Some politicians are wedded to the notion that airpower alone can prove decisive on a battlefield.
It’s a tempting proposition to elected officials who have to face the voters, a former Marine and an analyst with the Stimson Center think tank said Thursday.
But Dan Grazier, the director of Stimson’s National Security Reform Program, said Washington policy makers need to reflect on what military aviation offers before spending billions of dollars on aircraft like the B-21 Raider stealth bomber.
“The idea that [politicians] can display their martial prowess without putting a whole bunch of American teenagers carrying rifles on the ground, that’s an appealing prospect. But in reality, what that does is lower the threshold for entering a war,” Mr. Grazier said. “If a president is confronted with an international crisis and has advisers whispering in his ear, ’Hey, Mr. President. We can solve that problem just by dropping a couple of bombs.’ Now all of a sudden, the threshold for entering that war has been dropped.”
Mr. Grazier was at the Stimson Center in Washington to talk about the future of American airpower. He argued that the current strategy exposes fundamental flaws in modern military thinking. He criticized the notion that a conflict with Iran could be “sharp and short” because of U.S. fifth-generation aircraft and precision bombing, without any soldiers on the ground.
“I do agree that air superiority is very important. But air superiority is important not as an end unto itself, but as part of a combined arms operation,” he said. “It is important that we have air superiority, but there are many ways to do that.”
Mr. Grazier said drones certainly have their use on the battlefield, especially for reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. But they’re not the silver bullet that everyone thinks they are, he said.
“Many times, when a new weapon shows up, it makes everybody really nervous. But then, everybody adapts, and they develop countermeasures,” he said. “Even simple things like nets and directed energy weapons have been able to disrupt drones.”
He’s particularly concerned about the financial cost for next-generation jets like the B-21 Raider, about $700 million apiece, and the F-47 stealth fighter, about $200 million each.
“I believe that the entire national security establishment needs to fundamentally reevaluate the military aviation needs of the country before we go down this current rabbit hole,” Mr. Grazier said. “Just because the United States has operated large fleets of bombers and fighters in the past doesn’t automatically mean that is what we should be doing moving forward.”
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