Square peg in a round hole: airpower against mobile targets and missiles

From the article:

Unsurprisingly, the broad public reaction is to read this as a massive failure: too few sorties, the wrong munitions, faulty intelligence, and the entire campaign costing $29 Billion (so far). The more uncomfortable conclusion is that air forces have been here before, and that the problem of finding and killing mobile launchers and missiles from the air may be less a tactical shortcoming than a structural feature. Two campaigns separated by 50 years—the Anglo-American CROSSBOW campaign against German V-weapons in 1943–1945 and the “Great Scud Chase” of Desert Storm in 1991—suggest that what is happening over Iran today is not a deviation from the norm but simply a repeat of it. As Colonel Mark Kipphut argued in his 1996 study comparing the two campaigns, the failure to internalize CROSSBOW’s lessons was itself one of the reasons those same failures were repeated in 1991; the present campaign against Iran suggests we might still not have learned them.

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The first lesson of CROSSBOW is that fixed infrastructure is easy to destroy and that adversaries do not stay fixed for long. British intelligence had received “reliable and relatively full information” on German long-range weapons as early as November 1939 two months into the war. It wasn’t till four years later, in 1943, that Allied photo-reconnaissance first identified the German “ski-sites” in northwestern France, named for the curious shape of one of the buildings on each launcher complex. Within weeks, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey would later report, ninety-six sites had been cataloged, and a sustained bombing offensive against them had begun. Of these ninety-six sites, no more than two were ever used operationally. On its face, this was a complete victory. Allied airpower had, by direct attack, denied the Luftwaffe permanent launching infrastructure before the V-1 campaign could begin.

The Germans drew the obvious conclusion. The Survey noted that during the period of the Allied counterattack, the Germans developed methods for launching V-1s and V-2s from small, inconspicuous sites that required minimal engineering work and freed firing operations from the elaborate sites originally planned. These were the “modified sites,” first photographed on April 26, 1944, which were well camouflaged, dependent largely on prefabricated buildings, of which more than sixty had been identified before the first V-1 was launched in England in mid-June. The “modified sites,” the Survey concluded plainly, were “heavily bombed without marked effect on the scale of effort.”

Kipphut, working from the same primary documents, formalizes the consequence as a two-phase division of the campaign. CROSSBOW I, running from April 1943 to early June 1944, was a qualified success: it delayed the start of V-weapon attacks by an estimated three to six months and so allowed OVERLORD to proceed before the full weight of Hitler’s missile arsenal could be brought to bear. Eisenhower himself wrote that had the Germans perfected the weapons six months earlier, the invasion of Europe would have been “exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible,” and that a sustained V-weapons attack on the Portsmouth-Southampton embarkation area could have caused OVERLORD to be written off entirely. CROSSBOW II, however, the campaign to suppress launches once they had begun, was in Kipphut’s assessment a “dismal failure”; despite thousands of sorties against more than 250 targets in the critical summer of 1944, the Germans averaged just over 80 launches per day, and German sources contend they never failed to launch on account of either Allied air attack or weapons shortages.

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Half a century later, in a campaign in which Coalition air forces enjoyed advantages of intelligence, precision, and surveillance technology that the Eighth Air Force could scarcely have imagined, the same problem reappeared in nearly identical form in what became known as “The Great Scud Chase.” The Iraqi air force had been swept from the sky within days. Yet from January 18, 1991, when Iraq launched its first ballistic missiles against Israel, until the close of the war, the suppression of Saddam Hussein’s mobile Scud launchers became, in the words of the Gulf War Air Power Survey, “undoubtedly the most frustrating and least satisfactory aspect of the air campaign.” The Survey’s statistical volume, taking stock after the fact, recorded a total of eighty-eight Iraqi Scud launches over the course of Desert Storm and concluded, in its summary line, that the launchers proved “particularly difficult to detect and were never fully suppressed.”

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The corroboration came in Kosovo eight years later. Press, writing while the dust was still settling, observed that the same problems that frustrated Coalition airpower in 1991 had hamstrung NATO efforts against Serbian ground forces in 1999. After eleven weeks and thousands of sorties, NATO had publicly claimed roughly a third of Serbian armor destroyed; postwar inspection by NATO’s own analysts found fewer than twenty Serbian tanks, a similar number of artillery pieces, and fewer than ten armored personnel carriers actually knocked out. Serb forces had used concealment and decoys that, from 10,000 feet, looked very much like the real thing. The technology had advanced considerably between 1991 and 1999; the gap between claimed and confirmed kills had not closed at all.

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What the present Iranian campaign appears to have demonstrated is not a new problem but the durability of a very old one. There is, on the available evidence, no reason to believe that another two months of bombing would produce a fundamentally different result. The CIA’s assessment that Iran can sustain the blockade for three to four months, combined with its findings on the surviving missile arsenal, points to the same conclusion that the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reached in January 1947, that Williamson Murray reached in 1993, that Mark Kipphut reached in 1996, and that Daryl Press reached in 2001: airpower can do many things to a missile force, but reliably destroying its mobile launchers from the air is not among them. The instruments have gotten better, but the targets have gotten better faster.