can become so compelling that defensive

improvements are ignored as irrelevant, and the ability and

requirement to conduct a successful offensive are no longer

questioned. This dynamic becomes self-reinforcing, and once

acting a powerful offensive preference begets more offense. It

is in this sense that a cult of the offensive can trap doctrine.

Robert Jervis asserts that it is possible to ameliorate the

effects of the security dilemma by first recognizing that it

exists.5 The author likewise asserts that one may avoid the

potential trap of a cult of the offensive by acknowledging

the spiraling tendency of offensive doctrines, then remaining

alert for symptoms which indicate that such a spiral may

be occurring.

The proper use of evidence is critical to drawing any useful

conclusions. One should not fault planners for underestimating

the power of the defense when defensive improvements occur

secretly or result from an unanticipated technological

improvement. For example, Luftwaffe planners did not fully

comprehend how the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) fighter direction

net incorporated radar to increase the power of the defense in

the Battle of Britain. While their intelligence methods may

merit criticism, the Germans did not ignore the influence of

CARTER

3
new technology for the defense; they simply did not have

adequate information to judge its importance.6

It also becomes much easier to find signs that accurately

predicted the nature of a conflict in hindsight. The historical

record may preserve the prognostications of those who

correctly anticipated how a conflict would unfold, while not

preserving other guesses which, though just as powerful at

the time, turned out to be as wrong as the preferred doctrine.

This phenomenon could lead one to conclude, erroneously,

that strategists made a clear choice to reject the correct

doctrine for the incorrect one. To demonstrate both the power

and the danger of the ideology of the offensive, the evidence

must show that the potential deficiencies of the offensive

doctrine were apparent, that the organization under study had

the opportunity to consider the data portending the

ineffectiveness of its planned offense, and that the military

organization nevertheless rejected doctrinal reform in favor of

continued emphasis on the offense.

The case studies considered here, the doctrines of the

RAF in the interwar period through 1938, of the Israeli Air

Force (IAF) from 1967 to 1973, and of the USAF from 1953

to 1965, are specifically bounded to test the hypothesis.

Changing the boundaries could lead to different

conclusions. For instance, the Israeli case begins after the

remarkable success of 1967, the British case does not

include World War II, and the US case examines only the

period before extensive bombing began in Vietnam. The

cases were selected for this study because they have

important similarities. In each case, the airpower doctrine

was offensive. During the time periods under study,

airpower employment conditions changed, which leads one

to question the appropriateness of the offensive doctrine by

the end of the period. Each case considers a relatively large,

well-funded military organization that had sufficient

flexibility to alter its doctrine, if leaders had decided that

doctrinal reform was necessary. Finally, the lessons gleaned

appear to have applicability to today’s airpower doctrinal

development.

CADRE PAPER

4
The Nature of Offense

and Defense for Airpower

In summary, the speed, range and flexibility of air power

grant it ubiquity, and this in turn imbues it with an offensive

capability. Because success in war is generally attained

while on the offensive, the adage, “the best defense is a

good offense,” is almost always true in air war.

—Col Phillip S. Meilinger 

10 Propositions Regarding Air Power

To analyze the potential influence of offensive ideologies on

the development of airpower doctrines, it is first necessary to

clarify the definitions of offense and defense as they apply to

airpower. Once the definitions are established, an accurate

description of the relationship between offense and defense for

airpower is possible.

Traditional Definitions of Offense and Defense

Interest in the relationship between offense and defense has

increased with the growing importance of offense-defense

theory in international security studies.7 Because some

elements of this theory are useful for explaining the

relationship of offense and defense in airpower, portions merit

a brief review in this study. Offense-defense theory defines

offense and defense traditionally in terms of the ability to take

or protect territory.8 The offensive-defensive balance is

expressed as the relative cost of offense and defense. While

several variations of the definition of balance are in use, the

key idea is that the offense has an advantage when it

consumes fewer resources to take territory than to defend it.

The theory expresses offense-defense balance as the ratio of

the investment required in offense to offset an opponent’s

investment in defense.9 For example, if it requires a $3

investment in offense to offset a $1 investment in defense,

then the offense-defense balance is expressed as 3:1. The

larger this ratio, the greater the balance favors the defense.

Defense has more of an advantage in a system, like the one

cited above as an example, with a balance ratio of 3:1 than in

another system where a $1 investment in defense can be

CARTER

5
offset by a $2 investment in offense, giving a balance ratio of

2:1. Still, in both of these systems, the defense has an

advantage. The idea of defense-dominance or offensedominance used to describe ratios other than 1:1 should be

more accurately expressed as advantage. The ability to

compare two systems with different balance ratios and identify

movement of the ratio along a continuum provides more utility

than making an absolute binary determination.10 This

definition of offense-defense balance avoids the contentious

classification of weapons as inherently offensive or defensive

by their characteristics, instead focusing on the net effect new

technologies have on the overall security system.

Offense-defense theory has demonstrated plausible

explanatory power for understanding the causes of wars, the

potential for arms races, and the nature of the security

dilemma at the strategic level. While the theory incorporates

the strategic effects of airpower, it sheds little light on the

nature of the offense-defense relationship for operational

airpower forces. Even a definition of tactical offensive

advantage still refers to the ability to seize or protect

territory.11 Limiting one’s definition of offense to the ability to

seize or secure territory implies that airpower acts only as a

supporting arm for forces which can take and occupy

territory. While supporting ground forces in the conquest of

territory is one significant role for airpower, it is not the only

way airpower influences national security. Further analysis

requires a more refined definition of offense and defense as

they apply to airpower.

Airpower Perspective

The first problem in defining offense and defense concerns

the matter of perspective. To illustrate, imagine that a fighter

aircraft engages an attack aircraft flying to a target. Initially,

one likely would label the initiator or the fighter offensive and

the reactor or the attack aircraft defensive. Suppose that the

attack aircraft negates the fighter’s initial weapons delivery

attempts and turns to engage the fighter. If the basis for

applying the labels of offense and defense depend on flying

characteristics, air-to-air weapons capabilities, and the spatial

CADRE PAPER

6
relationship of the aircraft, the roles reverse if the attack

aircraft attempts to shoot down the fighter, which must now

defend. As the engagement continues, the roles of offense and

defense may cycle back and forth with each transitory

advantage of altitude or position. Obviously the nature of the

engagement does not change based on whether the fight

occurs over friendly or enemy territory. While one may dismiss

this dilemma as pertinent only to the most tactical level of

war, it illustrates how the perspective of air warfare can differ

from that of ground warfare.12

To resolve the assignment of offensive and defensive roles,

several possibilities exist. One method defines engagement

roles by assigning each opponent the first role held. Thus, the

fighter aircraft that initiated the attack bears the offensive role

for the entire engagement, even though the roles may switch

later. Another common convention acknowledges the exchange

of roles by labeling the defender’s attempt to shoot the

attacker as a counteroffensive. A third method characterizes

tactical engagements by the nature of the higher operationallevel strategy they support. In this case, roles at the

operational level of war derive from the overall position of

forces on the map; one considers the prebattle status quo to

categorize tactical moves as offensive or defensive. All of these

conventions, however, stem from a ground combat perspective

in which roles do not change as quickly as they often do in

air combat.

Adopting a territorial approach to offense and defense

increases the definitional difficulties for operational airpower.

If one flies close air support (CAS) sorties in support of an

entrenched force attempting to repel an enemy advance, are

the CAS operations defensive or offensive? From one point of

view they are defensive, just as one considers the supporting

artillery fires defensive. On the other hand, such sorties

appear offensive because they must penetrate enemy airspace

and attack enemy positions. Suppose one resolves this

perplexity by categorizing air support in the same way as

artillery support in relation to the operations of the supported

ground force. If the ground force is defensive then the air

operations are defensive, and similarly, air support of

offensive ground force operations are offensive. This solution

CARTER

7
seems reasonable at first, but the problem compounds as one

considers air missions other than CAS. If one uses this

methodology, the sorties expended to establish air superiority

over the battlefield so the defensive CAS can proceed are

themselves defensive. Defense now also may include

interdiction sorties flown against bridges or against supply

convoys hundreds of miles from the ground fighting. Most

absurdly, using this convention forces one to label strategic

attack missions flown against an aggressor’s national-level

command and control systems, perhaps in the enemy’s capital

itself, as defensive.

To overcome this logical incongruence, the definitions of

offense and defense for air combat must allow categorization

of air operations with consideration of the characteristics of

airpower, while allowing the definitions to remain somewhat

intuitive given the common, traditional usage of the terms.

First, one should categorize air operations independently of

ground operations to avoid the absurdities discussed above. A

theater commander may choose to conduct offensive air

operations while ground forces remain in defensive positions,

as Gen H. Norman Schwarzkopf employed coalition airpower

during most of the 1991 Gulf War. Second, the definitions

must recognize the key characteristic of airpower: its ability to

strike targets throughout the depth of the theater of

operations rapidly, nonlinearly, and without regard to

physical obstacles. Third, the definitions must recognize that

proactive operations taken on one’s own initiative,

independent of enemy action, are intuitively offensive, while

reactive operations, taken in response to enemy action, are

intuitively defensive.

Some common uses of offense and defense confuse rather

than clarify the issue. The relationship between offense and

defense in strategic nuclear theory is often described with

respect to the destabilizing or stabilizing influence weapons

exert on nuclear deterrence. If stability is automatically

equated with the term defensive, then some counterintuitive

descriptions of capability can result, such as labeling strategic

missile defense systems offensive because they could facilitate

a nuclear first-strike option. Use of terms such as antideterrent or destabilizing can help to avoid such confusion. 13

CADRE PAPER

8
Likewise, international law, custom, or treaty may

specifically recognize certain acts as hostile or offensive and

authorize aggressive responses termed self-defense. Political

leaders who attempt to secure popular support may

deliberately avoid the use of the term offense, instead they

choose to frame actions in terms of defending something.

Some may even categorize preventive war or preemptive

attacks as defensive. Such considerations are critically

important at the strategic level. To develop definitions useful

for the analysis of operational doctrine, however, the inclusion

of these broader strategic uses of the labels offense and

defense adds confusion. Therefore, the definitions that follow

should be considered applicable at the operational level of

military operations and doctrine.

Definitions

With these caveats in mind, then, one can define defense

and offense in the airpower context. Air defensive operations

are those operations conducted to deny another force’s air

operations in a defined airspace. Defensive operations include

any effort to ensure that the enemy cannot use the air to

successfully attack targets existing either in the air, on the

ground, or on or under the sea. Defensive operations can be

further categorized into two types: active and passive. Active

defenses attempt to deny attacks by destroying or interfering

with the attacker or the attacker’s munitions. Examples of

active defenses include fighter aircraft, surface-to-air missiles

(SAM), antiaircraft artillery (AAA), theater ballistic missile

defenses, or electronic countermeasures (ECM). Passive

defenses attempt to deny weapons employment without

assaulting the attacker or the munitions. Camouflage, buried

bunkers, and hardened shelters are examples of passive

defenses. A defender conducts all of these operations to deny

an attacker the opportunity to engage targets from the air

successfully. Implicit in this definition of defense is the need

for continuous denial, since the defender must repulse an

attack which occurs at a time and place of the attacker’s

choosing. The definitional stipulation to designate a defined

area for the defense eliminates potential confusion concerning

CARTER

9
the current USAF offensive counterair (OCA) mission. One

conducts OCA missions against airfields or aircraft in an

attempt to destroy the enemy’s capability to operate anywhere,

not just in a specified area. So this definition recognizes such

OCA sorties as offensive even though they are designed to

prevent the enemy from conducting air operations.

Air offensive operations include both those operations

conducted inside of the airspace defended by another and

those conducted outside of one’s actively defended airspace.

No matter who controls the airspace, the offense must always

employ measures required to defeat passive defenses. The

consideration of who controls the airspace recognizes that

offense comes in two distinct types.

For the first type of offense, operations inside airspace

defended by another, the offensive force must expect that the

defenders may choose to oppose the airspace penetration. To

counter the defense, the offensive force may use active

measures such as escort fighters, SAM suppression aircraft,

ECM, and infrared countermeasures (IRCM) or passive

measures such as camouflage or stealth. The offensive force

may have such effective countermeasures that they appear to

negate anything the defender can muster, exemplified by the

use of stealth fighters over Baghdad in the Gulf War. Yet, the

defender had other options available to negate or degrade the

use of stealth fighters, such as dispersal of critical nodes or

laser countermeasures.

The second type of offensive operations, those occurring

outside of one’s actively defended airspace, is included to

recognize the offensive nature of operations in contested

airspace, as well as operations in an area an opponent does

not actively defend. For example, US pilots flew high-altitude

reconnaissance sorties over Cuba in July 1961 at an altitude

unreachable by Cuban defenses. But such passive defenses as

camouflage were still available to the Cubans. When the

Soviets deployed a SAM system capable of reaching the

overflying aircraft, the notion of air superiority above a given

altitude may have changed, but the essential character of

the operation had not. In both instances the U-2 overflights

were offensive.

CADRE PAPER

10
It is possible for two belligerents to actively defend the same

airspace. Two nations sharing a border could station SAM

batteries close to their shared boundary. When hostilities

commence, both activate their SAMs, which are able to defend

airspace across the other’s border. Any aircraft attempting to

penetrate the enemy’s SAM coverage would have to treat such

operations as offensive, even though the actions occur inside

airspace simultaneously under friendly defense. The fact that

one’s own SAMs cover the area may allow friendly aircraft to

operate without fear of engagement by enemy fighters, but the

nature of the operations are still offensive and friendly aircraft

must pursue measures to negate enemy defenses.

The use of the term air superiority can confuse the issue of

offense and defense. The official US military definition comes

from Joint Publication (Joint Pub) 1-02, Department of

Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms . That

definition is “that degree of dominance in the airbattle of one

force over another which permits the conduct of operations by

the former and its related land, sea, and air forces at a given

time and place without prohibitive interference by the

opposing force.”14 The establishment of air superiority, while

possibly reducing aircraft escort requirements, does not alter

the offensive or defensive nature of operations. Coalition

aircraft operating in the Kuwaiti theater of operations after 17

January 1991 functioned under a condition of air

superiority.15 The Iraqis attempted to defend this airspace

with SAMs and AAA after that date, but coalition attacks

continued without prohibitive interference. Coalition air

operations were still offensive since they were conducted in

airspace defended by an opponent. As coalition ground forces

advanced and swept away the remaining SAMs and AAA

pieces, the airspace defended by the Iraqis contracted. Air

superiority can also mislead because it ignores the

effectiveness of passive defenses, which may hinder offensive

operations as well as, or better than, active ones. Because a

force has established air superiority over an area does not

imply that the force is defending the area. The condition of air

superiority implies that one can successfully conduct

operations at the time of one’s choosing, not necessarily all of

the time. There is a subtle difference between this and

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defense, since effective defense implies that the enemy can

never choose a time to conduct significant air operations

without meeting resistance. Air superiority does not guarantee

the success of offensive operations, as the relative lack of

success of US interdiction operations over the Ho Chi Minh

Trail for the majority of the Vietnam War demonstrates.

These definitions help to concentrate attention on the entire

spectrum of air combat. Rather than focusing on the battle

between air forces or the battle between air forces and ground

defenses, these definitions ensure that one can correctly

categorize all measures which influence the employment of

airpower. The definitions will prove useful for analyzing the

relative power of the offensive and defensive in the case

studies that follow.

Offensive-Defensive Relationship for Airpower

With the definitions of offense and defense thus established

for airpower, the next issue concerns the relationship between

the two. Naturally, the considerably longer history of ground

warfare colors expectations and abstractions concerning the

power of defense. For ground forces, once a force occupies the

battlefield, a rival must annihilate that force, or cause it to

retreat or surrender, before its forces can occupy the ground.

The attacking force may choose a direct attack method, such

as the use of firepower against the defender, or an indirect

attack method, such as severing lines of communication, to

force the defender to retreat or surrender. When viewing

airpower as an adjunct or merely as a supporting force for

ground operations, then the same offense-defense

considerations apply of direct attack by firepower or indirect

attack on supply lines. To consider air warfare, which occurs

in a realm that no one can feasibly occupy, calls for a

reevaluation of the relationship between offense and defense.

Airpower theorists have long questioned the applicability to

air warfare of Clausewitz’s dictum “that defense is the

stronger form of waging war.”16 Douhet believed that no

defense against aircraft was possible.17 USAF published

doctrine has repeatedly asserted that airpower is inherently

offensive.18 Col Phillip S. Meilinger’s third proposition about

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airpower states “air power is primarily an offensive weapon.” 19

According to these authors, offensive preference derives from

airpower’s ability to concentrate decisive combat power

anywhere in a theater without regard to physical boundaries.

The theoretical relationship between offense and defense for

airpower rests on three defining influences: the combat

medium, time, and the ability to concentrate. First, the air,

the combat medium for airpower, is always neutral, as

airpower theorists emphasized.20 In ground battle a defender

can choose an engagement area to maximize terrain

advantages. By looking at a map or studying the terrain, one

can declare an area good or bad for defense. Air engagements,

however, always occur in a neutral medium that provides

neither cover nor advantage to a defender. One could argue

that clouds or sun position may provide cover, but this

argument ignores another certitude about air engagements.

Air engagements always occur on the move. A defender cannot

seek cover in a cloud or hide in the sun forever. Eventually an

aircraft must move on, either to perform its mission or to land

and refuel.

Second, in air war at the operational level, time accrues to

the detriment of both offense and defense, because one must

expend resources simply to enter airpower’s medium, the air.

Once operating in the air, an aircraft has a finite sortie

duration, then it must return to base for refueling and

maintenance. Airpower suffers from a constant, significant

resource drain even if no combat occurs. Ground forces not

engaged in combat consume significantly fewer resources

than forces engaged with the enemy. A tank sitting in a

defensive position uses fewer resources than a tank on the

move. An airplane flown on a training flight consumes the

same resources, excluding weapons, as a comparable combat

sortie. Furthermore, a parked tank can perform a defensive

mission because it can still employ its weapons. An aircraft

must fly to perform its mission. It defends nothing sitting on

the ground. The range and flexibility of airpower allow one to

conserve resources by holding aircraft on the ground, then

scrambling to intercept an attacker. If an aircraft does not get

airborne, however, it cannot execute its mission, even with all

of its firepower capabilities intact. A tank unable to move but

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still able to fire may have a short life on the modern

battlefield, but it can still perform its mission until it is

destroyed or bypassed. An airplane on the ground has no

mission, other than possibly functioning as a part of a “fleet in

being,” resulting in a strong impetus to launch aircraft. Every

minute of flight costs resources and brings the aircraft one

minute closer to having to recover to the base where it

remains unusable until it can be refurbished for takeoff.

Third, the ability to concentrate air forces rapidly allows an

offensive force the capability to overwhelm a defensive one.

While the neutrality of the aerial medium and the detrimental

effects of time impart no advantage to the offense, a

connection exists between airpower’s key characteristics—

speed, range, and flexibility—and the offense. These

characteristics, by themselves, favor neither offense nor

defense. Yet, for two forces of approximately equal speed,

range, and flexibility, it is easier to conduct offense than

defense. The offense can mass, at a chosen time and place,

forces sufficient to overwhelm the defense, which must

attempt to defend everywhere. Moreover, as noted above,

aircraft consume resources to fly. To keep a defense of aircraft

airborne in sufficient numbers to ward off an attack, given

that the attacker can employ mass and concentration at the

time of his choosing, requires a tremendous expenditure of

assets. Thus, the defender must rely on alert aircraft and early

warning to scramble sufficient numbers of aircraft to defend.

One cannot escape the eroding effect of time, however. If the

enemy does not come into contact with the defense, but

instead only feints, the resources are already spent to launch

the defenders. They must land and refuel. The enemy has

forced the defender to expend resources at near combat levels,

without engagement. Such tactics exact a toll on the defense.

An attacker with superior resources can exhaust the defender

without firing a shot. If the defender fails to react, the attacker

can press the attack, possibly catching the defender’s forces

on the ground. To defend successfully, one must counter the

offense’s ability to mass overwhelming forces. The airpower

offensive-defensive relationship hinges on the amount of

time the defender requires to mass sufficient force to blunt

an attack.

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Clausewitz’s proposition about the power of the defense

does not apply to airpower since his proposition stems from

“the advantages of waiting and the advantages of position.” 21

Because the aerial medium is neutral, there cannot be an

advantage of position, and because time has a decaying effect

for both offense and defense, there cannot be an advantage of

waiting. At the strategic level there may be benefits to fighting

over friendly territory such as simpler recovery of downed

aircrews and damaged aircraft, or proximity to friendly bases,

but there is no such positional advantage for the air battle

itself except that created by mutually supporting firepower.

The ease with which the offense can concentrate and

overwhelm the defense is a product of current technology. A

more general understanding of the relationship between

offense and defense for airpower can be obtained by employing

abstract notions to describe airpower’s characteristics. For

example, coverage can be defined as the area over which an

airpower platform can employ its effects (whether discretely as

with firepower or continuously as in electronic jamming) and

reaction can be defined as the time required to employ a

platform after notification. Using these definitions a general

proposition can be derived: as coverage increases and reaction

improves, the ability to use airpower defensively increases.

The efforts of the offense to concentrate enough force to

overwhelm the defense can take the guise of superior

weaponry or sheer numbers. When coverage is small and

reaction slow, airpower offensive forces appear to derive an

insurmountable advantage from the ease with which airpower

can concentrate force. When quick reaction and large coverage

permit a defensive force to concentrate as well, then the

offensive advantage is negated. Theory does not convey an

advantage upon either the airpower offense or the defense, but

the technology of the day might.

Both the offense and the defense can turn to passive

measures in an attempt to gain the advantage. If the defender

can conceal targets, it matters little that the attacker can

penetrate enemy airspace; the attacker is prevented from

employing his weapons. If the attacker can develop passive

countermeasures, such as jammers or stealth, which deny the

defender any possibility of engagement, the offense gains an

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advantage. Such advantages may be limited to certain times of

day or apply only in certain weather conditions. Weather

conditions that deny weapon launches from long ranges or

force attackers to low altitude to stay below an overcast may

negate an attacker’s advantage. Reliance on such passive

countermeasures as radar absorbent material may restrict

attacker operations to the hours of darkness. Air planners

must recognize or create the conditions necessary for success.

The offensive-defensive relationship for airpower does not

function like a scale. Rather, it operates more like a chaotic

pendulum, varying from absolute balance derived from system

characteristics to swings between degrees of superiority

determined by local conditions. The airpower offensivedefensive advantage can shift as one moves across an area of

operations, creating areas where either offense or defense

enjoys superiority based on the time of day, or on the local

weather. The difference between modeling the offensivedefensive balance as a scale and modeling it accurately is like

the difference between using the orbital model of the atom and

the quantum model. One can predict whether offense or

defense has an advantage under a given set of conditions, but

one may have little control over the conditions existing at the

time of the operation.

This sensitivity of the offensive-defensive balance to local or

transient conditions profoundly affects airpower strategy.

Certainly weather has always affected military strategy. No

one can deny the impact the early arrival of the Russian

winter had on Germany’s advancing forces in the fall of 1941.

Such events slow the movement of forces, thereby thwarting

the strategy of those requiring rapid mobility to conduct an

offensive. To have an operational or strategic level impact,

such events must affect large regions of the theater for a

considerable period of time. For airpower strategy, however,

even a small, short-lived event may have far-reaching

operational or strategic effect.

Since airpower forces may operate over long distances

without occupying the enemy airspace covered in transit, the

only payoff for airpower is the mission result. Whether that

result is destruction of a target, delivery of a logistical payload,

or collection of an image, airpower employment reaps no

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benefit, other than perhaps a psychological one, from the

intermediate ability to operate through intervening territory. A

ground offensive may grind to a halt short of the objective, but

presumably one can use the resources gained short of the

objective to bolster one’s operational position. An aircraft that

arrives over its target only to find the target shrouded by a

late-lifting fog or that is forced to abort its mission because of

a system error gains no such limited success in return for the

effort expended.

Airpower forces have sought technical solutions to permit

successful employment during the transitory periods of

inclement weather or darkness. Interestingly, such

improvements to date have increased airpower’s need for

mission support, either in terms of intelligence or imagery.

This solution has served only to shift the overall airpower

mission’s sensitivity to small inputs from the target area to

the support area. A technologically dependent mission may

fail because of a lack of information about an enemy leader’s

exact position, or an imaging parallax misinterpretation

leading to use of a desired mean point of impact that is in

error by 15 feet. Even as technology has infused airpower’s

offensive forces with the ability to negate enemy defenses, the

balance between them increasingly hinges on the proper

functioning of complex machinery. A rash of ECM built-in test

faults or targeting radar failures may rapidly shift the

operational balance in favor of the defender. Because of its

dependence on technology, the relationship between offense

and defense for airpower appears to be much more sensitive to

initial conditions and small events than the relationship

between offense and defense for military forces in general. The

discussion of offense and defense in airpower cannot be

divorced from an analysis of the circumstances postulated to

exist during the employment of airpower forces.

Summary

These definitions of airpower offense and defense allow the

categorization of doctrinal and strategic postures. The

development of strategy, techniques, and equipment to

conduct airpower operations in the airspace defended by

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another or outside of airspace defended by friendly forces is,

by definition, offensive. The development of strategy,

techniques, and equipment to deny another force’s air

operations in a defined airspace is, by definition, defensive.

Due to its attributes, the traditional view of the relationship

between offense and defense is altered for airpower. Because

airpower defense has no advantage of position and time

accrues to the detriment of both offense and defense, airpower

defense enjoys no inherent advantage. The success of

airpower defense is measured by the ability to thwart the

concentrated force of the offense. Airpower’s dependence on

technology also makes its employment more sensitive to local

conditions and small inputs.

Airpower and the Ideology of the Offensive

The importance of strategic attack and the fragility of states

at the strategic level of war: Countries are inverted

pyramids that rest precariously on their strategic innards—

their leadership, communications, key production,

infrastructure, and population. If a country is paralyzed

strategically, it is defeated and cannot sustain its fielded

forces though they be fully intact.

—Col John A. Warden III

At the most basic level, military organizations prefer

offensive doctrines for the reason that offense works. As

Clausewitz noted, defense may be the strongest form of war,

but as soon as strength allows, defense must give way to

offense in order to pursue the objective. 22 Upon closer

examination, however, it becomes apparent that not every

offensive works. Because airpower operations outside of

friendly defended airspace or through airspace defended by

another are offensive regardless of the ground position of

forces or borders, a majority of airpower operations involves

offense, including many of those executed in pursuit of a

strategically defensive policy. Airpower strategists, for whom

offense is already the norm, should remain especially wary of

any factors that might exaggerate offensive preference. This

discussion considers such factors that can reinforce and

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perhaps skew a military organization’s preference for the

offense. The author explores the application of the ideology of

the offensive to airpower and the ramifications of preference

for offensive doctrine postulated to apply to armed forces in

general and to airpower in particular.

The Appeal of Offensive Doctrines

Military organizations promulgate doctrine to guide the

development of strategy for a particular military event.

Doctrine attempts to capture the accumulated lessons of

previous conflicts and combine them with the implications of

theory to provide a “best-approach” guide for strategists. 23 The

strategy chosen for any specific conflict should doctrinally

employ the means available to accomplish the stated

objectives. Thus, doctrine provides guidance for some future

conflict while strategy guides the disposition or employment of

forces for a specified time or in a particular conflict,

accounting for the contextual elements applicable to the

situation. Since doctrine is based upon the perceived

applicability of historical lessons to the current period, the

writers and reviewers of doctrine must judge two key elements:

what lessons history teaches and what circumstances make

those lessons applicable, or irrelevant, to the current

situation. Understanding the sources of doctrine involves

accounting for the factors that influence these two judgments.

Existing literature does not enforce a rigorous definitional

separation of strategy and doctrine. The difference between

strategy and doctrine is certainly important in some contexts.

For instance, current US joint doctrine is authoritative but

allows the military commander’s strategy to deviate from

doctrine should unusual circumstances warrant. This study

focuses on the principles that guide military decisions, the

sources of those principles, and the likely implications of

choosing offensive principles over defensive ones. Whether

those principles are expressed as doctrine, strategy, or both in

a particular case does not alter the substance of this

discussion, obviating the need for a technically strict

application of the definitions here.

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To help explain why military organizations choose particular

doctrines, it is useful to describe how organizations assimilate

inputs from the external world to produce military doctrine or

strategy. Graham T. Allison’s work on strategic decision

processes offers a starting point for analyzing how military

organizations process inputs. Allison offers three different

models to explain the behavior of governments: the Rational

Actor Model (Model I), the Organizational Process Model

(Model II), and the Bureaucratic Politics Model (Model III). 24

Applying Allison’s models to a military organization instea d

of a government provides some insights into the development

of doctrine.

Suppose one takes Allison’s Model I view and considers

military doctrine as if it were the output of a rational, unitary

actor.25 Published US doctrine easily fits the unitary actor

portion of this paradigm, at least superficially, since the

service chief signs service doctrine, granting it an official seal

of personal approval. The other aspect of this model,

rationality, poses a more vexing problem. Allison defines

rationality as the “consistent, value-maximizing choice within

specified constraints.”26 A rational actor objectively examines

alternative courses, evaluates the consequences of choosing

the various alternatives, then selects the course of action

which maximizes the payoff determined by applying the same

value function to each alternate outcome. Applying this model

to the armed forces, a rational doctrine results from an

objective consideration of the lessons of history and the

capabilities and limitations of military power. A rational

strategy results from the objective consideration of the

available courses of action and the objective evaluation of the

expected results of pursuing each alternative. Errors may

arise from incomplete information or unpredictable

consequences of actions, but such mistakes do not invalidate

the determination that the doctrine was rational. The rational

actor view has tremendous intuitive appeal, and it forms the

basis for predicting how an opponent will react in an

interactive contest such as military action. Planners can

forecast several military moves ahead based on the

assumption that the opponent will usually choose the best

option available given the circumstances.27

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Experience has shown that organizations do not always

select the best option. If an organization does not pursue the

doctrine or strategy with the highest expected payoff, whether

due to less than objective evaluation, incomplete consideration of alternatives, or biased determination of the value

function, its doctrinal or strategic choice fails the test of

rationality. It is in this sense that one can label a strategic

choice irrational.

Irrational choice is a logical contradiction for a model that

assumes rational action, thus Allison provides as alternatives

Models II and III, which can account for apparently irrational

actions. While Model III also has application for explaining the

actions of military organizations, Model II provides the best

instrument for dissecting the forces that can shape military

doctrine and strategy. Instead of considering an action as a

logical, conscious choice, Model II frames action in terms of

organizational output resulting from the interactions of the

organization’s constituent parts.28 Allison states that action

results from the continuous functioning of standardized

routines possessing seven identifying characteristics: pursuit

of organizational goals, sequential attention to goals, implementation of standard operating procedures, construction of

programs and repertoires, uncertainty avoidance, limited

problem solving, and adaptation resistance (unless an

organization is forced to change by budget feast, budget

famine, or spectacular failure).29

The foremost organizational goal, according to this model, is

to guarantee the continued well-being of the organization. The

primary purpose of military organizations is to ensure national

security. It follows that if a military organization can pursue

national security and organizational goals simultaneously,

there will be a powerful impetus to do so. For armed forces in

general, pursuit of offensive doctrine justifies a larger,

better-equipped organization, thus increasingly satisfying the

primary organizational goal. To conduct an offense, forces

must be raised, trained, equipped, and positioned for combat.

Defensive doctrine allows one to economize on combat-ready

forces, perhaps relying on fortifications or obstacles to slow an

enemy’s advance while less expensive reserves mobilize.

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This offense-defense relationship is somewhat problematic

for air forces since airpower defense enjoys no advantage of

position. To the extent that some defensive measure, such as

SAMs, can be employed to secure airspace from intrusion, a

state might buy time to mobilize offensive air forces. If,

however, air platforms must be used to defend, by the

definition of defense established previously, then large

numbers of platforms must be immediately available. The

organizational issue for air forces is not so much one of pure

size, since airpower defense also demands a relatively large,

well-equipped, standing force, but of the composition of the

force. Large numbers of solely air-to-air capable fighters are

useful for defense, and useful for offense as long as the enemy

contends air superiority, but are useless for conducting

missions against surface targets. Air forces vigorously

pursuing offense seek equipment, munitions, and countermeasures improvements predicted to increase the numbe r of

aircraft that will successfully penetrate defenses to strike

enemy targets. To the extent increases in offensive capability

lead to increases in organizational wealth above the level

required to field a large defensive force, airpower organiz ations also profit from escalating the pursuit of offensive

doctrine.

While Allison’s general model is adaptable to describe a

military organization, several authors have examined how

military organizations particularly develop strategy and

doctrine. Jack Snyder, in his book, The Ideology of the

Offensive, claims that the factors affecting “military strategy

are many, but they can all be considered under three

headings: rational calculation, motivated bias, and doctrinal

simplification.”30 Snyder’s category of rational calculation, like

Allison’s Model I, demands an accurate perception of the

contextual elements of a situation, such as political objective,

technology, geography, and relative military balance.31

Realistically, a strategist cannot expect to have completely

accurate information when developing strategy. Some data

relating to the situation will remain ambiguous, and the

interpretation of the ambiguous data depends upon the bias of

the strategist. The more ambiguous the data used in the

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rational calculation, the greater the potential effect of one’s

bias on the result.32

Snyder describes two sources of bias, motivational bias and

simplification bias. Motivational bias stems from the

motivation of the strategist, the strongest of which is

organizational interests. The strength of motivational bias

varies directly with the perceived severity of the threat posed

to a military organization. The more an action threatens

organizational essence or fundamental organizational beliefs,

the stronger the motivational bias against taking that action. 33

Military organizations often derive prestige from either the

success of previous offenses or the promise of future quick

victory via the offense.34 Strategists from such organizations

will likely exhibit a motivational bias for the offense. The more

closely organizational prestige is linked to offensive action, the

stronger the motivational bias for the offense. A particularly

dangerous motivational bias occurs when strategists view the

“necessary” as “possible,” primarily because strategists believe

no other alternative exists. The German decision to execute

the Moltke version of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914 may

exemplify this phenomenon.35 Some have argued that Field

Marshal Helmuth von Moltke’s poor execution led to the

failure of the plan. In an airpower example, this bias could

have contributed to the decision to attempt an aerial resupply

of the German Sixth Army trapped in the Stalingrad perimeter

from November 1942 to February 1943.36

The other type of bias, simplification bias, results from the

needs to focus organizational attention, inculcate a common

organizational belief system, assist strategy calculations, and

reduce uncertainty.37 The first two simplification elements

serve to exaggerate any existing systemic bias. As doctrine is

distilled to ease its transmission and assimilation throughout

an organization, simplified rules of thumb colored by any

existing bias replace the more complex processes that reflect

the nuances inherent in actual employment. Offensive

doctrines address the latter two needs because, in general,

offense permits more detailed planning than defense. It is

easier to forecast requirements after seizing the initiative than

while reacting to an opponent’s moves. Although it is generally

true that offense lends itself more readily to advance planning

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than defense, this relationship does not always hold. The

defense simply may not require much planning, as is the case

in some defense advantage situations. For example, the

defense required less planning than the offense in

World War I, though it was still true that offense could be

planned far in advance. As offensive advantage increases,

however, the ability to plan increasingly favors the offense.

During Operation Desert Storm, the first 72 hours of the

offensive air campaign could be planned in great detail far in

advance of the beginning of the war. Thus, two elements of the

simplification bias tend to promote offense, while the other

two tend to exaggerate any existing bias.

In Snyder’s model, the choice between an offensive or

defensive strategy arises from the interaction of these three

forces: rational calculation, motivational bias, and

simplification bias. When these variables lead to conflicting

doctrinal choices, the one with the strongest case dominates.

If the organizational ethos is at stake, motivational bias

dominates. If the military has powerful, centralized

institutions, simplification bias dominates. If incontrovertible

evidence of the efficacy of either offense or defense exists,

rational calculation dominates. If no single force dominates,

doctrine results from a synthesis of all three. 38 From Snyder’s

work, it follows that if a military organization believes offense

is more powerful than defense, the forces which shape the

choice of strategy should tend to preserve and intensify that

offensive preference.

Barry R. Posen’s analysis of the doctrinal preferences of

military organizations in his book, The Sources of Military

Doctrine, concludes “from specialists in victory, defense turns

soldiers into specialists in attrition, and deterrence makes

them specialists in slaughter.”39 Posen examines

organizational theory and civil-military relations literature to

defend his assertion that militaries prefer offensive doctrines.

Organizationally, offensive doctrines tend to reduce

uncertainty, confer initiative, and increase size and wealth.

With respect to civil-military relations, offensive doctrine

grants a military organization more autonomy than either

defense or deterrence.40 Offensive doctrine appeals to policy

makers outside of the military because such doctrines

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promise quick, decisive victory. They appeal to military

organizations because policy makers will continue to fund

organizations that promise cheap victory.41

Many of Posen’s arguments about military preference for the

offensive parallel arguments made by Van Evera. Van Evera’s

research provides a more detailed analysis of military

organizations that can help to account for offensive

preference. He begins with an organizational approach which

ranks, from most important to least important, the g oals

that any organization seeks: increased size and wealth,

autonomy, preservation of organizational essence, control over

the “task environment," prestige, and homogeneity. By

integrating these organizational needs with two organizational

characteristics, poor self-evaluation and bounded rationality,

Van Evera derives several assertions about the direction of

military bias.42

Military organizations can exaggerate both security threats

and the capabilities of potential enemies through the use of

worst-case scenarios and conservative estimates of friendly

capabilities.43 An example, which had far-reaching

consequences, was the overestimation of Luftwaffe capabilities

when England and France appeased Hitler at Munich. 44 On

the other hand, every failed offensive provides another

possible data point for those who would point out the danger

of underestimating the enemy. When the price of military

failure is high, the need for worst-case planning is

understandable. The cost of military failure increases as it

becomes easier to conquer opponents, in other words, as

offensive advantage increases. Coincidentally, a system of

offensive advantage allows a military organization to justify,

through worst-case scenarios, larger, more powerful military

organizations, even for states that seek security inste ad of

conquest. Thus, the security dilemma operates to the

organizational advantage of the armed forces. This advantage

does not imply that a military organization promo tes a

security dilemma for organizational gain, only that the

security dilemma reinforces the organizational goals o f the

armed forces. Offensive advantage, however, provides both

the spark and the fuel that feed the security dilemma. Military

organizations have a stake in propagating belief in the po wer

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of the offense because a belief in defensive advantage less

adequately fulfills the organizational needs of size and

wealth, control, and prestige. Defense advantage can actually

threaten the organizational goals of promoting essence and

increasing autonomy.

Van Evera concludes from his research that military

organizations generally prefer offensive strategies. Even in cases

where strategists acknowledge that the defender maintains an

advantage, offensive preference can lead to a rationalization

phenomenon he describes as the sharp rap.45 Those advocating

the sharp rap claim that the defense will rapidly collapse, even

though it possesses superior forces, because of the violence and

shock of the attack. The sharp rap succeeds not by defeating the

majority of the enemy’s forces but by destroying the enemy’s

leadership, communications, and morale.46 Belief in offensive

advantage leads military organizations to emphasize “the

importance of striking first, the requirement for massive forces

in-being, the hostility toward limited war and the emphasis on

intensely violent wartime operations.”47

From this analysis of international relations literature come

two important propositions about military doctrine. First,

offensive doctrines hold a powerful appeal for military

organizations because such doctrines further organizational

goals, heighten prestige, and increase power. Second, once

adopted, offensive doctrines can easily become dogmatic

because the pursuit of offense promotes organizational growth

and survival.

One must avoid exaggerating the implications of thes e two

propositions. First, military preference for offensive doctrines

neither implies that all offensive doctrines are inappropriate

nor that they are adopted merely to satisfy primarily

self-serving interests. The success of the Israeli Defense

Force (IDF) in 1967 illustrates a well-executed offensive

strategy. The rapid collapse of the French in 1940 lends some

credence even to the efficacy of the sharp rap. Second,

military organizations sometimes adopt defensive doctrines, so

while the allure of the offense may be powerful, it is not

irresistible. In the aftermath of World War I, the United States,

France, and the United Kingdom all believed in the

ascendancy of defense.48

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The critical inference to draw from these conclusions is that

for logical, justifiable, comprehensible reasons, military

organizations tend to prefer offensive doctrines. This

preference is self-reinforcing and can result in a steadily

increasing offensive bias. Since ambiguities abound in the

national security environment, a reinforced offensive bias may

cause a military organization to pursue an offensive strategy

past the point of apparent rationality. Recognition of a military

organization’s natural proclivity for the offense is the first step

to inoculation against its potential ill effects. The next step is

to recognize how irrational belief in the power of the offense

can lead to disastrous consequences.

The Cult of the Offensive

The term cult of the offensive describes the condition that

occurs when an organization believes so strongly in the

supremacy of offense that it no longer develops and evaluates its

doctrine rationally. The word rationally, used here in the very

narrow, technical sense discussed above, refers to the

reasonably objective examination, evaluation, and selection of

the best course of action from the available alternatives.

Irrational is used here in a specifically defined manner to

describe doctrine or strategy that fails to meet this test of

rationality. All military strategists make estimates about the

ability of forces to conduct assigned missions in the face of

enemy resistance. The strategist’s perception of the relationship

between offensive and defensive power underlies each estimate.

Relational perceptions are manifested in such assertions as a

three-to-one advantage in personnel at the point of attack will

permit an offensive breakthrough or stealth fighters can

penetrate enemy airspace without extensive suppression of

enemy air defenses. When these underlying assumptions are

objectively verifiable by the available test data, exercise results,

or wartime experiences, belief in the offensive is rational, even if

the assumptions prove false. When these assumptions arise

from bias, cite unverifiable sources, ignore disconfirming

evidence of the power of the defense, or rely on insupportable

claims, one must consider the possibility that continued

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preference for offensive action is irrational and may be

attributable to a cult of the offensive.

The cult of the offensive probably explains why some

conflicts may result in war. Snyder claims that a cult of the

offensive, exacerbated by the absence of sound civil-military

relations, gripped the major military organizations of Europe

in 1914, and this combination of factors helps explain why the

July crisis erupted into war.49 Van Evera attributes both the

initial cause and the uncontrollable nature of the events

precipitating World War I to the cult of the offensive. 50 On the

other hand, not all analysts agree that the cult of the offensive

adequately explains the causes of World War I. Scott D. Sagan

argues that the consequences of the cult of the offensive were

“necessary, but not sufficient” to have caused the war. 51 He

offers the political objectives of the belligerents and the nature

of their alliance commitments as rational explanations for

their militaries’ offensive doctrines.52 Whether the cult of the

offensive substantially accounts for the occurrence of World

War I, there is potentially great explanatory power in the idea

that an offensive bias can so grip military organizations that

apparently irrational strategy results.

Previous works on the ramifications of offensive preference

and cults of the offensive have focused on effects at the

highest level of national security strategy. To gain additional

insight, however, one can apply the same type of analysis to a

single aspect of military employment, in this case, airpower.

The requisite organizational theory applies to airpower forces

since most military organizations have a large, self-contained

airpower arm, if not an independent air force. Airpower

doctrine and strategy, even if a subset of a larger joint

strategy, is distinct enough from its larger context to permit

its separate study. Finally, since airpower strategy affects the

overall strategy it supports, a misplaced faith in the power of

offensive airpower could have dire consequences for the larger

military organization and for national security.

Implications of Being Trapped by an Offensive Ideology

By considering the effects of offensive advantage on military

forces in general, one can derive six effects which result from

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offense advantage for airpower.53 First, airpower becomes

cheaper to use as the danger of losing aircraft decreases. This

action implies that policy makers in such situations may

employ an airpower strategy with little risk of negative

consequences. Second, the advantage of striking first grows.

When offense has the advantage, the ability to defend one’s

own airpower assets decreases, and the imperative to use

one’s airpower before it is lost to an enemy strike strengthens.

Third, windows of vulnerability to airpower attack and

windows of opportunity to attack open wider and more

frequently. When one has either a quantitative or qualitative

advantage, the pressure to attack increases before one’s

enemy can marshal defenses. The rapid mobility of airpower

assets exacerbates this situation, further increasing pressure

to take action. Fourth, secrecy grows which increases the

danger of miscalculation. Announcing one’s policy to use

airpower to destroy some enemy capability, for example, a

weapons of mass destruction storage facility, alerts the

enemy. Since this knowledge may cause the enemy to employ

such weapons before they are destroyed, notification will not

occur. Conversely, the target state’s incentives for secrecy

increase to foil any potential attacker. This awareness lessens

the probability that diplomacy might resolve such a situation

as one dares not make the alerting threat. Fifth, if offense

has the advantage, states will keep air forces in a stat e of

readiness so they can launch before they are destroyed. This

action might fuel the security dilemma because keeping

forces in constant readiness can be perceived as a threat.

Sixth, arms races between airpower forces will result as

competitors seek to maintain sufficient forces to close

windows of vulnerability.

If one believes that offense has an advantage for airpower

when, in fact, it has less of an advantage than one believes,

the effects described above will have further negative

consequences. First, suppose that one employs airpower

thinking losses and risks will be minimal. When losses are

higher than expected, the objective will not have been worth

the cost, or the conflict may escalate either to avenge the

losses or to achieve an objective that is worth the cost already

invested. The loss of US helicopters in Somalia led to a

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reexamination of policy and the subsequent withdrawal of

forces.54 Second, a first strike executed in the belief that it

would produce a significant advantage could start a conflict in

which neither side has an advantage or the attacker is

doomed to defeat. When the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor

failed to sink the US aircraft carriers, much of the anticipated

advantage of the attack was lost. Third, the perception that

windows of opportunity and vulnerability open wider and

more frequently places additional stress on those coordinating

other instruments of power, thus constantly forcing planners

into a crisis reaction mode. If the perception concerning such

windows proves false, one loses the opportunity to react in a

more controlled manner, perhaps reducing the chances of

discovering a more peaceful solution. The US reaction in the

Mayaguez incident off the coast of Cambodia in 1975

demonstrates how a perceived window of opportunity can

affect airpower planning.55 Fourth, as the need for secrecy

grows, the chances of resolving a problem with other

nonmilitary instruments of power decreases. Finally, one pays

a tremendous opportunity cost both to maintain forces in

constant readiness and to respond to arms races caused by a

misplaced belief in the power of offense.

Implications

The appeal of offensive doctrine and the ramifications of a

misplaced belief in offensive advantage hold significant

importance for airpower strategists. Such strategists, based

on solid historical evidence, traditionally laud the offensive.

Since pursuit of offensive capability coincides with the

fulfillment of organizational goals and needs, airpower

strategists can easily acquire an offensive bias. Once

manifested, organizational forces tend to strengthen an

offensive bias over time. Barring the occurrence of a

significant event that clearly illustrates the need to revise

strategy, offensive preference is likely to intensify, possibly

displacing objective strategy determination. History has

shown that a mistaken belief in the advantages of offense can

have disastrous consequences, as it did for the major

European powers of 1914. A strident caution must be

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sounded if airpower strategy is susceptible to entrapment by a

cult of the offensive, which could similarly spell disaster for

the air forces and nations involved. Offensive ideology may

hold the promise of peacetime organizational success but

could sow the seeds of wartime organizational failure.

Royal Air Force, 1918–38

Since its very earliest days the belief in the offensive rôle of

the Service had possessed religious force, with Bomber

Command as the priesthood.

—John Terraine 

A Time for Courage

In his 1937 report to the RAF Air Ministry, Air Chief

Marshal Sir Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt, air officer commanding in

chief of Bomber Command, stated that his command could

not execute even a modest air offensive against Germany

without risking the loss of his entire force. 56 He indicated just

how severe the problems were when he reported in December

1938 that Bomber Command remained deficient in almost

every area after a year of work. 57 It must have been shocking

to hear such reports coming from a command whose

staunchest advocates, such as Hugh M. Trenchard, Arthur

Harris, and Arthur Tedder, had promised for years that

airpower would make armies and navies obsolete. 58 The RAF

commander, on the eve of World War II, evaluated its potential

for combat, and found it lacking. As Max Hastings noted in

his history of Bomber Command, “seldom in the history of

warfare has a force been so sure of the end it sought—

fulfillment of the Trenchard doctrine—and yet so ignorant of

how this might be achieved, as the RAF between the wars.” 59

The next discussion examines the RAF’s doctrine, explores

some of the reasons leading to the RAF’s poor state of

preparedness, and then tests the hypothesis that a cult of the

offensive may have gripped RAF planners.

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Lord Hugh M. Trenchard (left) and Maj Gen William E. Kepner

These leaders—Lord Trenchard and the commander of the US VIII Fighter

Command—are seen at the time of the climax of the Combined Bomber Offensive in World War II.

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RAF Doctrine

The report that led to the establishment of the RAF as a

separate service also laid the cornerstone of RAF doctrine. The

Smuts report of August 1917, written for the War Cabinet,

stated that “an air service can be used as an independent

means of war operations. . . . As far as can at present be

foreseen there is absolutely no limit to the scale of its future

independent war use. And the day may not be far off when

aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and

destruction of industrial and populous centres on a vast scale

may become the principal operations of war, to which the

older forms of military and naval operations may become

secondary and subordinate.”60 From the RAF’s very beginning,

the mission of strategic bombing became inextricably linked

with the justification for an independent air service. As the

RAF fought for bureaucratic survival in the 1920s after World

War I, its chief of staff, Air Marshal (later Lord) Trenchard,

used the promised effects of strategic bombing to secure the

RAF’s position against the other services.61 Such claims

further fueled interservice rivalry, which caused Trenchard to

claim even more significance for the RAF’s mission. The

resulting dynamic of interservice assault and defense led to

distrust and exaggerated claims.62

Trenchard believed that RAF bombers could destroy

Britain’s enemies from the air. From this basic premise rose

the remainder of the Trenchard doctrine over the next 10

years. When Basil H. Liddell Hart published Paris; Or, The

Future of War, in 1925, Trenchard felt so strongly that it

conveyed the essence of airpower employment that he

required all RAF officers to read it. 63 In the book, Liddell Hart

identified an enemy population’s will to continue as the key to

victory in war. Furthermore, he claimed that an air campaign

offered a method to attack enemy will directly, quickly, and

with fewer casualties than a land or sea campaign. 64

Around the same time, the Committee of Imperial Defence

(CID) established the Air Raid Precautions Committee to study

the problem of air defense. In its first report in July 1925, the

committee concluded that there existed only a slim chance of

defending against air attack and that air attacks would

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Giulio Douhet

He is the earliest of the classical airpower theorists, and his influence is reputed as definitive for both the Royal Air Force and the United States Air

Force. Douhet asserted strongly that the bomber attack will always get

through, and the only real defense against bombing would be to mount an

offensive against the enemy’s vital targets before he can cripple one’s own.

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negatively affect British morale.65 To the RAF, defense

appeared inefficient, perhaps futile, so Trenchard promoted an

RAF doctrine employing an offensive strategy to provide

defensive security.66 This offensive strategy aimed at

destroying an enemy’s morale, and thus will to fight, by

dislocating normal life, stopping trade, and convincing the

enemy’s population of the hopelessness of winning, all

through strategic bombing. By the end of the 1920s,

Trenchard and the Air Ministry espoused a doctrine that

excluded practically every mission except strategic bombing. 67

Explaining the preponderance of bombers in the RAF,

Trenchard said, “although it is necessary to have some

defence to keep up the morale of your own people, it is

infinitely more necessary to lower the morale of the people

against you by attacking them wherever they may be.”68

RAF doctrine entered the 1930s resting on four

assumptions. First, air war would be horrible for civilian

populations. Second, Britain was the European power most

vulnerable to air attack. Third, no defense against air attack

was possible. Fourth, no international restrictions regarding

limits on bombers were enforceable.69 Proponents of the

Trenchard doctrine believed that the next war would start

with an air attack, that the key to victory would be enemy

morale, and that one could destroy enemy morale through

strategic air attack; therefore, the RAF must have a large,

constantly alert, offensive force.70

Doctrinal Discord

Not everyone agreed with Ludlow-Hewitt’s assessment of

Bomber Command in 1938. Never popular with the Air

Ministry, Ludlow-Hewitt was replaced in April 1940, just

before World War II began in earnest. When his successor, Sir

Charles Portal, took over, Trenchard wrote a congratulatory

note to Portal and complained that the RAF was already

bypassing the chance to win the war through strategic

bombing.71 John Slessor, future chief of the Air Staff, wrote

just four days before World War II started that “the lessons of

history prove that victory does not always go to the big

battalions. At present we [the RAF] have the initiative. If we seize

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it now we may gain important results; if we lose it by waiting

we shall probably lose more than we gain.” 72 After the war,

Slessor would admit that he was wrong; luckily, few in Bomber

Command tried to follow his advice.73 He also allowed that the

RAF’s claims to possess the ability to deliver a “knockout blow”

before the war had been greatly exaggerated.74

The contemporary assessment by Ludlow-Hewitt of Bomber

Command continues to be confirmed by those who analyze in

hindsight the RAF. Williamson Murray notes that by 1939 the

RAF possessed a bomber force that could not survive in

daylight operations, could not find targets at night, had no

Lord Hugh M. Trenchard and Maj Gen Ira C. Eaker

Pictured is their arrival at 303d Bomb Group base in England for an inspection tour.

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capacity for missions other than strategic bombing, and only

had a fighter force because of the civilian government’s

interference.75 Hastings points out that the RAF failed to

develop night bombing techniques, to provide for navigation

methods for use in poor weather, to improve weather

forecasting techniques, or to gather intelligence on potential

German strategic targets.76 Finally, the official history of the

RAF states “when war came in 1939 Bomber Command was

not trained or equipped either to penetrate into enemy

territory by day or to find its target areas, let alone its targets,

by night.”77

World War I as the Basis for RAF Doctrine

The RAF’s strategic bombing doctrine grew from the British

experience in World War I. German Zeppelin and Gotha raids

against London profoundly affected the opinions of politicians

and citizens alike, as exemplified by speeches before

parliament in which members claimed airpower could bring

the war to a rapid conclusion with long-range bombing

operations.78 In the doctrinal debates of the 1920s and 1930s,

supporters of the RAF’s strategic bombing doctrine often cited

World War I experience as evidence to support their claims for

both the effects of bombing on morale and the inefficiency of

defense. Unfortunately for the RAF of the late 1930s, no one

conducted a scientific study of World War I bombing results; 79

thus, both of these claims rested on dubious evidence.

There is no question that the German bombs which struck

London in World War I caused panic and public outcry for

reprisals, but it is debatable whether such reactions equaled a

loss of morale or decreased the public’s will to continue the

war. During the war Britain suffered a total of 52 Zeppelin

raids that killed 556 and wounded 1,357, and 27 bomber

aircraft raids that killed 836 and injured 1,994. 80 For a report

to the 1925 committee on air defense, RAF planners

extrapolated from these figures a casualty estimate for an air

attack against London. The RAF report informed the

committee that in just the first three days of air attacks

London would suffer twice the number of casualties as

Germany and Britain combined sustained in the entire four

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years of the last war. Obviously, according to the RAF report,

such attacks would likely lead to a morale collapse, especially

since no defense was possible against them. 81

Caproni Aircraft

One Italian influence on American offensive air thinking resulted from US

pilots being sent to Italy for training on Caproni bombers that were used

against Austrian cities before the end of World War I.

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The linkage between civilian casualties and the collapse of

morale was, and remains, contentious. The RAF’s casualty

estimates, however, clearly rested on skewed analysis. At the

time of the London Gotha bombings, Winston Churchill

disagreed with the claim that public morale sagged. 82 In the

annual air estimate debates of the 1920s, those who pointed

to evidence that Londoners’ morale stiffened, not waned,

during the bombings were silenced by bombing advocates’

claims that new technology would make bombing much more

lethal in the future.83 When developing the casualty estimates,

RAF planners based their calculations solely on the 27

bomber raids against London as World War I ended. They

ignored both the earlier Zeppelin raids and the RAF’s own

results of 746 Germans killed and 1,843 injured in 242 raids.

The planners also made allowances for increased lethality to

arrive at the often repeated figure of 50 expected casualties for

each ton of bombs dropped.84 The importance of this

questionable figure should not be underestimated since it

formed the basis for practically all RAF planning, both

defensive and offensive, from 1923 until 1940. 85 Because this

linear relationship between bombs and casualties was

accepted, as the ability to deliver bomb tonnage increased, so

did the casualty estimates. With such a high expectation of

casualties, only a few enemy bombers had to get through

friendly defenses to inflict catastrophic damage. Thus, one

could argue, since no defense could prevent every enemy

bomber from getting through, aircraft would be employed

most efficiently not as a defensive shield, but as an offensive

hammer to threaten the enemy’s “fragile” morale. 86

In addition to choosing carefully which World War I data

were used to support casualty estimates, it is certain that the

airpower advocates’ claims for the RAF’s wartime effectiveness

selectively ignored portions of the historical record. True, the

first strategic raids by the Royal Flying Corps against German

targets in the fall of 1917 prompted a group of Rhineland

mayors to petition the German government to stop bombing

Britain so that raids against their cities would stop. 87 These

raids actually inflicted little damage, however. To continue

attacks against Germany, Trenchard, as commander of the

Independent Force in France, had to expend increasingly more

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effort to suppress German defenses. Eventually Trenchard

had to devote 50 percent of his sorties to attacking German

airfields in an attempt to prevent German fighters from

interfering with his bombers. He also had to assign fighters to

escort the bombers during daylight raids.88 None of this

experience apparently dampened the RAF’s postwar praise for

the decisiveness of strategic bombing. In the RAF’s official

report to parliament on its conduct of World War I, its authors

claimed that the 1918 attacks had significantly affected

German materiel and morale. The RAF also lamented that the

war ended before the Handley Page V/1500 heavy bomber

could begin attacks against Berlin and conclusively

demonstrate the efficacy of strategic bombing.89

Handley Page Bomber

One of the Handley Page bombers that was designed for the offensive in World

War I. Hugh M. Trenchard, who led the British Royal Flying Corps in France

and later the Royal Air Force, was a firm believer in the notion that airpower is

inherently offensive. The United States built some Handley Pages under

license during the war but not in time to use them in combat.

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Prediction versus Performance

The comment that the RAF could have proven its strategic

bombing concept if the war had lasted longer, or if its planned

aircraft had arrived earlier, highlights one of the most important

characteristics of the interwar period’s airpower doctrinal

debates. Since World War I occurred during the infancy of

airpower, many of the interwar claims of the Air Ministry rested

on extrapolated predictions of the RAF’s future performance,

allowing for increased aircraft capabilities rather than on

demonstrable evidence of past accomplishments. Given the

rapid pace of aeronautical advancement throughout this period,

one could dismiss the lessons of only a few years past as irrelevant to either the current or the future environment. This

dismissal would profoundly affect the RAF’s doctrine by focusing

the staff’s attention on planned, rather than current, capabilities.

Bureaucratic battles—first for the RAF’s survival, then for

funding under the constraints of the Ten-Year Rule—dominated

the agenda of the RAF’s leadership from the end of World War I

until the mid-1930s.* The RAF’s senior leaders, attempting to

secure funding, made claims for the utility of airpower based not

so much on evidence but on optimistic projections of future

capability. The British Air Staff then had to expend tremendous

time and effort defending the RAF’s claims to various

government committees. The CID held annual hearings to

evaluate the roles and missions of the three services. During the

1920s, Trenchard often appeared before the committee. He

argued that airpower could directly strike an enemy’s heartland,

that Britain was likewise exposed to such attacks, and that the

economical answer to Britain’s security woes was to bolster the

RAF and its offensive power at the expense of the other services.

Naturally the other services voiced different views of the utility of

airpower. As a result of the constant battle against critics, the

Air Staff may have begun to believe its own rhetoric and that its

claims for future performance were not only predictions but

also realities.90

*Employed as a planning and budgeting device by successive British governments

during the interwar period, the Ten-Year Rule assumed that Great Britain would not

be engaged in a major war for the next 10 years, thus obviating the need for any

sizable defense expenditures.

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A Cult of the Offensive?

To attribute the RAF’s 1938 offensive doctrine to a cult of the

offensive, it is necessary to show that the RAF’s leaders permitted

faith in the offensive to so distort their judgment that their

offensive doctrine appears irrational. Comparing the interwar

statements of RAF leaders about the impracticality of air defense

to the results of the 1940 Battle of Britain does not prove the case

a priori. One should not expect the air planners of the 1920s to

have foreseen the invention of radar, a component critical to that

successful defense. Instead, the examination at this point turns to

the RAF’s considerations of defense, which in turn influenced the

development of aircraft self-protection measures and the evolution

of employment, equipment, and techniques.

The RAF Concept of Defense

The RAF maintained the position from 1920 to 1937 that air

defense was impractical and even a waste of resources. 91 This

powerful idea influenced the construction of British air defenses,

the justification for offensive doctrine, and the development of

bomber aircraft.

The RAF began its dismantling of British air defenses as

soon as it received responsibility for the mission after World

War I. By 1920 the RAF had placed all searchlights and AAA

pieces in storage, dismantled every air defense control center,

and reassigned every fighter squadron previously committed

to air defense.92 These actions may have been the result o f

an increasingly pacifist public’s desire to remove weapons of

war from sight, especially when no threat appeared visible

on the horizon.

Some elements in the British defense establishment still

considered defense a viable option. During the early 1920s,

various boards considered the matter of British air defense,

postulating France as a potential enemy. Some speakers testified

that fighter aircraft could possibly provide a defense against

daylight bombers, but such aircraft could not defend at night, and

so would prove worthless. Nevertheless, a result of this process

was the creation, in 1925, of the Air Defence of Great Britain

Command, which built on an earlier plan integrating fighters,

warning systems, and AAA in a joint structure. While these

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efforts did little to change the RAF’s view of defense, they did

establish the framework of the air defense system that would

conduct the Battle of Britain 15 years later. 93

The focus of attention on air defense in the mid-1920s

resulted from the British public’s growing fear of air attack. The

proximate cause of this long brewing public perception was a

series of widely read articles published in 1922 by P. R. C. Grov es,

the British air representative at Versailles, in which he detailed

the expected use of airpower against cities in any future conflict.

Groves asserted that the only possible defense against such an

attack was the maintenance of an independent air force to

threaten any potential enemy’s cities in return.94 RAF leaders,

whether wittingly or not, encouraged the public’s perception that

British civilization could end in a massive exchange of air

attacks through its exaggerated casualty estimates. The first Air

Raid Precautions Committee’s acceptance of the RAF’s casualty

estimates in 1925 without comment demonstrates the persuasiveness of the RAF’s 50 casualties per ton of bombs multiplier.

The theme of the tremendous destructiveness of airpower

continued to influence British government and public debate

during the 1920s, contributing to the rise of a movement to ban

aircraft because of their potential as a holocaust weapon. 95 The

RAF’s penchant for portraying bombing casualties in the worst

light continued in the 1930s.96 In an October 1936 report to the

Joint Planning Committee of the Chiefs of Staff, RAF

representative Harris predicted 150,000 casualties in London

from a German first air strike, possibly resulting in a popular

revolt against the government.97 A 1937 RAF report stated that

the Luftwaffe would be able to inflict 10 times as many

casualties in 1939 as it could in 1937, and pointed out that

defense against such an attack would be impossible. 98

The Impetus behind Offensive Doctrine

The convergence of opinion among “the airmen, the

alarmists, and the disarmers”99 on the expected effects of

strategic bombing may have contributed to the RAF’s offensive

bent. Whether one or the other of these groups began the

trend of exaggeration, the idea that airpower would have a

decisive impact on any future conflict was constantly

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reinforced. The epithet, “the bomber will always get through,”

came not from an airpower advocate but from an airpower

disarmament supporter. It was used in a 1932 speech to the

House of Commons delivered by former British Prime Minister

(then cabinet member) Stanley Baldwin.100 “I think it is well

for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on

earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever

people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The

only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill

more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you

want to save yourselves.”101

Baldwin’s assertion that no defense could stop an air attack

had long been an element of RAF doctrine, though the chief of

Air Staff dismissed his reference to targeting women and

children.102 A 1922 Air Ministry memorandum written for the

Standing Defence Sub-Committee of the CID, one of the first

written statements on RAF air doctrine, noted that “in war in

the air, even more than in other forms of warfare, it is

accepted that a vigorous offensive against the enemy is the

surest form of defence, for in a medium of three dimensions

passive defence is more than ordinarily inefficient and only by

means of an offensive can the air forces of the enemy be

satisfactorily contained; in addition such offensive is a

powerful means of influencing the morale of the enemy

population, who may compel their Government, as a result, to

sue for peace in order to secure relief from the constant

presence of hostile aircraft.”103

The RAF’s doctrinal belief that defense was impossible

influenced the design of self-protection measures for its

bomber aircraft. The RAF set low aircraft performance

standards, contracting for bombers that were “slow,

unarmored, and possessed little in the way of defensive

armament.”104 Tail guns, first proposed in 1918, did not

appear in an RAF aircraft design requirement until 1933.

While the armament of potential enemy fighters improved, the

RAF continued to purchase the dependable, but relatively

short-range, Browning .303-inch machine gun developed for

its aircraft in World War I. Sticking with the smaller gun

allowed enemy fighters armed with heavier weapons to shoot

RAF bombers while remaining out of range of the bombers’

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defenses. In one concession to the possibility of defense, RAF

planners opted to fly aircraft in mutually supportive defensive

formations to compensate for the lack of firepower of a single

bomber. A major design requirement for RAF bombers, then,

became the ability to fly formation, as opposed to heavier

armor or more firepower. Requested aircraft specifications for

speed and range lagged behind those of existing commercial

aircraft, and additional military requirements hardly excused

this disparity since the RAF’s expressed need for aircraft

armor or armament practically disappeared.105 It was not

until late 1936 that the Air Ministry developed aircraft

specifications for long-range heavy bombers equipped with

powered gun turrets for self-defense.106

In addition to slighting the self-defense aspects of its

aircraft, the RAF also neglected to develop the equipment and

employment methods required to execute offensive missions.

To succeed, a bomber must find its target and hit it with a

weapon capable of achieving the desired effect. The RAF failed

to procure aircraft systems that could perform any of these

tasks in sustained combat conditions. In an age when civilian

airliners flew at night and in bad weather, the RAF did not

have the navigation equipment necessary to permit either type

of operation. The RAF had experienced the negative effects of

bad weather on bomber operations during World War I, but

took no action to remedy the situation during the interwar

years.107 During his tour of duty in Iraq in 1923–24, Harris

developed night bombing techniques, as well as pathfinding

and target marking procedures, but none of these innovations

appeared in general RAF procedures until just prior to the

war.108 If an RAF bomber crew could find its target, it did not

have the bombsights or mastery of the delivery techniques

necessary to enable it to hit the target reliably. 109 The RAF

also failed to develop ordnance capable of inflicting the type of

destruction advertised by its advocates. RAF bomb dumps in

1938 still contained a majority of small, 200-pound bombs left

over from World War I, and even many of the newly produced

bombs proved worthless due to poor fuses and low-quality

explosive fills.110

RAF leaders had access to evidence that their offensive

strategy might require modification. A review of the R.A.F.

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Quarterly during this period provides some interesting

insights into the issues debated in the service, both in the

topics covered in articles and those avoided. First produced in

January 1930 and “devoted to the interests of the Royal Air

Force . . . to encourage thought and discussion and the free

expression of opinion,” the journal published articles on

service life, travel, and sports as well as articles “of definite

historical and Service value.”111 From 1930 to 1937, professional topics ranged from airpower doctrine, to advantages

and disadvantages of various aircraft types, to technical

recommendations. Thus the journal addressed many of the

issues RAF policies ignored. The need for RAF cooperation

with the British Army and Royal Navy in executing missions

other than strategic bombing was addressed several times

during this period.112 Some articles acknowledged the power

of the defense, either advocating home defense forces for

Britain, or recommending methods to increase the

penetration capabilities of RAF bombers.113 Others tackled

more specific deficiencies, like the ne ed for navigation

aids,114 weather broadcasts to aircraft,115 armament

improvements,116 enhanced relationships between the aircraft

industry and the RAF,117 and the requirement for detailed

intelligence support for air campaign planning. 118 Of the few

articles which, in hindsight, offered recommendations which

missed the mark, only one was outlandish: a proposal to

replace single-engine fighter aircraft with “ramming”

aircraft.119 Still, many articles largely reaffirmed such major

tenets of the RAF’s offensive doctrine as the belief that

self-defending bomber formations needed no fighter escort,

that airpower would play the decisive role in the next conflict,

and that the ultimate target for airpower was enemy

morale.120

In 1936 the journal presented two airpower theories which

articulated opposing views of the value of offense. Excerpts

from Douhet’s theory121 were published in the same issue as

the first three chapters of N. N. Golovine’s Air Strategy.122

After the last four chapters of his book were published in the

next issue, Golovine became a frequent contributor to the

journal. His balanced view of offense and defense and his

advocacy of several types of specialized combat aircraft

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contrasted sharply with the RAF and Douhet’s offensively

centered doctrine.

While descriptions of the use of airpower in empire policing

activities appeared frequently, only one article published

during the first seven years of the journal analyzed a major

power’s air operations: a study of the Italian campaign in

Ethiopia.123 Noticeably absent from the R.A.F. Quarterly is any

mention of the Spanish Civil War, where data on the effects of

bombing on civilian morale could have been gathered. 124 From

August to December 1936, both the Nationalists and the

Loyalists bombed Spanish cities hoping to destroy the enemy

population’s morale. When these bombing campaigns proved

relatively quickly to have little appreciable effect on morale,

both sides shifted their bombing missions to more traditional

military targets.125 In October 1939 the journal published an

article that assessed the performance of airpower on both

sides of the Spanish Civil War. Reasonably balanced, the

report covered most aspects of the conflict, highlighted that

the majority of air attacks were against entrenched enemy

troops, and concluded that “the effect of air attacks on the

morale of the population is less than sometimes supposed.” 126

The reasons for the RAF’s inability to perform its professed

mission stem, in part, from a lack of detailed operational

planning and rigorous testing. The temptation exists to blame

these faults on insufficient funding during the exigencies of

the declining defense budgets of the 1920s and early 1930s.

The RAF’s official history offers as possible explanations for

poor preparedness the lack of adequate training airspace and

the pressure of the rapid force expansion that began in 1934.

The pace of rearmament, according to Sir Charles Webster

and Noble Frankland, might have led to a staff preoccupation

with aircraft procurement and basic flying training, as well as

a misprioritization of equipment acquisition.127 Scot

Robertson attributed the RAF’s shortcomings to its failure to

realize that its strategic bombing concept, as developed, was

neither a theory nor a doctrine, but a hypothesis in desperate

need of testing.128 While Robertson’s explanation satisfies

more than Webster and Frankland’s official history, it still

falls short of offering a reason for the failure to recognize

strategic bombing as an untested proposal. Neville Jones

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observed “during this period the doctrine of the offensive

hardened into the dogma . . . that the bomber would always

get through. . . . Events were soon to prove that the effectiveness of air defence had been seriously underestimated, while

the power of the offensive had been equally seriously

over-estimated.”129 The idea that an offensive ideology gripped

RAF planners might help to explain why they did not question

the efficacy of their planned offensive operations or account

for the myriad employment details. If one truly believed the

contemporary rhetoric that the power of the bomber offensive

was irresistible, then matters such as precise target location,

navigation techniques, or development of improved munitions

Hugh M. Trenchard and Col Edward J. Timberlake

During his inspection of a US Bomber Command base, Lord Trenchard, father

of the RAF, examines the tail of a 93d Bomb Group Consolidated B-24 at

Hardwick, England. Col (later Lt Gen) Timberlake of San Antonio, Texas, is

seen in the background. He served as commander of Continental Air Command from 1962 until 1966.

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might begin to lose their relevance. Such rhetoric was

promulgated by the RAF and amplified by both government

speeches and the popular press.

The fact that the RAF on the eve of World War II could not

conduct the operations it had ostensibly prepared to execute

for more than 20 years prompts a search for plausible

explanations. Convinced of the futility of defense, RAF

planners procured lightly armed, lightly armored aircraft.

Belief in the exaggerated destructive power of aerial attack left

the RAF in possession of a bomber fleet that could not find its

intended targets, hit them, or destroy them if it could

accomplish the first two tasks. Because the RAF’s interwar

offensive doctrine failed to consider objectively bomber aircraft

capabilities and limitations, the RAF could not perform its

planned offensive mission. A misplaced faith in offensive

ideology trapped RAF leaders during the interwar period and

contributed to their 1938 dilemma.

To say that the RAF was trapped by a cult of the offensive is

not equivalent to saying that offensive action was impossible

or that any offensive doctrine was doomed to failure. It does

imply that, by 1938, the offensive strategic bombing doctrine

pursued by Bomber Command appeared irrational and that

the firm grip of an offensive ideology may account for this

doctrinal failure.

Symptoms

Three symptoms indicate the RAF’s drift toward offensive

ideology. First, the RAF neglected both experimental testing

and detailed planning of its strategic bombing concepts. The

RAF did not sufficiently test its bombing accuracy under

simulated combat conditions.130 To illustrate, RAF planners

divided targets into two categories, precise and group. The

former category required high accuracy, and since the RAF

had previously rejected dive-bombing, these targets demanded

a level pass at low altitude. The group targets, which evolved

into area targets during the war, did not require the same

accuracy since there were many desired impact points within

close proximity of each other. These targets could be struck

from high-altitude deliveries. All of the testing of these

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deliveries, however, was done in good weather without any

compensation for enemy defenses. Neither these tests, nor

other objective evaluations, adequately addressed night or bad

weather techniques, or the avoidance of enemy defenses and

the inaccuracies this would induce.131

Even in the exercises the RAF conducted, the results were

often skewed to support existing doctrine or ignored if the

result did not affirm preconceived notions. In a series of

exercises conducted between 1927 and 1933, the Air Staff

arbitrarily assigned bombers twice the killing power of the

defensive fighters. When the fighters still achieved a 50

percent successful interception rate, the data were ignored.

The Air Staff also disregarded information from the 1927 and

1928 exercises on the effectiveness of AAA. Notably, the 1932

exercise highlighted the needs for procedures for flying in bad

weather, illumination of targets at night, and an improved

target intelligence system. All of these deficiencies remained

uncorrected in 1937.132

The RAF’s failure to develop operational plans delayed the

recognition that a mismatch existed between projected

employment concepts and actual capabilities. When planners

started developing the RAF’s first operational plans, known as

the Western Air Plans, for war against Germany in late 1937,

many of the service’s deficiencies came to light. 133 Had RAF

planners begun this process earlier, even if against a notional

foe, they might have uncovered many of the RAF’s faults and

avoided the cult of the offensive.

Second, the RAF selected one mission, strategic bombing,

as its reason for existence, inhibited the development of other

missions, and squelched dissent.134 While the perceived

importance of this mission to securing RAF independence has

been highlighted, the pursuit of a single mission above all

others clearly led to a dangerous single-mindedness among

RAF leaders. The RAF dismissed the defensive mission, an

opinion which persisted through 1938 with the Air Ministry’s

objections to Sir Thomas Inskip’s emphasis on fighter

production.135 The Air Staff even rejected other offensive

missions such as interdiction, close air support, and

reconnaissance.136 When the Experimental Mechanized Force

began to exercise with RAF units in 1927, the Air Ministry

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responded by warning “the War Office against allowing Army

officers to encourage Air Force officers to violate official Air

policy.”137 The Air Staff also attempted to suppress or refute

negative comments about strategic bombing.138

Third, the RAF concept of strategic bombing remained

vague, long on predicted effects but short on quantifiable

objectives. Robertson attributed some of the aircraft priority

shifts when the RAF began rebuilding in 1934 to this lack of a

clear RAF doctrine. “What is important here, however, is why

the Air Staff were unable to articulate exactly what was meant

by equality in air power [with Germany]. The answer stems

largely from the fact that the Air Staff were unable to point to

precise target objectives for the air striking force. Even when

they could, those target objectives were related to the morale

argument that had sustained their theories for the better part

of fifteen years. Yet morale as an objective was virtually

unquantifiable. No one knew, truthfully, what scale of effort

would be required to produce victory through that form of

air attack.”139

Conclusion

There are other possible explanations for the RAF’s

continued pursuit of offensive doctrine. Many of the factors

identified previously as reasons military organizations might

prefer offense to defense are present in this case. These

reasons help to explain why the RAF preferred offense, but not

why the RAF failed to test the required concepts, write the

necessary plans, or procure aircraft properly equipped to

execute the offensive. One also has to wonder why the RAF

chose an offensive strategy to protect a security-seeking

nation that identified itself as the most vulnerable in Europe

to the consequences of an air attack. Rather than offer to

construct a defensive shield—which might have led to even

bigger budgets based on constructing a fighter aircraft force

sufficient to the task—the RAF instead denigrated the power

of defense against airpower, and claimed that only through

offense could Britain achieve security. The RAF’s leaders

obviously believed in offense. Because that offensive faith

persisted despite evidence that the RAF could no longer

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execute an offensive, a cult of the offensive is one of the

plausible explanations for the doctrinal failures of the RAF

before World War II. As Hastings noted “the RAF trained for

more than two decades guided only by Trenchardian faith that

it would somehow be ‘all right on the night.’” 140

Israeli Air Force, 1967–73

We played the game by our rules and suddenly we didn’t

know the rules or how to play them. . . . During the Yom

Kippur War the systems that were supposed to support the

pilot and help him do his job didn’t exist. These were the

ECM and intelligence systems. We came in to fight like we

did in 1967 but the conditions were different.

—N. Merchavi 

Israeli Air Force A-4 and F-4 pilot

A stark contrast appears between the performance of the

Israeli Air Force on 5 June 1967 and its performance on 6

October 1973. On the former, the first day of the Six-Day War,

the IAF immediately established air superiority when it struck

25 Egyptian airfields, damaging or destroying approximately

350 enemy aircraft.141 On the latter, the first day of the Yom

Kippur War, the IAF lost 30 aircraft, 65 percent of the total

lost during the entire previous war, by attempting to stop

enemy advances in the Sinai and the Golan Heights. 142 The

major difference between these two air battles was the

employment of integrated, mobile SAM defenses by the Arab

forces. While the IAF knew its enemy possessed these SAMs,

the IAF was surprised by the magnitude of their effect on air

operations. The defensive capabilities of the Arabs changed

considerably between the two conflicts, but IAF doctrine

changed very little, remaining offensive. The next section

traces the roots of the IAF’s doctrine and its development

between these two wars and describes some of the changed

conditions that may have led to the different outcome in 1973.

IAF Offensive Doctrine

The doctrine of the Israeli Defense Force, the parent

organization of the IAF, arises from conditions unique to

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Israel’s geographic and political position. Surrounded by

potential enemies, an attack could occur with little warning. A

desire for economic growth limits the size of the standing

army; the IDF relies upon a rapid mobilization of reserves to

bring forces up to combat strength. Even with its reserves, the

IDF expects to fight greatly outnumbered by its enemies. The

IDF also anticipates that the international community will

intervene and force a rapid termination to any conflict in the

region. These imperatives dictate an IDF operational doctrine

based on offense, preemption, speed, indirect approach,

exploitation of “superior macro-competence,” and combined

arms warfare.143

The doctrine of the IAF derives from that of the IDF. The

IAF must guarantee air superiority over Israel to prevent

enemy aircraft from interdicting the mobilization of

reserves.144 The IAF’s fourth commander, Dan Tolkowsky,

who assumed command of the IAF in 1953 during its fifth

year of existence, determined the approach the IAF would

pursue to establish air superiority. The IDF General Staff of

the period advocated the use of airpower in a defensive role,

citing the Royal Air Force’s performance in the Battle of

Britain as a successful employment of defensive airpower.

Tolkowsky, however, believed that airpower could best

succeed through offensive action, primarily by destroying

enemy aircraft on the ground. He also cited the Battle of

Britain to bolster his case, claiming that the Luftwaffe might

have prevailed had the Germans continued attacks on RAF

airfields rather than shifting to targets around London. 145

Tolkowsky won the debate, and the IAF doctrinal tenet of

securing air superiority through offensive action persisted

through the Yom Kippur War. Attacking preemptively

increased the probability that the IAF could destroy most of

the enemy’s aircraft before they launched or dispersed. With

air superiority swiftly established at the outset of a conflict,

the IAF could focus its efforts on supporting ground and naval

forces in combined arms warfare.

During the Six-Day War of 5–11 June 1967, the IAF

validated every tenet of its doctrine. The IAF destroyed most of

the Egyptian Air Force in a preemptive attack, then likewise

struck the Syrian Air Force. With air superiority thus ensured,

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the IAF’s fighter-bombers switched to a ground support role

and assisted the Israeli Army in pushing the frontiers of Israel

to the Suez Canal in the west and the Jordan River in the

east. The IAF’s astounding success resulted from achievement

of surprise, commitment of all resources to the attack, and a

paucity of both active and passive defenses around enemy

airfields.146 In October 1973, the IAF would realize only one of

these three conditions, the total commitment of resources to

the attack. The failure to account for a lack of surprise and

the greatly increased level of Arab defenses doomed many of

the initial attackers to destruction.

Failure to Achieve Surprise

A successful surprise attack, by definition, hinges on striking

an unprepared enemy. Even an enemy possessing considerable

means to counter an attack may be unable to employ them

effectively if caught unaware.147 Two considerations prevented

the IAF from conducting a surprise attack in October 1973: a

political prohibition against preemption and a fully alerted

enemy. The former is often blamed for the IAF’s initially

disjointed performance, but the latter negated any opportunity

for a successful surprise attack.

The Israelis seriously considered preemption during the last

hours before the war began. The first publicly documented call

for an IAF preemptive attack came from the IDF chief of staff,

Lt Gen David Elazar, on Saturday, 6 October, at an early

morning cabinet meeting but was denied by Prime Minister

Golda Meir based on Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan’s

negative recommendation.148 Maj Gen Benny Peled, the IAF

commander, had advised Elazar in a discussion before the

meeting that the IAF could strike Syrian SAM batteries at

1100. While preparing for these missions, planners informed

Peled that low clouds would prevent attacks on most of the

SAM targets, so he switched the targets to airfields in Syria.

These airfield targets were cancelled when the cabinet denied

Elazar’s request for a preemptive attack.149 When the war

began around 1400, many of the scrambled IAF fighters had

first to jettison the bombs uploaded for the cancelled airfield

missions before turning to meet attacking Arab aircraft.

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Considering the results of later IAF attacks on Syrian SAMs,

one must question whether the planned preemptive attack on

6 October would have succeeded even if the weather and the

cabinet had permitted it. The Arab forces, having been

surprised in 1967, must have been at a high state of alert

during the hours before they initiated the 1973 war, and the

IAF had little success subsequently against alerted SAMs. 150

On 7 October, an F-4 squadron launched 15 aircraft on

Operation Dugman 5 to destroy Syrian SAMs. The fighters

only identified three of Syria’s 31 active SAM batteries, and

lost six aircraft while inflicting only marginal damage on the

few SAMs they found. The IAF did not attempt another mass

operation against SAMs for the remainder of the conflict. By

the end of the war the IAF had only managed to destroy three

of 31 SAM systems and damage five others. 151

Failure to Account for Increased Defenses

The Arab forces greatly increased both their passive and

active defenses against air attack between 1967 and 1973.

The Soviet Union enhanced Arab active defenses by furnishing

updated SAMs and new radar-directed AAA. The mobile SA-6

Gainful SAM and the mechanized ZSU-23-4 Shilka AAA

proved the most deadly of these systems. By tightly

integrating the AAA and the SAMs, the Arabs intensified the

lethality of their defensive system. Tactics useful against the

SAMs made aircraft more vulnerable to the AAA. As a result,

the IAF lost approximately 109 aircraft in the Yom Kippur War

to surface-to-air weapons, split approximately evenly between

SAMs and AAA. Fifty-four of those aircraft, almost half of the

total, were lost in the first four days of the war. 152

The Egyptian forces made great strides in increasing their

passive defenses as well. They constructed decoy missile sites

along the Suez Canal to distract attackers. 153 They also

modified their airfields to make them more survivable.

Egyptian airfield improvements included construction of both

hardened and underground aircraft shelters, addition of

multiple runways to allow operations if one runway was hit,

and even emplacement of highway landing strips near airfields

to launch and recover aircraft in case damaged runways were

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not repaired quickly enough.154 On 7 October the IAF struck

many Egyptian airfields, but achieved little lasting damage

due to the protection afforded by aircraft revetments and the

rapid response of runway damage repair units. 155

The IAF’s First-Strike Assumptions

By the time Generals Peled and Elazar considered a

preemptive attack on 5 and 6 October, the attack would not

have surprised the Arab forces preparing for their own

offensive and likely wary of such an IAF attack. Even without

achieving complete surprise, one could argue that a

preemptive attack would have had value because it might

have given the initiative to the Israeli forces. General Peled, for

one, blamed the IAF’s poor performance during the first four

days of the October war on the cabinet’s decision ruling out

preemption, claiming the initial days of the war would have

gone much better had the IAF initiated action rather than

reacted to Arab moves.156 General Peled’s remark reflects the

IAF planning assumption that the IAF’s first attacks would

destroy, or at least significantly degrade, enemy SAM

coverage, thus giving the IAF air superiority to conduct

ground support missions. To understand the likelihood of

achieving this initial offensive goal, one can break the

question into two parts, analyzing first the likelihood of the

cabinet approving a preemptive attack, and second, the

likelihood of gaining air superiority in a first strike.

Preemption has long been a tenet of IAF doctrine and Israeli

policy. The IAF formulated plans to attack the Egyptian Air

Force preemptively as early as 1952, prior to the Sinai

campaign of 1956.157 The incredible success of the opening

attack of the Six-Day War in 1967 served to validate the

notion of preemption and increased the prestige of the IAF to

the point that it became the premier arm of the IDF. 158 From a

policy standpoint, Israel has maintained that, due to its

precarious position, certain actions on the part of her

neighbors, such as moving large numbers of troops close to

Israel’s borders, pose particular danger to the nation. In an

effort to marshal international support for actions and

preclude the start of an accidental war, Israel has publicly

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declared which of these actions are causus belli and justify

preemptive attacks. Israeli policy makers see this declared

policy of preemption as an aid to Israel’s deterrence posture

vis-à-vis her potential enemies.159

While preemption has been a major part of Israeli strategy

through the years, IAF planners should have realized that

preemption actually was a more remote possibility for the IAF

in the early 1970s. After the 1967 war, Israel turned to the

United States to replace the aging French equipment in its air

fleet. The United States began delivering A-4 Skyhawks to the

IAF in August 1968, then F-4E Phantoms in September

1969.160 With the United States as its major aircraft supplier,

Israel found its ability to use aircraft in preemptive attacks

somewhat curtailed. Beginning in March 1969 Egyptian forces

conducted a number of attacks across the Suez Canal. In

June Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s declared the

War of Attrition. Responding to these events Gen Ezer

Weizman, the head of the General Staff Operations Branch

and former commander of the IAF, advocated a large airpower

effort against the Egyptians. The remainder of the General

Staff argued against this use of the IAF, opting instead for

responses in kind. This situation created a tension which

continued throughout the War of Attrition, with Weizman and

the IAF arguing for more vigorous action on the part of the

IAF, and Minister of Defense Dayan refusing because of the

perceived risk of escalating the conflict. 161 The conflict

escalated, however, and the IAF began using newly delivered

F-4 aircraft to bomb targets deep in Egypt beginning in

January 1970. At this point the IAF’s use of airpower began to

cause substantive political difficulties with its primary arms

supplier. The US State Department warned that it viewed

Israel’s use of airpower in the conflict as escalatory. The

United States continued to pressure Israel diplomatically to

refrain from the deep bombing raids until finally, in March

1970, the United States withheld shipment of 25 F-4s and

100 A-4s to Israel.162

When the War of Attrition ended in August 1970, due in

large part to US pressure,163 IAF planners should have

recognized that superpower interest in the region would likely

restrain future operations and might prevent cabinet approval

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of a preemptive attack in the future. Some IAF leaders had

expressed an understanding of the delicate nature of the

relationship between Israel and her most significant arms

supplier as early as the spring of 1969. 164 The need both to

ensure US support and to avoid international censure as an

aggressor led Prime Minister Meir to rule out either preventive

war or a preemptive attack in response to the various

incidents in January, May, and September of 1973, each of

which appeared to be precursors of an Arab attack. 165

Evidence that Arab Defenses Had Increased

The IAF’s experience in the War of Attrition also should have

presaged the difficulty of disabling a Soviet-style integrated air

defense system composed of modern SAMs and AAA. While

using airpower as “flying artillery” to strike Egyptian targets

along the Suez Canal, the IAF destroyed the enemy SAMs,

radars, and AAA to the point that by September 1969 IAF

aircraft could bomb targets with little threat of resistance. The

IAF began bombing targets deep in Egyptian territory in January

1970 and destroyed the remaining defenses from the Suez Canal

to Cairo. The Egyptian Air Force fared no better than the

surface-to-air units, losing 32 fighters while only downing four

of the IAF’s.166

Then, in March and April 1970, the Soviet Union responded

to the IAF’s deep attacks by rebuilding Egyptian defenses. The

Soviets began delivery of the SA-3 SAM, which had a much

better low-altitude capability than the SA-2, and the improved

MiG-21MF Fishbed J flown by Soviet pilots. 167 By the end of

June, the Soviets had 120 MiG-21s and 55 SA-3 batteries

manned by Soviet troops stationed in Egypt. Israel, choosing

to avoid conflict with a superpower, restricted its attacks to

the Suez Canal region.168 The Egyptians and their Soviet allies

began pushing the defensive belt of SAMs and AAA towards

the Suez Canal. As the defenses strengthened, IAF losses

mounted. A pivotal period began on 1 July, with estimates of

IAF losses to the Egyptian integrated defense system ranging

between seven and 20 aircraft during the subsequent five

weeks until the cease-fire on 7 August. 169

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By the end of the War of Attrition, the IAF had flown against

all of the defensive systems it would face three years later in

the Yom Kippur War. Even the SA-6 made an appearance just

before the cease-fire, shooting down an F-4 on 3 August

1970.170 The combination of radar-guided SAMs, manportable SA-7s, and radar-directed AAA such as the ZSU-23-4

made the airspace over the Suez Canal especially deadly for

attacking aircraft, as indicated by the IAF’s sharply increased

loss rate during the last weeks of the conflict. The SA-6,

however, made the most significant impression. An Israeli

officer outlined the IAF’s perception of the SA-6.

The War of Attrition concluded in Israel with a feeling of discomfort,

largely because of the SA-6. We had no response to the overlapping

missile systems, which complemented each other. . . . This was no

longer a missile fired from a bunker but one fired from a vehicle,

something tiny, seeing but unseen, with almost unlimited range of

operation. . . . The pilot’s response time is reduced to almost nothing.

A lot of time passes before the aircraft’s radar detects the location of

the firing and until the opposition missile homes in on the target. In

this time, the mobile missile carrier can turn and run, and it is not

worth wasting ammunition chasing it.171

The IAF pursued several measures to counter the increased

defensive capability of an integrated air defense system. The

IAF acquired US Shrike antiradiation missiles, developed

intelligence systems to detect SAMs, and purchased updated

electronic warfare gear.172 Still, despite the evidence of the

lethality of an integrated defense system, the magnitude of

losses to Egyptian and Syrian SAMs and AAA three years

later in the first days of the Yom Kippur War shocked IAF

leaders.173

A Cult of the Offensive?

In this case, the claim that the IAF was captivated by

offensive ideology rests on three points: the mistaken belief

that the IAF could eliminate the Arab integrated defense

systems in a large first strike, the failure to adequately provide

aircraft with self-protection measures to negate defenses, and

the lack of munitions appropriate to counter the Arab passive

airfield defenses.

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In the two years following the War of Attrition, the IAF

began working on methods to destroy SAMs and to operate in

airspace protected by SAMs. Efforts were undertaken to collect

information on missiles and to develop ECM to aid in launch

detection and missile avoidance. Based on observance of

Egyptian and Syrian war exercises in 1972, the IAF developed

a series of plans called the Scratch File to destroy Syrian and

Egyptian SAMs in the event of a coordinated Arab attack.

These plans required additional refinement before

implementation, but over the next year most of the personnel

working on the plans moved to other positions in the IDF. In

August 1973, only four months after taking over the IAF from

Moti Hod, General Peled reviewed the Scratch File. He

critiqued the plan for its complexity and its reliance on events

beyond the control of the IAF.174 The existing plans to destroy

enemy SAMs in a large first strike apparently had some

potential flaws. Still, Peled had enough faith in the plan in the

early hours of 6 October to recommend an IAF preemptive

strike against Syrian SAMs.

To execute the IAF’s plan would require a large effort from a

relatively small air force, similar to the successful airfield

attacks of the Six-Day War. The effort to destroy enemy SAMs

would have to come either before hostilities, in the form of a

preemptive attack à la 1967, or in response to an attack by

the enemy. The reasons for the IAF to doubt that the cabinet

would approve a preemptive strike were noted above. The

reasons the IAF should have doubted it would be allowed to

devote a large portion of its force to a SAM strike after the

Egyptians and Syrians attacked lay in the foundations of the

IDF defense strategy.

The IDF strategy in 1973 rested on three elements: advance

warning provided by the intelligence organization, use of the

standing army and air forces to block any enemy advance and

hold territory, and the rapid mobilization of the reserve forces

to conduct a counterattack.175 In addition to securing air

superiority over Israel to permit mobilization of the reserve,

this strategy also called on the IAF to provide sufficient

numbers of aircraft to assist the standing army in holding

positions under assault. Other commanders in the IDF

General Staff believed that the IAF could, and would, provide

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the airpower necessary to both cover friendly positions and

stop a surprise invasion.176 So the IAF’s continued pursuit of

a strategy calling for a large first strike against enemy SAMs

when such a strike was not likely to be approved either before

or after hostilities highlights a serious discontinuity between

IAF offensive strategy and reality.

A second disparity between IAF doctrine and reality

occurred in the overestimation of the IAF’s ability to operate,

with acceptable attrition, in the high-threat environment

created by enemy integrated air defenses. The IAF had

experienced significant losses to Egyptian defenses in the

closing weeks of the War of Attrition. While efforts were

undertaken to develop countermeasures against the SAMs,

they had not reached fruition at the time of the Yom Kippur

War. In other words, the IAF advertised a capability to operate

in a SAM environment that, at best, existed only on a handful

of aircraft or, at worst, existed only on paper. Part of the

explanation for the lack of adequate ECM gear lay with US

restrictions on sales of such equipment due to security

concerns. Edward N. Luttwak and Daniel Horowitz noted that

“there also seems to have been a strong bias in the [Israeli] Air

Force against the technological ‘high road’ solution, and a

measure of overconfidence in the ability of Israeli pilots to

improvise defensive tactics in the face of new weapons.” 177

Another glaring example of the failure to institute relatively

cheap countermeasures solutions was the lack of chaff

dispensers on most IAF aircraft.178 To compensate for these

deficiencies once the war started, the IAF improvised chaff

dispensers for F-4s, used helicopter spotters to warn aircraft

of missile launches (until several of these helicopters were

shot down), attempted to negate missiles through various

aircraft maneuver profiles, and tried to determine the

locations of Egyptian “safe passage” corridors. While these

innovations speak highly of the ingenuity of the IAF, none of

them adequately addressed the basic problem of insufficient

preparation for the type of battle to be fought. 179

When the planned offensive first strike against the enemy’s

missiles failed to materialize, the IAF was forced to fly close air

support and interdiction missions in a high-threat

environment. Even if the first strike had gone as planned, one

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of the lessons of the War of Attrition was that the enemy could

usually recover from damage and quickly have the missile

systems back on line. The IAF had to relearn this lesson in the

Yom Kippur War.180 Col Eliezer Cohen notes that “tricks

developed [to defeat SAMs] during the War of Attrition were

forgotten for some reason during the first stage of the Yom

Kippur War.”181 Even many of the targets struck by the IAF

demonstrated a certain lack of attention to the CAS and air

interdiction problem. Numerous sorties attacked, and

successfully hit, the bridging equipment used by the

Egyptians to cross the Suez Canal. These sorties actually had

little effect because the Egyptians could quickly repair

damaged bridges by replacing the destroyed sections. 182

The final discontinuity in the IAF’s offensive strategy was its

failure to compensate for the passive defensive measures

taken by the Egyptians to protect their airfields. Unlike the

opening attack of the Six-Day War, when every impact point

and every weapon were meticulously matched to ensure

maximum utilization,183 the airfield attacks in the Yom Kippur

War proved ineffective because of the lack of penetrating

munitions to destroy sheltered aircraft. The purchase or

indigenous development of precision-guided munitions in

sufficient quantities to attack the airfields might have solved

this problem.

The IAF based its doctrine around a first strike against

SAMs that was not likely to be approved, failed to adequately

provide for self-protection measures against SAMs, and did

not acquire the munitions necessary to overcome airfield

passive defenses. The hypothesis that the IAF was trapped by

a cult of the offensive may account for these shortcomings.

Lessons about the power of the defense were readily available

from the IAF’s own combat experience in the War of Attrition.

The IAF devoted some resources to negating the threat posed

by an integrated defense network. Yet, at the time of the Yom

Kippur War, the IAF’s attempts to defeat the defenses still

focused on limiting an attacker’s time over target, altering

attack angles, and increasing pilot skills. To truly negate the

defenses, the IAF required different weapons, better electronic

warfare equipment, and enhanced intelligence support.184

Perhaps most telling in this regard is the self-assessment of

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the participants, as Cohen points out. “What was the source

of the self-confidence that the commanders of the IAF

displayed prior to the war, when they claimed the ability to

destroy the missiles? Here as well, in their retrospective

wisdom, IAF commanders admitted in debriefings and closed

inner-circle meetings that the estimations regarding their

response capabilities were unrealistic.”185

Perhaps the IAF’s overestimation of its ability to overcome

the enemy’s defenses, despite the abundance of evidence to

the contrary, stemmed from the rapid collapse of the enemy in

1967. Minister of Defense Dayan apparently believed in a

version of the sharp rap termed the Collapse Theory. Dayan

believed that the combination of IAF and armor attacks

against any Egyptian forces penetrating the Sinai would

disrupt their plans so completely that the entire offensive

would collapse.186 By “believing the enemy’s forces to be

essentially fragile, trusting in the ability of the [Israeli] Air

Force to overcome the missile barrier, and in the ability of the

tank forces to defeat Egyptian forces on the ground, Dayan

and his associates felt secure with the very thin defence that

would itself collapse in October 1973.”187

Symptoms

From this analysis of the IAF, three items emerge as

possible indicators that the IAF’s doctrine was caught by an

unreasonably offensive ideology. First, IAF doctrine

apparently evolved independently of the other IDF forces’

doctrine. Most of the IDF General Staff counted on the IAF

to provide the forces necessary to blunt an enemy surprise

advance and to secure the time to mobilize the reserves. The

IAF, however, persisted in believing that its initial strikes

would be used to roll back enemy SAM defenses. Resolving

this difference in strategy at the joint IDF level could have

clarified the IAF’s initial mission focus and forced IAF

planners to address the problems of conducting close air

support and interdiction in a high threat area protected by

an integrated SAM and AAA network.

Second, the plans to attack SAMs were not adequately

examined for fundamental weaknesses until just before the

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war began. Even if the cabinet had approved a preemptive

attack, IAF commanders later admitted that the attack plan

contained serious flaws, especially in intelligence and

targeting. The difficult problem of locating mobile, tactical

SAM vehicles on a dynamic battlefield required more thought.

Any plan must be exercised and realistically evaluated before

it is accepted, especially before other plans are made on the

assumption that the first plan will set the necessary

conditions. The IAF obviously learned from this experience as

its successful performance against Syrian SAMs in the Bekaa

Valley in 1982 proved.188

Third, the weapons the IAF intended to employ failed to

evolve as passive and active defenses strengthened. When the

war began, the IAF possessed few weapons that allowed the

shooter to remain outside of the lethal threat envelope, such

as the AGM-65 Maverick missile. The IAF did not have

weapons with the combination of accuracy and penetration

capability to destroy revetted aircraft. All of the development of

tactics and acquisition of self-protection equipment in the

world is worthless if the weapon employed cannot deliver the

desired effect on the target.

Conclusion

The IAF continued to pursue an offensive airpower doctrine

through the beginning of the Yom Kippur War without

adequately accounting for the improved defensive capabilities

of the Egyptians and Syrians. Enamored with an ideology of

the offensive, the IAF ignored the unpleasant lessons of the

War of Attrition and attempted to repeat its offensive success

of 1967 without instituting the planning or equipment

updates necessary to cope with the improvements of the Arab

defenses. The pursuit of an improperly developed offensive

doctrine was manifested in three areas. The IAF overestimated

the likelihood of a successful first strike against the enemy’s

SAMs, lacked the preparation required to conduct missions

against targets protected by SAMs, and failed to acquire

weapons capable of offsetting the enemy’s passive airfield

defenses. A misplaced faith in its ability to conduct the offense

contributed to the IAF’s loss of almost 18 percent of its aircraft

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in the first four days of the war. 189 The symptoms of the IAF’s

offensive ideology included unilateral doctrine formulation,

inadequately critiqued offensive plans, and stagnant weapons

development. It is a tribute to the resourcefulness and skill of

the IDF, including the IAF, that Israel ultimately triumphed in

the Yom Kippur War.

United States Air Force, 1953–65

There is no question that a nuclear war can be “won,” as

wars of the past have been won—by the side which is best

prepared to fight it. This preparation of which I speak

includes as top-priority items civil defense measures as well

as military offensive and defensive power.

—Gen Nathan F. Twining

Neither Liberty nor Safety

B-47

This bomber, which entered the inventory in the early 1950s, was one of the

main instruments of the US offensive strategy for deterrence in that decade

and beyond.

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In 1965 the USAF’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) operated

807 nuclear-capable bombers, 600 B-52s, 114 B-47s, and 93

B-58s, as well as 880 nuclear intercontinental ballistic

missiles (ICBM), 59 Titans I and II, and 821 Minutemen I and

II.190 On 1 February 1965, Gen Curtis E. LeMay retired as the

USAF’s chief of staff (CSAF), the last of the major commanders

from World War II to leave USAF active duty. 191 Four months

later, B-52 bombers executed their first conventional bombing

missions in Vietnam.192 Thus, 1965 marked the end of an era.

SAC’s predominance among the Air Force’s major commands

began to dwindle in light of two changing world conditions,

the growth of the Soviet Union’s (USSR) nuclear arsenal, and

the increasing US involvement in Vietnam. The USAF’s

strategic doctrine through 1965, primarily under the auspices

of SAC, centered on the maintenance of a predominantly

offensive nuclear capability. The author next examines the

development of the Air Force’s strategic nuclear doctrine in

the years after the end of the Korean War in 1953 to

determine the feasibility of the offensive nuclear doctrine

pursued in 1965.

USAF Nuclear Strategy

The United States pursued three different approaches to

grand nuclear strategy during this period: massive retaliation,

second-strike counterforce, and the combination of assured

destruction and damage limitation. Massive retaliation, the

US security policy announced by Secretary of State John

Foster Dulles in January 1954, sprang from the belief that the

threat of nuclear war could deter communist aggression, like

that which had occurred in Korea, worldwide. 193 When

ordered, US nuclear forces would launch a massive campaign

to destroy the Soviet military and the urban economic and

industrial base that supported military production. 194

A clear shift in US nuclear strategy occurred when the

Kennedy administration took office in January 1961. In his

first weeks in office, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara

received a briefing on the nuclear single integrated operational

plan (SIOP), a report from a Pentagon weapons evaluation

group critical of nuclear force structure, and a RAND briefing

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on a proposal to adopt a “no-cities” nuclear strategy. This

combination of briefings energized McNamara’s demand for a

more flexible strategy than massive retaliation.195 These

efforts culminated in McNamara’s initial no-cities doctrine

(also called second-strike counterforce). The strategy remained

Brig Gen (later Maj Gen) Haywood S. Hansell Jr.

Famous in the genesis of the Combined Bomber Offensive against Germany,

Hansell was a teacher at the Air Corps Tactical School and a principal planner

who constructed AWPD-1. He flew with then Capt Claire Lee Chennault in the

predecessor unit to the Thunderbirds. General Hansell preached the gospel of

the offensive throughout his career and a long postwar retirement.

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retaliatory, thus second strike, but initially targeted nuclear

and other military forces rather than cities. Soviet cities would

be targeted by subsequent forces, providing negotiating

leverage to end the conflict.196 As budgetary pressures

mounted over the next 18 months, McNamara first attempted

to control military spending on nuclear forces by forbidding

the services to cite the counterforce mission as a justification

for weapons. Then, in November 1963, he changed the US

nuclear strategy to one based on the combination of assured

destruction and damage limitation.197 The first capability,

assured destruction, provided a rationale for limiting the size

of the US nuclear arsenal. The second, damage limitation,

described the capability of US forces to strike unlaunched

enemy nuclear forces, and thereby decrease the amount of

damage the United States would suffer in subsequent nuclear

exchanges. McNamara described the first capability as

essential, regardless of cost, and the second as optional,

dependent upon the threat and the available budget. 198 In

effect, McNamara’s new policy was to use assured destruction

as a method to size US forces properly and damage limitation

as a strategy for the employment of that force. 199

USAF nuclear strategy between 1953 and 1965 sometimes

led and sometimes lagged behind the grand strategy outlined

above. During the massive retaliation era, the Air Force

planned to use nuclear forces in much the same way that

conventional bomber forces had been employed in World War

II. Targets included enemy military forces, transportation

nodes crucial to the movement of those forces, and the

industries and elements of the enemy economy, such as

electricity and raw materials processing plants, which fed war

production. The first lurch toward a new targeting strategy

emerged in the early 1950s. In 1953 while incumbent CSAF

Hoyt S. Vandenberg favored the continuance of the previous

industrial targeting emphasis for nuclear forces, LeMay, as

SAC commander, and Nathan F. Twining, the next CSAF,

advocated changing the planned majority of effort from

industrial targets to military targets.200 This strategy shift was

supportable because the development of the hydrogen bomb

in 1953 made weapons simultaneously smaller and vastly

more potent, and because of the continuing growth of the US

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nuclear arsenal.201 The USAF focus on military targets gained

momentum when the United States began to receive

intelligence data from U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union in

the mid-1950s. The transformation continued in fits and

starts throughout the latter years of the 1950s and was

enhanced by periodic technological improvements, such as

increases in weapon delivery accuracy, and by the deployment

of new weapon systems, such as nuclear-armed ballistic

missiles, nuclear weapon-capable fighter aircraft, and the

Left to right: Generals Hoyt S. Vandenberg,

Matthew B. Ridgway, and Lauris Norstad

General Vandenberg never served on a bomber crew but commanded the

greatest tactical air force in history during World War II, the Ninth Air Force. He

presided over the Air Force from 1948 to 1953 as it was building the Strategic

Air Command into a formidable nuclear offensive force. Commander Ridgway,

as a result of his Korean War experience, was skeptical of the value of airpower in general, and while supreme commander of NATO, General Norstad

was one of the earliest advocates of flexible response.

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B-52 bomber. Air Force strategy remained consistent with

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s policy of massive

retaliation, even though it included many military targets,

because it would still inflict tremendous casualties. 202

The USAF’s somewhat schizophrenic approach to a nuclear

strategy caught between military and industrial targets

reached its culmination in the “optimum mix” strategy of

1959 to 1961. The optimum mix strategy targeted both

military and industrial targets and sought to achieve

maximum destruction with the available force. The exact

detonation points of weapons aimed at military targets were

sometimes slightly adjusted to achieve greater casualties in a

nearby city, as had been the targeting technique since the

mid-1950s.203 A change was brewing, however, instigated by

USAF interest in what would happen if deterrence failed and

propelled by the work of Herman Kahn and William W.

Kaufmann, which called for a strategy with less emphasis on

countervalue targeting.204

Beginning in 1960, Air Force strategy increasingly ignored

countervalue targets and emphasized the need for counterforce strikes. Some blamed interservice battles over the utility

of minimum deterrence, in particular the debate with the Navy

over acquisition of the submarine-launched Polaris missile

system, for this strategy shift.205 Regardless of the cause,

USAF leaders would emphasize the ability of nuclear forces to

target the enemy’s military forces, both conventional and

nuclear, for the remainder of the period under study. 206

The roots of the “new” USAF strategy actually stemmed from

an often-expressed Air Force interest in counterforce

targeting. As early as 1953, former Secretary of the Air Force

Thomas K. Finletter recommended that the Air Force move

toward “anti-force” targeting and away from “anti-industry.” 207

General LeMay stated in 1955 that the USAF’s first mission

should be to destroy Soviet atomic capability. 208 General

Twining, speaking as CSAF, claimed in 1956 that the USAF’s

primary mission was to destroy the USSR’s capability to strike

the United States.209 In December 1957 Maj Gen James H.

Walsh, director of Air Force intelligence, declared that the

USAF was moving away from Douhet’s airpower theory based

on massive destruction of cities and back toward Clausewitz’s

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ideas of focusing attacks on enemy forces. 210 While quick to

recognize the positive attributes of counterforce strategy, the

Air Force was slow to implement it, citing insufficient force

size and inadequate intelligence capabilities as reasons for the

Maj Gen (later Gen) Nathan F. Twining

General Twining held vital positions during the heyday of the air

offensive strategy. He commanded the Fifteenth Air Force during

the Combined Bomber Offensive against Germany and became

USAF chief of staff in 1953. Later in the decade he served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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delay at the time.211 All of this provided the background for

the USAF counterforce emphasis of the early 1960s which

claimed such a strategy could not only deter war but also

successfully prosecute nuclear war should deterrence fail.

A Cult of the Offensive?

To demonstrate that Air Force doctrine between the Korean

and Vietnam Wars was trapped by a cult of the offensive, one

must show that the USAF ignored evidence of the power of the

defense and pursued offensive doctrine without a complete

understanding of the possibilities and limitations of the

offense. This argument, then, hinges on two things. First, how

did the USAF treat evidence of the power of the defense?

Second, how rational was the USAF’s decision to pursue an

offensive doctrine in the 1960s?

USAF Reactions to Defensive Improvements

Military aerospace technology advanced rapidly during the

period under study. The proliferation of missiles had one of

the most significant impacts on air operations. Missiles

provided much greater engagement ranges and promised

improved probability of kill compared to guns for both

air-to-air and surface-to-air applications. Intermediate range

and intercontinental ballistic missiles threatened to replace

bomber aircraft as the primary nuclear weapon delivery

system. In fact, the last day the Air Force had as many

bombers on nuclear alert as missiles was 21 April 1964. Afte r

that, the number of alert missiles always exceeded the number

of alert bombers.212 Examining equipment changes,

preparation of its own defenses, and nuclear mission planning,

reveals the USAF’s estimation of the power of the defense as

conditions evolved in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The first equipment change, as already noted, was the

acquisition of ICBMs to augment bombers as nuclear

weapons delivery platforms. A raucous debate ensued

between those who believed the ICBM should completely

replace the piloted bomber and those supporting the USAF’s

position that a force containing a mix of bombers and

missiles provided the optimum offensive capability.213 A

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complete exposition of the missile/bomber debate lies beyond

the scope of this study. One aspect of the debate is important,

however, because it centered around the defenses an enemy

could erect against bombers and missiles. ICBM advocates

initially asserted that no defense was possible against the

missile, while improved antiaircraft defenses were making it

less likely that a bomber could survive to reach the

target.214 As technology progressed and antiballistic missile

(ABM) defenses became theoretically feasible, ICBM

advocates cited the greater relative expense of ABM systems

compared to ICBM systems to support their case. Quoting a

Department of Defense study, they claimed that for every

dollar an enemy spent on ICBMs, the United States would

have to spend $3.20 on ABM systems to offset the offensive

improvement. This, in their view, made defense impractical

and unaffordable for either side. 215 The offensive-defensive

aspect of this debate forced Air Force leaders, who

B-52

The core instrument of the US offensive strategy in the late 1950s and used in

combat in the Gulf War, the B-52 is a long-lived bomber.

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advocated a mixed force of bombers and ICBMs, to defend

their assertion that the manned bomber could successfully

negate enemy defenses. As a result, USAF leaders consistently

emphasized bomber survivability, funding the research,

development, and purchase of such penetration aids for

bombers as electronic countermeasure suites and decoys. 216

The USAF purchased the Hound Dog nuclear air-to-surface

missile to allow B-52 bombers to employ nuclear ordnance

from outside the range of enemy defenses and proposed

production of the B-70 bomber to counter future Soviet

defensive improvements.217

USAF Employment of Defense

The USAF’s appreciation for defense is revealed in its

efforts to ensure the survival of its own forces in the face of

an enemy attack. SAC pursued various passive defensive

measures to counter the perceived Soviet offensive threat.

Albert Wohlstetter led several RAND studies in this period,

which were not always well received by the Air Force, that

focused on the vulnerability of SAC’s forces, and

recommended various defensive measures to alleviate the

problems he identified.218 General LeMay undertook to

eliminate SAC’s dependency on vulnerable overseas bases in

1954 by accelerating development of the B-52 and

concomitantly acquiring an air refueling capability to allow

bombers stationed in the United States to fly to their targets

in the Soviet Union nonstop. Even while implementing

defensive measures to increase survivability, some still

believed in offense as the answer to vulnerability. Instead of

absorbing a Soviet first strike, SAC planners of the early

1950s advocated launching on warning of an attack “to get in

a better, faster, preemptive strike.”219

RAND’s 1954 report on vulnerability considered the threat

of attack posed by Soviet long-range bombers. A 1956 RAND

study, Protecting U.S. Power to Strike Back in the 1950s and

1960s, again headed by Wohlstetter, highlighted SAC’s

continued vulnerability to a surprise attack, which could

only worsen given the possibility that the Soviets would

soon deploy an ICBM. Among other items, this report

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recommended the construction of giant hardened shelters to

protect SAC bombers.220 SAC’s leaders still believed in

aircraft dispersal as a viable defensive counter to an

impending Soviet attack, but they failed to provide either

nuclear weapons transport or loading facilities at the

dispersed bases. The Gaither Committee, appointed by

President Eisenhower in 1957 to study the vulnerability

problem, discovered that SAC could not get a single

nuclear-loaded aircraft airborne within the attack warning

time generated by the distant early warning (DEW) line’s

radar. General LeMay responded that he had access to

highly classified intelligence from aircraft constantly flying

over the Soviet Union intercepting military communications

B-36

Though some Air Force officers favored a balanced air arm after World War II, the

imperatives of politics and economics gradually compelled the USAF to adopt a

force structure built around a strategic nuclear bombing capability. The B-36 was

the leading instrument of that strategy until the great jet bombers were ready.

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and that SAC would act on strategic, not just tactical,

warning. Furthermore, LeMay stated he would order a

preemptive attack if he received warning of a massing of

Soviet offensive forces, so he claimed that the Gaither

Committee’s test proved nothing of significance. 221

By the time the mythical bomber gap of the 1950s evolved

into the imaginary missile gap of the 1960 presidential

campaign, SAC had begun to implement passive measures to

protect its nuclear forces. Gen Thomas S. Power, the new SAC

commander, implemented Eisenhower’s direction to have

one-third of SAC’s bombers on 15-minute ground alert in

October 1957 after testing the concept to discover and correct

deficiencies in the ground alert scheme.222 As perceived threat

capabilities increased, the number of passive measures

undertaken increased as well. In July 1961 President John F.

Kennedy increased the size of SAC’s ground alert commitment

to 50 percent of the bomber force. 223 Six months later SAC

began to maintain a number of B-52 aircraft constantly on

airborne alert.224 SAC also implemented passive protection for

its ICBMs, constructing hardened, underground silos for

missiles. Still, the primary passive defensive measures

remained alert and dispersal, and SAC refused to build

hardened shelters for bombers.225

In addition to passive countermeasures, the USAF also

pursued active defenses against Soviet offensive forces. Air

(Aerospace) Defense Command (ADC) received attention as a

shield against possible Soviet attack beginning in the earl y

1950s. The Air Force sought superior interceptor aircraft, radar

detection networks capable of providing warning, fighter control

systems that could direct air battles between jet aircraft, and

sophisticated surface-to-air systems to provide area coverage to

complement the Army’s Nike point defense SAM. These efforts led

to the deployment of the F-101/102/104/106 interceptors, the

DEW line of radars, the semiautomatic ground environment

system to direct aircraft intercepts, and the Bomarc SAM.

When analysts predicted that the Soviets were developing a

standoff missile capability for their bombers, similar to the

US Hound Dog, the USAF responded in 1957 by requesting

a new interceptor. The proposed F-108 required Mach 3

speed to permit it to engage enemy bombers before they could

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launch their missiles, given the time constraints dictated by

radar warning.226

As USAF leaders became increasingly convinced in the

early 1960s that the Soviets preferred missiles over bombers

for offensive action, the service’s desire to field defensive

systems waned. When the 1961 budget deliberations forced

the USAF to choose between the offensive B-70 bomber and

First Launch of the Minuteman Solid-Propellant Missile

The Minuteman was a main instrument of the land-based missile leg of the

strategic triad, which was designed to deter through the maintenance of an

invulnerable offensive capability.

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the defensive F-108 interceptor, its leadership opted for the

former, over the objections of Gen Laurence S. Kuter (then

North American Air Defense commander).227 USAF interest in

defensive measures did not completely end with the

cancellation of the F-108 but continued to be expressed in

the form of support for development of an ABM defense. 228

Even the F-108 proposal reappeared in subsequent budget

debates but was never developed. As late as 1965 General

LeMay, then CSAF, attempted to insert a long-range,

high-altitude interceptor program back into the budget, but

the proposal had to be modified after Secretary McNamara’s

disclosure of the previously classified A-11 program and his

statement that an interceptor version could be developed, if

required.229 The interceptor version of the A-11, designated

the YF-12A, was repeatedly sought by the Air Force, but was

never produced. The reconnaissance version of the aircraft

entered USAF service as the SR-71. 230

USAF Appreciation of the Difficulty of Offense

Perhaps nowhere was the USAF’s appreciation for both the

power of the defense and the problems of the offense more

apparent than in its plans for nuclear warfare. Evolving from

the SAC targeting plans of the 1950s and the US Emergency

War Plan, detailed planning for nuclear war reached its

ultimate expression with the publication of the SIOP. The

SIOP, first published in December 1960,231 matched specific

weapons with individual targets and contained the detailed

coordination required to deconflict the strikes of all US

nuclear systems, regardless of service or command of

origin.232 Producing the SIOP forced planners to consider the

feasibility of thousands of coordinated offensive actions.

Planners developed target intelligence, prioritized targets,

established a desired probability of target destruction,

orchestrated the timing of missile strikes against surfaceto-air missile sites to permit bomber penetrations, and

deconflicted aircraft ingress routes. The SIOP planners

assumed high attrition and failure rates for attackers, with

causes ranging from the destruction of employment vehicles

by enemy defenses to failure of weapons to function properly.

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The high attrition assumptions required the tasking of a large

number of offensive weapons to execute the plan. 233 The

establishment of high confidence levels of target destruction

also fueled demands for more offensive weapons since

planners tasked multiple system and warhead combinations

against the same target to achieve the desired probability that

the target would be destroyed.234 General Power, SAC

commander from 1957 to 1964, explained the programming of

several weapons against the same target by saying, “we are

playing for the highest stakes there are, the survival of our

nation and we cannot afford to leave the success of the most

important military factor in our Deterrent System to chance

and wishful thinking.”235

Brig Gen William “Billy” Mitchell

In the early twenties, General Mitchell supported a balanced air force containing

both offensive and defensive capabilities but gradually became more offensively oriented. He was court-martialed in 1925 and left the service early in 1926.

Billy Mitchell continues to have great influence on the thought of the USAF.

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While the SIOP may have forced US planners to seriously

address many of the problems inherent in a large-scale

nuclear offensive, the SIOP also spawned severe criticism.

First, it was driven by capabilities, not requirements. 236 Air

Force leaders admitted that the SIOP called for the launch of

every available weapon against the enemy in the shortest

possible time.237 Even the designation of enemy was somewhat

vague, as the first SIOP called for strikes against targets in

China and several Eastern European countries, as well as

targets in the Soviet Union.238 The SIOP attempted to deliver

the maximum target destruction, in the minimum amount of

time, given the available arsenal.

Second, some of the planners’ assumptions appeared

questionable. Daniel Ellsberg, when reviewing the SIOP as a

RAND analyst in 1961, believed the most basic assumption of

the plan, simultaneous worldwide execution, was flawed.

Ellsberg claimed, for one thing, that execute orders arrived at

different times at different bases, fatally disrupting the

execution timing so diligently deconflicted by the planners. 239

Others noted that SAC planners had increased the expected

probability of destruction on designated key targets from the

directed 75 percent to as high as 97 percent in some cases.

Overall, 812 targets in the first SIOP required a probability of

destruction of 90 percent or higher. Additionally, planners

based the effective damage figures used to determine the

number of weapons required only on the blast effects of

nuclear weapons, disregarding the effects due to heat, fire,

and radiation. Critics postulated that if every target on the

SIOP received only one nuclear weapon, the resulting

radiation would adversely affect several European and Asian

allied countries.240

Third, the SIOP provided no employment options. The

planners wove each individual item so completely into the

plan that its execution demanded an all or nothing effort; it

was impossible to execute the SIOP in stages. The parallel

between World War I’s intricately planned mobilization

schedules and inflexible nuclear employment plans had

become apparent to Secretary McNamara after he listened to a

10 February 1961 RAND briefing on a no-cities nuclear

strategy.241 McNamara had received his first SIOP briefing

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only one week earlier, and this combination of events led to

his demands both for more execution flexibility and for the

development of alternative courses in the nuclear war plan. 242

The Rationality of Offense

With these important problems about the offensive war plan

identified, one must question whether the offensive strategy

pursued by the USAF through 1965 was rational. Some would

argue that no victory was possible in nuclear war, so any plan

advocating a nuclear offensive must be irrational. 243 One

cannot dismiss either the pure counterforce strategy or that of

second-strike counterforce so easily, though. US grand

Maj Gen Frank M. Andrews

General Andrews was the first commander of the GHQ Air Force and was an

apostle, if not the high priest, of the Air Corps offensive preference. He was at

the controls of a B-24 Liberator when it crashed into a mountain in Iceland in

the spring of 1943.

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strategy for this entire period was nuclear deterrence. The two

prevailing deterrent views focused on either countervalue or

counterforce targets.244 The countervalue strategists believed

that threatening to destroy an enemy’s cities would deter

aggression, even though one’s own cities were sure to be lost

as well in an ensuing nuclear exchange. The counterforce

group, which included the Air Force, thought that if

deterrence fails, the United States should have an executable

military strategy that sought to deny the enemy the means to

secure its military objectives. The Soviets might realize that

the Americans spared Soviet cities in a counterforce nuclear

attack, and likewise, they might avoid US cities in a nuclear

counterattack. As General Power commented, a counterforce

strategy “places greater importance on saving American lives

than on destroying an aggressor’s cities,” while admitting that

there was no guarantee that a Soviet counterstrike would

spare US cities.245 A counterforce deterrent also appeared

more credible as an extended deterrent strategy for NATO and

as an answer to possible Soviet “salami tactics.” 246 During a

1962 speech to NATO ministers in Athens, Secretary

McNamara officially announced the change in US strategy

from one of massive retaliation to one of flexible response.

With its heavy emphasis on counterforce targeting, the new

strategy appeared to affirm the counterforce targeting

position.247 However, as the US National Command

Authorities eschewed preemptive attacks,248 the number of

counterforce targets grew so large that a counterforce strike

became virtually indistinguishable from a countervalue

attack.249 Also, as the desire to contain spending on nuclear

forces grew,250 the McNamara policy began to drift more

toward the assured destruction side of the deterrent scale. 251

Still, the USAF sought to maintain a war-winning strategy

both as a deterrent and as a hedge against deterrence failure;

82 percent of the nuclear force committed to the SIOP in 1963

was tasked against counterforce targets.252 General Twining

summed up the USAF position, as quoted earlier in this

section, by saying nuclear war was winnable if the Air Force

approached it like a conventional military problem. 253 So the

USAF counterforce doctrine of 1965 appears logical and

consistent with grand nuclear strategy. Independent of the

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evaluation of whether offensive counterforce was the best or

“correct” strategy, one must admit at least that the strategy

appears rational given the balance of forces at the time.

The evidence presented so far has demonstrated that the

USAF pursued a rational counterforce nuclear offensive

doctrine. USAF planners also considered how evolving

defenses would affect offense. The Air Force’s leadership

emphasized technological innovation to improve the penetration

capabilities of bombers, advocated a mixed bomber and

missile force to hedge against Soviet deployment of an ABM

system, and procured standoff air-to-surface missiles to

prolong the usefulness of piloted bombers against growing

Soviet defense capabilities. In addition, AF leadership planned

thoroughly by anticipating and compensating for losses

inflicted on attacking forces and pursued a mix of active and

passive defenses to protect US forces. The USAF respected the

power of the defense and its SIOP planning factors likely

underestimated the ability of its own offensive forces to

conduct operations. Because the USAF’s offensive nuclear

strategy was logical, consistent with national strategy, and

recognized the myriad obstacles which had to be overcome for

offense to succeed, it appears that, despite its obvious

preference for offense, the USAF was not trapped by a cult of

the offensive.

The Air Force unquestionably preferred offense to defense,

as its leaders and observers consistently noted. Bernard B.

Brodie was appalled at the atomic targeting plans of the early

1950s which, reminiscent of the sharp rap myth, “hinged on

the notion that somehow the bombing campaign would, just

like that, force the Soviet Union to collapse.” 254 The USAF’s

first basic doctrine manual, AFM 1-2 published in 1953,

acknowledged the possibility of defense, but asserted that

airpower was inherently offensive.255 General LeMay defined a

deterrent force in 1955 as “an effective nuclear offensive force

which is secure from destruction by the enemy regardless of

what offensive and defensive action he takes against it.” 256 In

1956 Gen Earle E. Partridge, ADC commander, stated, “we

believe that the best defense is a good offense, and we believe

that our primary mission in the Air Defense Command is to

defend the bases from which Strategic Air Command is going

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Gen Curtis E. LeMay

General LeMay is best known in association with US strategic bombing. He

built SAC into a formidable force including two legs of the strategic triad. He is

shown here as a young officer and (next page) in Vietnam in 1962 when he was

chief of staff of the USAF.

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to operate.”257 Fred Kaplan, commenting on USAF reluctance

to build hardened shelters for bomber aircraft, observed that

“to spend money on offense, not defense, was practically

dogma in Air Force circles.”258 Gen Thomas D. White, while

testifying before Congress as CSAF in 1960, outlined his view

that “of course, our philosophy is based on the fact that offense

is the best defense. . . . I am perfectly certain that . . . air

defense could absorb the national budget, and still could not

guarantee 100-percent defense.”259 Writing in 1964, former

SAC commander General Power said, “with all other factors

being equal, the nation which takes the initiative in nuclear

war automatically assumes military superiority.”260 Despite

this consistent predilection for offense, however, Air For ce

actions demonstrate that the understanding of the requir ements for successful offense matured and evolved from the

dangerously cultic view Brodie decried in the early 1950s. By

the mid-1960s, nuclear offense was still revered but not

imbued with a mystical, irresistible quality. The numerous

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projects pursued to ensure the survival of its attacking forces

substantiate the USAF’s recognition of the power of the

defense. General LeMay’s remarks before Congress in 1963

reveal some of the tension that respect for the defense caused.

“We now have the capability of taking a portion of the

penetrating force and putting it on the defense system and

destroying it so you can go in without opposition. We have the

weapons to do this. And we plan on doing it. I sometimes think

that we have given the defense system too much credit.” 261

Symptoms

Three factors indicate how the Air Force largely avoided the

trap of offensive ideology: detailed planning, realistic exercises

and testing, and constant challenges from outside the

organization. The first of these, detailed planning, resulted

from the task of producing the SIOP. Centralized control of

airpower had long been a tenet of USAF doctrine. The SIOP

covered every aspect of nuclear employment and left little

room for innovation at lower echelons. The combination of

security requirements and the desire to centralize control of

operations drove the USAF to pool its resources and create a

tremendous planning engine. By exploring the employment

plan in great detail, planners could uncover force deficiencies

and highlight them for correction. Any plan, no matter how

detailed, is built around assumptions, and some of the

assumptions of the SIOP were probably flawed. The SIOP,

complex instrument that it was, would have suffered in

execution like any other plan when it came into contact with a

reacting enemy. None of these defects, however, detracts from

the fact that producing the SIOP forced planners to specifically

address the power of the defense. Specifically addressing the

defense may have helped the USAF to avoid the cultic trap

characterized by the belief that somehow, at the point of enemy

contact, the offense would mystically prevail.

The second issue, realistic training and thorough testing,

forced USAF planners to consider actual capabilities, not

predicted performance. One of the reasons cited for Air Force

resistance to a rapid, massive conversion to missiles was the

lack of full-scale operational missile testing.262 SAC pursued a

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policy of not accepting weapons into the SAC inventory until

they were operational, to avoid the construction of a force

based on promise instead of capability.263 Training for the

delivery of nuclear weapons became such an Air Force fixation

that it took priority over all other training, even for fighter

aircraft in some commands.264 SAC also professed that

nuclear employment required more than just the proper

weapons. It included the combined output of the entire

organizational system. The command’s definition of weapon

system, according to General Power, encompassed the weapon

plus the facilities, support equipment, personnel, and training

facilities to exercise them all.265

The third factor, challenge from outside sources, provided a

relentless force that may have prevented the USAF from

fixating on an undeveloped notion of offensive capability.

Nuclear strategy was a constant subject of attention by

civilian theorists throughout the period. One can see RAND’s

influence on Air Force strategy in the measures taken to

reduce force vulnerability and in the development and pursuit

of a nuclear war-fighting strategy.266 The advent of the Polaris

system forced the Air Force to support the feasibility of its

offensive plans against those who claimed that a countervalue

strategy could deter nuclear war at substantially lower cost. 267

The Air Force arguments against Polaris centered on the

technical problems of developing the fleet ballistic missile

system and on the limited utility of its “fractional megaton”

warhead for counterforce targeting.268 Finally, the

bomber-missile debate repeatedly forced the USAF to justify

the survivability of its bomber force and to consider seriously

the air defense capabilities of the Soviets. General LeMay’s

previously cited congressional testimony indicates that even

the offensive-minded CSAF reacted to the pressure to make a

full allowance for enemy defensive capability.

Conclusion

Several of the factors that lead military organizations to

prefer offensive doctrines are evident in this case. Air Force

attempts to build a credible counterforce capability, in

addition to providing for national security, furthered

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organizational growth and power. Switching to a counterforce

strategy allowed planners to link the size of USAF nuclear

forces to the size of enemy forces, which provided a rationale

for increasing the USAF’s nuclear arsenal as the Soviet

arsenal grew. Recognition of the power of the defense also

permitted planners to develop and procure new systems to

counter projected Soviet defensive enhancements. Finally,

pessimistic estimates of reliability and survivability of

offensive systems justified the purchase of additional weapon

systems to compensate for worst-case scenarios.

Regardless of the impetus, USAF planners recognized the

potential power of the defense and attempted to compensate

for the difficulties inherent in executing a nuclear offense.

Furthermore, they pursued measures to increase the

probability that their planned nuclear offensive would

succeed. Air Force offensive strategy in Vietnam during the

remainder of the 1960s, not considered in this study, may

have lacked much of this rationality and merits future

examination as a separate case. In the early 1960s, the USAF’s

pursuit of a nuclear counterforce capability may have been

inappropriate, too expensive, or incapable of achieving all of

the desired results had it been executed. The reasons for

failure, however, would not have been attributable to a

seriously misplaced faith in the power of the offensive. Because

of its acknowledgment of both the power of the defense and the

difficulties of offense, the USAF of the late 1950s and early

1960s avoided a potential cult of the offensive.

Implications

Offensive doctrine held tremendous appeal for all three of

the airpower organizations considered in this study. The

interwar RAF viewed offensive strategic bombing as the most

economical means to guarantee British security against

potential threats from the continent. This belief allowed the

RAF’s leaders to secure the organization’s funding and

autonomy during the drastic British defense cuts after World

War I. The IAF enjoyed tremendous prestige, much of which

derived from the devastatingly successful offensive air strikes

of the 1967 Six-Day War. Israel’s defense policy emphasized

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quick victory and encouraged preemption. The leaders of the

USAF after the Korean War saw the offensive employment of

nuclear weapons as a true military strategy, useful should the

more politically oriented strategy of deterrence fail. Pursuit of

an offensive strategy also provided a rationale for increasing

the size and power of USAF and SAC organizations relative to

those of the other armed services. Offensive doctrine in each

Polaris Submarine

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, US Navy condemnation of

strategic nuclear attack lessened as submarine launched ballistic

missiles proved practical.

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of these cases appeared to meet organizational and national

security goals simultaneously.

For the RAF and the IAF, however, offense became an article

of faith. These organizations were trapped by a cult of the

offensive in the sense that their offensive doctrines were

accepted without serious challenge to the notion that airpower

could execute the planned offense given the existing

conditions. Offensive ideology, in turn, contributed to the

ineffectiveness of the force. The RAF’s self-evaluation of its

offensive forces on the eve of World War II revealed that its

touted offensive capability did not exist. Israel’s political

leadership did not allow the IAF to preemptively strike enemy

SAMs, and once the war started, ground support

requirements forced the IAF to operate against a strong

defense. Even if the IAF had devoted its first strikes to SAMs,

preemptively or not, it is debatable whether the strikes would

have eliminated the missile threat.

While not the only factor at work in these cases, the fact

that an offensive ideology gripped the RAF and the IAF helps

to explain why their doctrines failed to produce the expected

military success. Apparent in both cases is a cultic acceptance

of the belief that offense would triumph despite enemy

countermeasures. And that the benefits accrued from taking

the initiative would compensate for the operational risks. The

RAF, reflecting the views of many in British society and

government, believed that offensive airpower was so

destructive that society would unravel and governments

collapse soon after air strikes began. This belief in the

omnipotence of airpower offense could account for the lack of

emphasis on developing the equipment and procedures

required to strike individual targets. The IAF deservedly

enjoyed the rewards of a successfully executed massive

offensive strike in 1967. During the subsequent years, few

questioned that the IAF would repeat its offensive performance

at the beginning of the next conflict.

Yet, in both cases, strong evidence existed, and was

ignored, that the envisioned offensive would not unfold as

expected. The RAF first discovered in World War I the need for

navigation aids, all-weather capability, larger explosives,

better intelligence, and protection from enemy defenses.

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During the interwar period, employment exercises repeatedly

showed the need for these improvements. The RAF’s

leadership, however, ignored this evidence. The IAF first

encountered the increased capabilities of a Soviet-style

integrated air defense system of SAMs and AAA during the

War of Attrition. While the IAF initiated programs to counter

these defensive improvements, they were not pursued

vigorously and few adjustments were made to compensate for

identified deficiencies before October 1973. The IAF’s leaders

persisted in the belief that their planned offensive would

succeed, disregarding both the contrary evidence and the

probable political limitations. An unshakable faith in the

power of offense propelled the doctrines of both the RAF and

the IAF past the point of objective evaluation of capability and

limitations, which led to a doctrinal failure.

The USAF case lacks the dramatic finale of the RAF and IAF

cases. USAF strategy supported the national strategy of

deterrence, and no nuclear war occurred, but it is too large an

inferential leap to conclude that the USAF offensive doctrine

was therefore successful. Until more information becomes

available about Soviet perceptions and reactions during the

period under study, one can only conclude that the strategy

did not fail. Whether the USAF offensive strategy is deemed a

failure or success, though, does not affect the conclusion that

the Air Force avoided a cult of the offensive in its nuclear

strategy. This determination rests upon the evidence that Air

Force planners admitted the power of the defense and

attempted to compensate for many of the difficulties likely to

arise in offensive execution.

From the analysis of these cases, it appears that detailed

planning and critical evaluation may provide two keys to

avoiding the trap of the cult of the offensive. Detailed planning

reveals the shortcomings of an intricate offensive campaign.

Both the RAF and the IAF failed to plan their offensive

operations to the level of detail that the USAF did in its SIOP

or the IAF did in 1967. When the strategist must decide how a

crew locates a target, who dictates which targets to hit, which

munitions can achieve the planned effects, or how aircraft will

survive in the existing threat environment, the differences

between war on paper and actual war become evident. To plan

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a large airpower offensive, one may have to delegate tasks

among different organizations. At some point, however, the

strategist must gather all of the organizations’ inputs for

analysis to determine the feasibility of an offensive strategy.

This synthesis of detailed planning information serves to

replace the cultic faith that airpower can perform a task with

the hard evidence necessary to support the claim.

While detailed campaign planning may confirm that an

airpower offensive is executable, it does not completely

address the issue of effectiveness. Strategists must also

evaluate the mechanism through which they anticipate

employment of offensive airpower will lead to achievement of

an objective. A cult of the offensive can occur at this level as

well, for instance, if a strategist falls victim to the sharp rap

myth and believes that the enemy will crumble as soon as

airpower employment begins. In some cases an opponent’s

system may be that fragile, but the strategist must diligently

identify the mechanism which will lead to this rapid collapse,

and not accept fragility to air attack as an element of cultic

faith.

Strategists must always closely examine assumptions, since

they provide an avenue for the imperceptible insertion of cultic

beliefs into any plan, whether offensive or defensive.

Assumptions allow the strategist to posit tasks as completed.

Accepting as an assumption that the bomber will always get

through may lead to the development of lightly armed

bombers, de-emphasis of escort-capable fighters, or the

elimination of defensive antiaircraft systems. Assumptions

blur the primary difference between theory and fact. Theory

must always be tested when confronting new conditions.

Turning a theoretical assertion into an unquestioned

assumption gives it the status of fact and exempts it from

proof.

Most importantly, the strategist’s planning synthesis must

rest on data obtained through a critical evaluation of

airpower’s capabilities and limitations. Whether critical

analysis results from internal organizational dynamics or from

defending one’s capabilities against external challenges,

airpower strategists must understand the true competencies

and weaknesses of their military instrument. Organizational

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theory predicts that self-evaluation will be a difficult task for

any organization. The USAF case demonstrates the possible

utility of external challenges to organizationally accepted

strategy as a means to mitigate the influence of offensive

ideology. Realistic training, testing, and evaluation of current

and developing capabilities, both offensive and defensive,

should provide the information necessary for rational strategy

development. This research has shown that strategy resting

on projected capabilities rather than on demonstrated

performance may be more susceptible to entrapment by an

offensive ideology.

Further investigation in several areas may help clarify the

influence of offensive ideology on airpower strategy. In

addition to the RAF case study presented here, the interwar

period offers several other instructive cases.269 France tied its

airpower directly to army support by decentralizing control of

its offensive air forces to ground commanders and

emphasizing short-range missions.270 German offensive

airpower doctrine simultaneously recognized the promise of

strategic bombing and linked airpower to the support of

ground forces.271 The USAF, like the RAF, emphasized

strategic bombing and developed its industrial web theory at

the Air Corps Tactical School to guide targeting. 272 Soviet

offensive airpower doctrine during the interwar period

alternated between strategic bombing, with the fielding of a

large force of four-engined bombers in the early 1930s, and

ground support.273 These four cases are interesting because,

with access to roughly similar technology and exposure to

similar bodies of airpower theory, each service implemented

an offensive strategy with different characteristics. After World

War II, the IAF’s offensive successes of 1967 and 1982 provide

an intriguing counterpoint to the 1973 case presented here.

Finally, offensive ideology may have had some influence on

USAF strategy in the Vietnam War. Further research can help

clarify the effects of offensive ideology on airpower strategy

and discover additional methods airpower strategists can use

to identify and avoid the trap of the cult of the offensive.

The most important and cautionary lesson to glean from

this study is that it is possible for an airpower organization to

become ensnared by a cult of the offensive. Once caught, the

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factors that make offensive doctrines naturally attractive for

military organizations will persist, and this persistence will

cause a spiraling preference for more offense, which

increasingly tightens the noose. If the efficacy of offense

becomes incontestable, the questions critical to the

development of an effective offensive strategy may never be

asked. The ultimate result can be a strategy completely

inappropriate for the conflict at hand. Recognizing the

potential trap provides one useful method of avoiding it.

Recognized or not, detailed planning and critical evaluation

will assist in the development of a strategy, whether defensive

or offensive, devoid of cultic faith. While the cult of the

offensive is not the only possible cause for poor doctrine, just

as it was not the only cause of doctrinal failure in the RAF or

IAF cases, it is one that can be avoided.

The caution that airpower doctrine is susceptible to a cult

of the offensive holds particular relevance for the US Air

Force today. The accomplishments of offensive airpower in

Operation Desert Storm have raised the expectations of

success for future US air operations. The continuing

acquisition of stealth platforms and precision munitions will

lead to an arsenal of weapons increasingly well-suited for

offensive action. When combined with the belief that any

enemy is a fragile system, susceptible to manipulation by the

delivery of a small number of well-placed munitions, 274 the

trap of offensive ideology is set. USAF strategists should be

able to avoid the trap by conducting detailed operations

planning and by critically evaluating capabilities and

limitations. Neither of these recommended actions will

necessarily drive planners to adopt a defensive strategy. These

measures should, however, help to prevent the adoption of a

faulty offensive strategy based on a cultic belief in the power

of the offense. No claim can be made, based on the studies

presented here, that defense is, or has been, more powerful

than offense for airpower, only that a flawed pursuit of offense

can lead to unexpected operational and potentially strategic

failure.

The recognition that airpower doctrine can be trapped by a

cult of the offensive may also inform policy. If trapped by the

cult, planners are likely to overlook defensive uses for

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airpower and ignore technological developments that enhance

the power of the defense. Because organizational imperatives

tend to reinforce offensive preference, any serious challenge to

the neglect of the defense may have to come from outside of

the organization, either directly or indirectly as support for the

heretics within the organization who recognize the need for

reform. Again, the knowledge that offensive ideology can

entrap airpower doctrine provides a means to avoid the snare.

For example, USAF planners should bear in mind that the

same characteristics often cited as offensive enhancements for

the F-22, namely speed, stealth, range, and targeting capability,

may greatly enhance its capability to perform defensive

missions as well.

For fundamentally sound reasons, offensive doctrine has

always held great appeal for military organizations and will

continue to do so. Pursuit of inappropriately offensive doctrine,

however, can spell disaster for any airpower organization.

Cults of the offensive have perniciously trapped airpower

doctrine and strategy in the past, increasing the human costs

of conflict for the offensive air forces dependent upon them.

The cult of the offensive, deriving from a blind belief that

offense will prevail, helps to explain the roots of some past

doctrinal failures of airpower organizations. Detailed planning

and critical evaluation of capabilities may allow an

organization to escape the trap of offensive ideology, and

ensure that the organization’s strategy and doctrine remain

appropriate to the most critical conflict, the one not yet

fought.

Notes

1. Jack Snyder, “Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive,

1914 and 1984,” International Security 9, no. 1 (Summer 1984); and

Stephen Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First

World War,” International Security 9, no. 1 (Summer 1984).

2. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and

Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 357–77; and

Antoine Henri Jomini, The Art of War, trans. G. H. Mendell and W. P.

Craighill (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971), 72–74, 182–88.

3. Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari (1942;

new imprint, Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1983), 10, 19.

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4. Air Force Manual (AFM) 1-2, United States Air Force Basic Doctrine, 1

April 1953, 7-8; Air Force Doctrine Document (AFDD) 1, Air Force Basic

Doctrine, September 1997, 14.

5. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), chap. 3.

6. Williamson Murray, Strategy for Defeat: The Luftwaffe 1933–1945

(Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, January 1983), 39–56.

7. Sean M. Lynn-Jones, “Offense-Defense Theory and Its Critics,”

Security Studies 4, no. 4 (Summer 1995): 660–91; Chaim Kaufmann and

Charles L. Glaser, “Establishing the Foundations of Offense-Defense

Theory” (paper presented at the NATO Symposium on Military Stability,

Brussels, 12–14 June 1995); Robert Jervis, “Cooperation under the Security

Dilemma,” World Politics 30, no. 2 (January 1978): 167–214; George H.

Quester, Offense and Defense in the International System (New York: Wiley,

1977); and Jonathan Shimshoni, “Technology, Military Advantage, and

World War I: A Case for Military Entrepreneurship,” International Security

15, no. 3 (Winter 1990/91): 187–212.

8. John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell

University Press, 1983), 29; Lynn-Jones, 665; Kaufmann and Glaser, 10;

Stephen Van Evera, “Causes of War, Volume 1: The Structure of Power and

the Roots of War” (PhD diss., University of California, 1984), 58.

9. Lynn-Jones, 665–66; and Kaufmann and Glaser, 21.

10. Lynn-Jones, 666; and Kaufmann and Glaser, 20–32.

11. Ted Hopf, “Polarity, the Offense-Defense Balance, and War,”

American Political Science Review 85, no. 2 (June 1991): 476.

12. Robert L. Shaw, Fighter Combat: Tactics and Maneuvering

(Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1985).

13. Karl Mueller, “Strategic Airpower and Nuclear Strategy: New Theory

for a Not-Quite-So-New Apocalypse,” in The Paths of Heaven: The Evolution

of Strategic Airpower Theory, ed. Phillip S. Meilinger (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air

University Press, 1997), 279–320; Jervis, “Cooperation under the Security

Dilemma,” 167–214; Charles L. Glaser, “Nuclear Policy without an

Adversary: U.S. Planning for the Post-Soviet Era,” International Security 16,

no. 4 (Spring 1992): 34–78; and Glenn Herald Snyder, Deterrence and

Defense: Toward a Theory of National Security (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton

University Press, 1961), chap. 1.

14. Joint Publication (Joint Pub) 1-02, Department of Defense Dictionary

of Military and Associated Terms, 23 March 1994, 22; and AFM 1-1, Basic

Aerospace Doctrine of the United States Air Force, vol. 2, March 1992, 273.

15. Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey:

Summary Report (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1993), 57.

16. Clausewitz, 359.

17. Douhet, 10, 19.

18. AFM 1-2, 7-8; and AFDD 1, 14.

19. Col Phillip S. Meilinger, 10 Propositions Regarding Air Power

(Washington, D.C.: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1995), 14.

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20. Ibid., 16; Douhet, 9.

21. Clausewitz, 358.

22. Ibid.

23. Dennis M. Drew and Donald M. Snow, Making Strategy: An

Introduction to National Security Processes and Problems (Maxwell AFB, Ala.:

Air University Press, 1988), 163–74.

24. Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile

Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1971), 2–6.

25. Ibid., 32–35.

26. Ibid., 30.

27. Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically: The

Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life (New York: W. W.

Norton and Co., 1991), chap. 2.

28. Allison, 6.

29. Ibid., 78–96.

30. Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making

and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 211.

31. Ibid., 18–24.

32. Ibid., 209.

33. Ibid., 25.

34. Some examples not covered elsewhere in this study include the

Prussian Army of the late nineteenth century, the Luftwaffe of 1940, and US

forces after Operation Desert Storm.

35. Glenn Snyder, chap. 5; and Gunther E. Rothenberg, “Moltke,

Schlieffen, and the Doctrine of Strategic Envelopment,” in Makers of Modern

Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton,

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 317–25.

36. Richard Muller, The German Air War in Russia (Baltimore: Nautical

and Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1992), 92–101.

37. Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive, 33.

38. Ibid., 30.

39. Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and

Germany between the World Wars (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,

1984), 50.

40. Ibid., 47–50.

41. Ibid., 18.

42. Van Evera, “Causes of War,” 251–54.

43. Ibid., 267.

44. Uri Bialer, The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and

British Politics, 1932–1939 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1980), 151;

R. J. Overy, “Air Power and the Origins of Deterrence Theory before 1939,”

Journal of Strategic Studies 15, no. 1 (March 1992): 87–89, 93; and Katriel

Ben-Arie, “Czechoslovakia at the Time of ‘Munich’: The Military Situation,”

Journal of Contemporary History 25, no. 4 (October 1990): 439–41.

45. Van Evera, “Causes of War,” 291.

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46. Ibid., 545. Van Evera cites Hitler’s “kick in the door” strategy against

the Soviets, the US Central Intelligence Agency estimation of Castro’s forces

prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and Israeli assertions about

Nasser’s reaction to air strikes in 1970 as examples of “sharp rap” failures.

47. Ibid., 538.

48. Robert Allan Doughty, The Breaking Point: Sedan and the Fall of

France, 1940 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1990), 8–18; Mearsheimer,

70–98; and Posen, 20.

49. Jack Snyder, “Civil-Military Relations,” 108–10.

50. Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive,” 58.

51. Scott D. Sagan, “1914 Revisited: Allies, Offense, and Instability,”

International Security 11, no. 2 (Fall 1986): 154.

52. Ibid., 153.

53. Van Evera, “Causes of War,” 78–79. Van Evera proposes 10 direct

effects of offense-dominance: (1) Conquest becomes cheaper so even

status-quo powers attempt it; (2) Aggressive wars of self-defense occur

because of “cumulative” resource availability; (3) States grow more

aggressive, which promotes defensive aggression, which raises the total

level of aggression; (4) First strike advantage grows; (5) Windows grow

bigger and more numerous; (6) States use more dangerous diplomacy like

faits accomplis; (7) States negotiate less, and negotiation more likely to fail;

(8) Secrecy grows which raises the danger of miscalculation; (9) States

assume more offensive force postures; and (10) Arms races intensify.

54. Chester A. Crocker, “The Lessons of Somalia: Not Everything Went

Wrong,” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 3 (May/June 1995): 2–8.

55. David R. Mets, Land-Based Air Power in Third World Crises (Maxwell

AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 1986), 35–63.

56. Scot Robertson, The Development of RAF Strategic Bombing Doctrine,

1919–1939 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995), 126–27.

57. Ibid., 89.

58. Barry D. Powers, Strategy without Slide-rule: British Air Strategy,

1914–1939 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976), 91–92; and H.

Montgomery Hyde, British Air Policy between the Wars: 1918–1939 (London:

Heinemann, 1976), 392. Powers cites written passages where each of these

men voiced their agreement with the Smuts report prophecy that airpower

would replace the others. Hyde claims that no RAF officer ever said that air

action alone would win a major war.

59. Max Hastings, Bomber Command (New York: Dial Press, 1979), 44.

60. Ibid., 38.

61. Powers, 166–67.

62. Ibid., 178.

63. Ibid., 128–29.

64. Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart, Paris; Or, The Future of War (1925;

reprint, New York: Garland Publishing, 1972), 19–22, 53–56.

65. Powers, 120–23.

66. Ibid., 126.

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98
67. Williamson Murray, “British and German Air Doctrine between the

Wars,” Air University Review 31, no. 3 (March/April 1980): 41; and Neville

Jones, The Beginnings of Strategic Air Power: A History of the British Bomber

Force 1923–1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1987), 28–30.

68. Quoted in Powers, 188. Italics in original.

69. Powers, 154.

70. Ibid., 192–206.

71. Hastings, 54–57.

72. Ibid., 54–55.

73. Ibid.

74. Powers, 207.

75. Murray, “British and German Air Doctrine,” 49; and Posen, 225.

76. Hastings, 44–45.

77. Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive

against Germany: 1939–1945, vol. 1, Preparation, ed. Sir James Butler

(London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1961), 125.

78. Powers, 78–79.

79. Hastings, 47.

80. John Terraine, A Time for Courage: The Royal Air Force in the

European War, 1939–1945 (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 9–10.

81. Ibid., 11.

82. Robertson, 20–23.

83. Powers, 144–45, 57–62.

84. Terraine, 10–11; and Powers, 122–23.

85. Posen, 145.

86. Robertson, 43.

87. Powers, 103–4.

88. Ibid., 105.

89. Ibid., 159–60; and George K. Williams, “Statistics and Strategic

Bombardment: Operations and Records of the British Long-Range Bombing

Force during World War I and Their Implications for the Development of the

Post-War Royal Air Force, 1917–1923” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1987;

also published as Statistics and Strategic Bombing [Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air

University Press, 1999]). Williams gives a detailed evaluation of the actual

effectiveness of bombing efforts in World War I which concludes that the

RAF ignored its own data to make exaggerated claims of success.

90. Robertson, 5, 37–38.

91. Posen, 173; Murray, “British and German Air Doctrine,” 46;

Robertson, 46, 97, 159; Powers, 123, 130, 206; and Terraine, 11.

92. Powers, 170.

93. Ibid., 189.

94. Ibid., 129–31.

95. Ibid., 147; and Bialer. Bialer discusses the air disarmament

movement and its influence on British policy.

96. Bialer, 12–13.

97. Terraine, 49; and Hyde, 391.

CARTER

99
98. Murray, “British and German Air Doctrine,” 46.

99. Terraine, 13.

100. Hyde, 280.

101. Quoted in Hastings, 43. Also quoted in Terraine, 13, with the

difference that Terraine has the word prevent instead of protect. Also quoted

by Hyde, 284, who wrote a biography of Baldwin. Hyde’s agrees with

Hasting’s version except for the addition of the word also after well, and

deletion of in before offence. In a later speech in the House of Commons, 30

July 1934, Baldwin clarified his statement to say that he did not mean to

imply that no defense should be attempted, only that no defense would be

totally impenetrable. See “Armaments,” R.A.F. Quarterly 5, no. 4 (October

1934): 361–62.

102. Hyde, 285–86.

103. Quoted in Robertson, 46.

104. Robertson, 160; and David Divine, The Broken Wing (London:

Hutchinson and Co., 1966), 177–81.

105. Robertson, 81–85, 66–67.

106. Jones, 106–7.

107. Robertson, 87–88; and Terraine, 88–89.

108. Robertson, 33–34.

109. Ibid., 87–88; and Terraine, 89–90.

110. Robertson, 85–86; Terraine, 88; and Divine, 190–91.

111. T. L. Leigh-Mallory, “Co-operation between the Army and Royal Air

Force during 1929,” R.A.F. Quarterly 1, no. 1 (January 1930): xliii.

112. Ibid., 37–44; B. H. Liddell Hart, “The Future of Armament—And Its

Future Use,” R.A.F. Quarterly 1, no. 4 (October 1930): 680–93; T. L.

Leigh-Mallory, “The Maintenance of Air Superiority in a Land Campaign,”

R.A.F. Quarterly 2, no. 2 (April 1931): 245–52; and R. L. Stevenson, “The

Co-operation of Aircraft with a Mechanized Army,” R.A.F. Quarterly 3, no. 2

(April 1932): 192–200.

113. J. A. Chamier, “The Heavy Fighting Aeroplane,” R.A.F. Quarterly 2,

no. 3 (July 1931): 422–25, identified the need for escorts for bombers and

fighters for defense; P. F. Fellowes, “The Heavy Fighting Aeroplane,” R.A.F.

Quarterly 3, no. 3 (July 1932): 329–36, claimed single-seat fighters were

needed; “Day-Fighting in Home Defence,” R.A.F. Quarterly 5, no. 1 (January

1934): 1–9, claimed the single-seat fighter could defend against bombers; E.

L. Howard-Williams, “The Principles of War and the R.A.F.: Maintenance of

the Aim,” R.A.F. Quarterly 5, no. 4 (October 1934): 373–79, said offense may

be best but, in reality, defense would be forced upon the air force; “Air

Power and Security,” R.A.F. Quarterly 6, no. 3 (July 1935): 251–56, a review

which characterized as “fallacial doctrine” a book’s claim that offense would

always prevail over defensive fighters; “The Principles of War and the R.A.F.:

The Offensive,” R.A.F. Quarterly 6, no. 4 (October 1935): 345–432,

considered the relationship between offense and defense, concluding each

could be appropriate depending on the situation; A. H. MacDonald,

“Bomber Formations in the Next War,” R.A.F. Quarterly 7, no. 1 (January

CADRE PAPER

100
1936): 1–15, advocated flying bigger bomber formations, up to 25 aircraft,

which included bomber-type aircraft without bombs to defend the

formation; and “Views on Air Defence,” R.A.F. Quarterly 8, no. 2 (April

1937): 101–17, stated that strategic offense was no defense.

114. F. M. V. May, “The Navigation Problems of an Air Striking Force,”

R.A.F. Quarterly 7, no. 3 (July 1936): 313–22. May discusses techniques for

dead reckoning and the use of beacons for offset navigation.

115. “Helping the Pilot,” R.A.F. Quarterly 8, no. 3 (July 1937): 265–69.

116. “Aircraft Armament,” R.A.F. Quarterly 5, no. 1 (January 1934): 51–54.

117. E. L. Howard-Williams, “The Aircraft Industry and the R.A.F,”

R.A.F. Quarterly 8, no. 1 (January 1937): 14–24.

118. A. G. R. Garrod, “Air Strategy,” R.A.F. Quarterly 1, no. 1 (January

1930): 28–36; and “Some Lessons of the Air Exercises, 1930,” R.A.F.

Quarterly 2, no. 1 (January 1931): 59–69.

119. E. L. Howard-Williams, “Air Defence of Great Britain,” R.A.F.

Quarterly 6, no. 2 (April 1935): 121–28; “Fighter versus Bomber,” R.A.F.

Quarterly 8, no. 4 (October 1937): 329–50; and “Ramming Attack against

Bombers,” R.A.F. Quarterly 8, no. 2 (April 1937): 141–46.

120. Garrod; J. F. C. Fuller, “The Supremacy of Air Power,” R.A.F.

Quarterly 1, no. 2 (April 1930): 240–46; “Some Lessons of the Air Exercises,

1930”; D. Colyer, “A Criticism of ‘War in the Air’,” R.A.F. Quarterly 2, no. 4

(October 1931): 590–96; W. S. Douglas, “The Heavy Fighting Aeroplane: A

Reply,” R.A.F. Quarterly 2, no. 4 (October 1931): 597–600; E. J.

Kinsgston-McCloughry, “The Rôle of Aircraft in War,” R.A.F. Quarterly 3, no.

3 (July 1932): 297–303; “The Defensive Powers of Bomber Aircraft,” R.A.F.

Quarterly 4, no. 4 (October 1933): 400–406; and “A Plea for the ‘Long-Range

Bomber,’” R.A.F. Quarterly 5, no. 1 (January 1934): 47–50.

121. Giulio Douhet, “Air Warfare—The Principles of Air Warfare,” R.A.F.

Quarterly 7, no. 2 (April 1936): 152–63; “General Giulio Douhet—An Italian

Apostle of Air Power,” R.A.F. Quarterly 7, no. 2 (April 1936): 148–51; and

“The Air Doctrine of General Douhet,” R.A.F. Quarterly 4, no. 2 (April 1933):

164–67.

122. N. N. Golovine, “Air Strategy,” R.A.F. Quarterly 7, no. 2 (April 1936):

169–213; N. N. Golovine, “Air Strategy (Continued),” R.A.F. Quarterly 7, no.

3 (July 1936): 261–99.

123. H. P. Lloyd, “The Italo-Abyssinian War, 1935–36,” R.A.F. Quarterly

8, no. 4 (October 1937): 357–67.

124. “Quarterly Air Notes,” R.A.F. Quarterly 8, no. 3 (July 1937): 322. A

regularly appearing section, “Quarterly Air Notes,” briefly mentioned the fall

of Malaga, but focused primarily on two accidental bombing incidents

involving British warships which occurred in February 1937. The column

included a local resident’s reports of aircraft sightings and Soviet bombing

accuracy.

125. James S. Corum, “The Luftwaffe and the Coalition Air War in

Spain, 1936–1939,” in Airpower: Theory and Practice, ed. John Gooch

(London: Frank Cass, 1995), 70–72.

CARTER

101
126. C. Rougeron, “Air Notes: Summary of ‘Les Enseignements Aériene

de la Guerre d’Espagna,’” R.A.F. Quarterly 10, no. 4 (October 1939): 401–16.

127. Webster and Frankland, 107–8.

128. Robertson, 158.

129. Jones, 33–34.

130. Robertson, 120–25.

131. Terraine, 88–89; and Jones, 46.

132. Robertson, 97–108.

133. Webster and Frankland, 94–98; Robertson, 162; and Terraine, 77–81.

134. Jones, 29.

135. Terraine, 77; Hyde, 409–11; and Webster and Frankland, 78–79.

136. Murray, “British and German Air Doctrine,” 48.

137. Brian Bond, British Military Policy between the Two World Wars

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 197–98.

138. Murray, “British and German Air Doctrine,” 49; Powers, 166;

Webster and Frankland, 63, 67, 74–75; and Posen, 168.

139. Robertson, 146.

140. Hastings, 45–46.

141. Lon Nordeen, Fighters over Israel: The Story of the Israeli Air Force

from the War of Independence to the Bekaa Valley (New York: Orion Books,

1990), 71.

142. Edward N. Luttwak and Daniel Horowitz, The Anatomy of the Israeli

Army (London: Allen Lane, 1975), 374. The IAF lost 46 aircraft in the

Six-Day War, see Luttwak and Horowitz, 299.

143. Yoav Ben-Horin and Barry Posen, Israel’s Strategic Doctrine, RAND

Report R-2845-NA (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, September 1981), vii.

144. Ibid., 44.

145. Luttwak and Horowitz, 121.

146. Nordeen, 85.

147. Richard K. Betts, Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning

(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1982), 10–11.

148. Chaim Herzog, The War of Atonement, October 1973 (Boston: Little,

Brown and Co., 1975), 52–53; and Luttwak and Horowitz, 343.

149. Eliezer Cohen, Israel’s Best Defense: The First Full Story of the Israeli

Air Force, trans. Jonathan Cordis (New York: Orion Books, 1993), 324.

150. Ibid., 387.

151. Ibid., 352–54; Chaim Herzog, The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and Peace

in the Middle East (New York: Random House, 1982), 310; Herbert J.

Coleman, “Israeli Air Force Decisive in War,” Aviation Week and Space

Technology 99, no. 23 (3 December 1973): 18; and Robert Frank Futrell,

Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine, vol. 2, Basic Thinking in the United States Air

Force, 1961–1984 (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 1989), 486–87.

152. Cohen, 387.

153. Nordeen, 123.

154. Trevor N. Dupuy, Elusive Victory: The Arab-Israeli Wars, 1947–1974

(New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 421.

CADRE PAPER

102
155. Nordeen, 125; and Cohen, 350.

156. Cohen, 386.

157. Michael I. Handel, Israel’s Political-Military Doctrine (Cambridge,

Mass.: Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, July 1973), 29;

Amnon Gurion, “Israeli Military Strategy up to the Yom Kippur War,” Air

University Review 33, no. 6 (September–October 1982), 54.

158. Handel, 59.

159. Ben-Horin and Posen, 34–35.

160. Cohen, 271, 285.

161. Avi Shlaim and Raymond Tanter, “Decision, Process, Choice, and

Consequences: Israel’s Deep Penetration Bombing in Egypt, 1970,” World

Politics 30, no. 4 (July 1978): 483–87.

162. Ibid., 502.

163. Ibid., 509.

164. Cohen, 278.

165. Luttwak and Horowitz, 341–42.

166. Shlaim and Tanter, 485–87.

167. Luttwak and Horowitz, 302; and Dupuy, 366.

168. Luttwak and Horowitz, 323–24.

169. Shlaim and Tanter, 508; and Dupuy, 366.

170. Cohen, 314.

171. Ibid.

172. Ibid., 351.

173. Luttwak and Horowitz, 350; and Dupuy, 551.

174. Cohen, 316–20.

175. Herzog, War of Atonement, 43.

176. Cohen, 389; Ben-Horin and Posen, 45; and Herzog, War of

Atonement, 279.

177. Luttwak and Horowitz, 351.

178. Ibid.

179. Dupuy, 472.

180. Cohen, 388.

181. Ibid., 390.

182. Dupuy, 421; and Cohen, 354.

183. Luttwak and Horowitz, 197; and Cohen, 195.

184. Cohen, 398.

185. Ibid., 388.

186. Luttwak and Horowitz, 358.

187. Ibid., 362.

188. Cohen, 466–72.

189. Ibid., 387.

190. J. C. Hopkins and Sheldon A. Goldberg, The Development of

Strategic Air Command 1946–1986 (Offutt AFB, Nebr.: Office of the

Historian, Headquarters Strategic Air Command, 1986), 130.

191. Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine, vol. 2, 235.

192. Hopkins and Goldberg, 131.

CARTER

103
193. David MacIsaac, “The Evolution of Air Power since 1945: The

American Experience,” in War in the Third Dimension: Essays in

Contemporary Air Power, ed. R. A. Mason (London: Brassey’s Defence

Publishers, 1986), 16–17; and Robert Frank Futrell, Ideas, Concepts,

Doctrine, vol. 1, Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force, 1907–1960

(Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 1989), 428–30.

194. Aaron L. Friedberg, “A History of the U.S. Strategic

‘Doctrine’—1945 to 1980,” Journal of Strategic Studies 3, no. 3 (December

1980): 44–47.

195. Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1983), 259–71.

196. Friedberg, 48–49.

197. Kaplan, 315–18.

198. Statement of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara before

subcommittee number 2 of the House Armed Services Committee on the

Fiscal Year 1967–1971 Strategic Bomber Program 25 January 1966,

released by House Armed Services Committee.

199. Henry S. Rowen, “The Evolution of Strategic Nuclear Doctrine,” in

Strategic Thought in the Nuclear Age, ed. Laurence Martin (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1979), 146; Friedberg, 53; and Kaplan, 319.

200. Friedberg, 41.

201. Kaplan, 211.

202. Rowen, 141.

203. Kaplan, 212.

204. Ibid., 216–27.

205. Ibid., 233–37.

206. Nathan F. Twining, Neither Liberty nor Safety: A Hard Look at U.S.

Military Policy and Strategy (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966),

95–101, 112; Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine, vol. 1, 623–24; and Thomas

S. Power, Design For Survival (New York: Coward-McCann, 1964), 119–20.

207. Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine, vol. 1, 435.

208. Ibid., 436.

209. Ibid., 608–9.

210. Ibid., 609–10.

211. Ibid., 437.

212. Hopkins and Goldberg, 126.

213. Power, 168–70; Kaplan, 254–55; Twining, 299–309.

214. Power, 170.

215. Kaplan, 321–24.

216. Power, 168–69; and Hopkins and Goldberg, 91.

217. Hopkins and Goldberg, 85; and Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine,

vol. 1, 518–20.

218. Kaplan, 110, 117–19.

219. Ibid., 108.

220. Ibid., 121.

221. Ibid., 132–34.

CADRE PAPER

104
222. Hopkins and Goldberg, 65.

223. Ibid., 98.

224. Ibid., 101.

225. Kaplan, 167.

226. Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine, vol. 1, 530–36.

227. Ibid., 537.

228. Ibid., 539–40; Power, 196; Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine, vol.

2, 229; and Kaplan, 345–46.

229. Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine, vol. 2, 115–17.

230. Ibid., 430–33.

231. Kaplan, 269.

232. Power, 187–91.

233. Kaplan, 267.

234. Power, 192–95.

235. Ibid., 195.

236. Rowen, 150.

237. Power, 191; and Kaplan, 269.

238. Kaplan, 269.

239. Ibid., 276–77.

240. Ibid., 268.

241. Ibid., 260–62.

242. Ibid., 262, 272–73.

243. Kaplan, 299–310. Among President Kennedy’s aides, Ted Sorensen,

Paul Nitze, and Dean Acheson all rejected the consideration of a

counterforce first strike, no matter how plausible it looked on paper, during

the fall of 1961.

244. Friedberg, 39.

245. Power, 119–20.

246. Kaplan, 218, 238.

247. Ibid., 283–84.

248. Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine, vol. 2, 40.

249. Kaplan, 365.

250. Friedberg, 49–52.

251. Kaplan, 315–18, 325.

252. Ibid., 319.

253. Twining, 112; and Robert Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear

Strategy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 96–103. The view

that nuclear war could be treated like conventional war was severely

criticized subsequently by deterrence theorists.

254. Kaplan, 45.

255. AFM 1-2, 7-8.

256. Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine, vol. 1, 512.

257. Ibid., 534.

258. Kaplan, 167.

259. Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine, vol. 1, 539.

260. Power, 39.

CARTER

105
261. Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine, vol. 2, 96.

262. Twining, 142; and Power, 147–49.

263. Power, 144–46.

264. MacIsaac, 18–19.

265. Power, 183.

266. Kaplan, 203–10; and Friedberg, 48–49. Kaplan traces the origins of

the “no-cities,” or nuclear war-fighting, strategy to RAND in the early 1950s,

but the USAF had long planned to attack counterforce targets. The RAND

strategy definitely influenced USAF counterforce thought, if it did not

originate there, because McNamara employed many RAND analysts in his

organization.

267. Kaplan, 236–44.

268. Harvey M. Sapolsky, The Polaris System Development: Bureaucratic

and Programmatic Success in Government (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1972), 38–40.

269. Leonard Baker and B. F. Cooling, “Developments and Lessons

before World War II,” in Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority,

ed. Benjamin Franklin Cooling (Washington, D.C.: Center for Air Force

History, 1994), 1–64. Baker and Cooling provide an overview of the interwar

airpower doctrine pursued by each of the World War II major powers which

includes a bibliographical essay.

270. Charles Christienne and Pierre Lissarrague, A History of French

Military Aviation (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986),

311; and A. D. Harvey, “The French Armée de l’Air in May–June 1940: A

Failure of Conception,” Journal of Contemporary History 25, no. 4 (October

1990): 456.

271. Murray, Strategy for Defeat, 19–20.

272. Robert T. Finney, History of the Air Corps Tactical School,

1920–1940 (1955; reprint, Washington, D.C.: Center for Air Force History,

1992), 62–75.

273. Cynthia A. Roberts, “Planning for War: The Red Army and the

Catastrophe of 1941,” Europe-Asia Studies 47, no. 8 (1995): 1293–1321.

Roberts’s analysis highlights some apparently cultic aspects of Soviet

doctrine.

274. John A. Warden III, “The Enemy as a System,” Airpower Journal 9,

no. 1 (Spring 1995): 40–55.

CADRE PAPER

106
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Airpower and the Cult

of the Offensive

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