Clearly winning a war with Air Power alone, or as the dominant means of delivering decisive effect, is no longer an ambition of the UK (or at least not as expressed under the SDSR).
It's as though Granby and Kosovo never happened.
(Keegan said of Kosovo that it marked a real turning point in the history of warfare. It "proved that a war can be won by air power alone." Diplomacy was tried before the war and didn't work, and Slobodan Milošević caved in weeks before the deployment of the large ground force.)
A charismatic senior RAF officer pointed out that "A lot of people forget how we ended up getting into Afghanistan, and it was through overwhelming firepower from the air." He explained succinctly and persuasively that we wouldn't have the foothold that we have today if that hadn't worked so spectacularly well. That Air Power was what ripped apart the Taliban regime to the point that we could walk in and begin the campaign as it is now. He said that this had been rather conveniently forgotten today, in the mantra of 'boots on the ground'.
He also pointed out that even today the very heavily specialised employment of air power is still playing a very important part in the campaign, and that Air Power is our key advantage. He suggested that the Taliban fight the way they do because we have air superiority, and that the Taliban's reliance on IEDs is largely due to the success of air power, because that’s the only tactic they’ve got left. If we did not hold them at threat from the air 24 hours per day, they would operate differently,
I would have thought that this was all pretty self-evident. But perhaps a soldier ignores or overlooks the mere 'enablers'?
Perhaps it's unsurprising that General Richards should have viewed the analysis in the National Security Strategy as "excellent", and as being an "impressive piece of work."
It's perhaps understandable that the more single-service focused soldier would believe that this 'boot-and-bayonet centric' Strategy should be "given more prominence", and that it represents a "balanced strategy to deal with a wide range of diverse threats."
Last edited by Jackonicko; 18th Jan 2011 at 20:26.