Airpower Realities
The clarion call for more troops in Iraq inevitably appears with the fashionable lament that an excessive fascination with the unfulfilled promise of airpower is a primary cause of America’s problems there. Had it not gutted its ground forces to pay for the Air Force’s favorite technological toys, so the argument goes, hundreds of thousands of conventional ground forces would have been affordable and perhaps available for the pacification of Iraq. Set aside for a moment the inevitable domestic and international opposition that would accompany a conventional military expansion, and the argument is seductive, despite its complete lack of intellectual or empirical support. Within it are two points of contention: American military forces are woefully lacking in ground troops—the root cause of excessive American casualties in overseas operations—and the air zealot’s claim that airpower can do it all is to blame.
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