The first priority, the best way to defeat an adversary, Sun Tzu tells us, is to defeat an adversary's strategy. Air campaigners do not appear to be strategists. This view fails to recognize the vital and strategic contribution played by targeting an adversary's fielded forces. The last ring holds the fielded military forces of the state. Although we tend to think of military forces as being the most vital in war, in fact they are means to an end.
Military forces are a means to an end.
It is pointless to deal with enemy military forces if they can be bypassed, by strategy or technology, either in the defense or offense. Warden's Five Rings. Warden's inside-out strategy implies that strategic attacks directed at the center rings will have cascading and devastating effects on the outer rings and preclude the necessity of ever having to attack the outer ring of fielded forces. In fact, Colonel Warden was so sure that his strategic attack plan would succeed against Iraq that the Instant Thunder plan did not include any attacks on the Iraqi Army, including Saddam's elite Republican Guard divisions. These ground forces absorbed the preponderance of the attack sorties of the war and an even larger proportion of the bomb tonnage.