A defense strategy for the future

Published 5:51 pm Saturday, November 12, 2011

By Gen. John Michael Loh, USAF, Ret.

On his way out, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates was first to offer the most profound lesson of America’s decade at war: “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.”

When it comes to deploying troops, we’ve grown more careful. But there’s a corollary to Gates’s lesson: When we must engage in Asia, the Middle East or elsewhere, lead and follow through with airpower, not with ground invasion, occupation or nation-building adventure.

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Airpower enables us to achieve quick and decisive results without the significant casualties that invasions produce. We see this in recent successes like the air assault that drove Gaddafi from power and the drone campaign that has decimated al Qaeda across a battlefield ranging from Pakistan to northern Africa.

But Congress has proposed nearly a trillion dollars in defense cuts that will fall primarily on essential modernization programs for our fighters, bombers, helicopters, drone aircraft, surveillance aircraft and satellites. Cutting these capabilities would not be just imprudent, it would be unconscionable.

Consider Afghanistan. The initial strategy relied on overwhelming airpower to attack the terror networks that carried out the World Trade Center attacks and drive them from any “safe haven.” That meant bombers, fighters, and precision missiles attacking Al Qaeda leadership and training sites, and space and air surveillance providing the intelligence for targeting.

However, the strategy soon changed from countering the terrorists to countering any and all insurgent groups, and spread on to Iraq. We soon found ourselves trying to build stable governments and win over wary populations – in short, nation-building. We lost sight of the major objective: attacking the terrorist leaders and their networks of support. And, we have paid dearly for it in lives, permanent injuries and more than one trillion dollars spent in each country.

The contrast with the recent airpower-based campaigns in Libya, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia could not be starker.

In Libya, NATO airpower, led by the U.S., stopped Qadhafi’s forces and allowed the rebels to dominate the ground action. No American lives lost or maimed, no IEDs, no atrocities against Americans, all at one-thousandth of the cost. Most important, we are not bogged down in another 10-year occupation and war.

In Pakistan, we are using space and air surveillance to find terrorist leaders and precision strikes to eliminate them. We found Bin Laden through intelligence and surveillance — not the door-to-door night raids of the Afghan occupation — and took him out with a small team supported by a fleet of drones, stealth choppers, jamming aircraft, and surveillance assets. We didn’t need to occupy Pakistan and to accomplish this surgical mission.

The same is true in Yemen, Somalia and other havens for terrorist regimes. We are using airpower to take on our enemies – and only our enemies. We are defending our national interests with no boots on the ground, no American casualties, and no trillion-dollar bills to pay.

Ironically, the budget cuts in Congress would make it even harder to get the strategy right in the future. Deep cuts to airpower, including the advanced research that keeps us two steps ahead of our enemies, would limit policymakers’ choices the next time a Libya starts to boil. That will make it harder to deter terrorists or other adversaries, and easier to slip into the type of mindless ground war that Secretary Gates deplored.

People assume the defense budget is bloated and can be cut without consequences, but they are wrong. Experts report defense spending is at record lows as a share of the budget (just 16 percent today, compared to 40 percent in the 1970s), and much of the money we are spending is being wasted in the nation-building sinkhole.

Modernization has been especially hard hit in recent cuts, with $300 billion in programs canceled under Secretary Gates and the services reporting that our airpower fleet is older and smaller and more depleted than it’s been in generations.

If Congress wants to save more dollars on defense, it should preserve the American airpower advantage that ensures our military dominance without 100,000-ground-troop invasions or trillion-dollar nation-building adventures.

General Loh is a former Air Force vice-chief of staff and former commander of Air Combat Command.