Robert O Cioppa

Airpower in Small Wars Back to the Future Robert O Cioppa

Publisher Marketing: Airpower has been used in warfare since the beginning of the 20th century. Initially only a reconnaissance or supply platform, it quickly became more involved in employing ordnance onto the enemy during the 80+ wars fought last century. 1 Airpower, in spite of its dominant role in today's military, had a fairly modest start in combat operations. Prior to World War I, the United States, Spain, and Italy had all employed airpower in small or colonial conflicts. Though the airplane was most often used in a reconnaissance role, the Spanish did experiment with dropping fragmentation bombs on enemy villages as early as 1913.2 Since then, airpower has been utilized in all corners of the globe with varied results in all sorts of contingencies ranging from police actions to full scale war. On the eve of World War I, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and the United States were all experimenting with using airpower to attack ground troops and targets.3 Once hostilities broke out in Europe, it took little time for the airplane to mature from a reconnaissance role to an attack role, with the first sanctioned attack on ground troops occurring during the Battle of the Somme in 1916.4 While these attacks may not have caused much physical damage, they significantly decreased morale amongst the attacked ground troops. At the close of hostilities, most of the warring nations embraced the notion of combined arms offensives, where air power augmented ground assaults by softening the opposition prior to an attack. The combined arms offensive so effective in WWI Europe was not, however, immediately embraced as a tactic in small wars. Lessons learned during airpower's early role in small wars is critical to today's missions as the Air Force fights the Global War on Terror, counter-insurgency operations in Iraq, and counter-drug missions in South America.