Airpower, according to Elliot Cohen, who directed the Gulf War Air Power Survey, “is an unusually seductive form of military strength, in part because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment.” Yet the idea that air power is a panacea or superior to land operations is mistaken.
Last month, in their essay at War on the Rocks, “Airpower May Not Win Wars, But It Sure Doesn’t Lose Them,” two senior Air Force pilots, Mike Pietrucha and Jeremy Renken, argued that the United States had departed from “the successful post-Vietnam template that relied on airpower to seek limited objectives.” Instead, they argued, the United States was mistakenly pursuing a “ground-centric approach” that “failed to achieve stated goals” in Afghanistan and Iraq.There is plenty to take issue with regarding their use of historical evidence. In their effort to explain the utility of airpower and condemn inter-service rivalry, Pietrucha and Renken engage in a rewriting of history, …