S41,
Yes indeed. The claim that Kosovo was won by air power alone may be a tad ambitious, and of course, ground forces were vital in Granby/Storm. But it is fair to say that air power was the dominant means of delivering decisive effect in both campaigns, and I would suggest that the quoted claims for the import of air in Afghanistan are not unduly exaggerated or over-optimistic.
I guess my starting point is that in a world that is admitted and acknowledged to be unpredictable, dangerous and ever-changing, I can't really grasp the wisdom of taking the most recent real world examples of when we have needed military force (within or just outside the last decade) and then deciding that we need just a little less than that today.
How is that alright? What has changed to warrant such a scaling back? How can we be sure that we won't need to do something similar (or even bigger) again? When did we last predict a threat developing far enough ahead to re-equip to meet it? Not in Iraq, not in the Balkans, not with Al Qaeda. Not in Sierra Leone, not even in the Falklands.
It would therefore not be unreasonable to assume that the next contingency might actually require just a little more effort, rather than a little less.
It's not as though either Telic or Deliberate Force were 'once in a generation' large scale wars that were somehow the 'war to end all wars.' These are operations of a scale that we might easily have to undertake again.
I may be being stupid or obtuse, but to look at these ops and then conclude:
"We need to be able to do today two-thirds of what we did yesterday".
Just seems to be insane, or at least recklessly irresponsible, to me.
Now clearly, we're never going to go back to the force structure that allowed us to mount a 'Granby' sized op, and no-one is seriously suggesting that we should go back to 30 Fast Jet Squadrons.
But 18 really doesn't seem excessive. 12 seemed like too few, and 6-8 feels like the 1920s all over again.
And the Army and Navy have not trimmed down by anything like the same amount, so it looks as though we no longer have 'balanced' forces.
Clockwork Mouse,
Intelligence, commonsense and wisdom are always welcome - especially when a journo is trying to get his head around an issue that he feels passionate about. S41's contribution is therefore most welcome. As would yours be should you choose to deploy or display any of those three attributes on this thread.
