Monday, June 06, 2011

Why airpower has failed in Libya.


Thanks Joe for sending this article.

A must read from Politico....a tidbit but make sure you read the entire article...its a primer on how airpower alone will never win wars.
Absent a coup or lucky air strike that takes out Qadhafi, success requires what all other wars demanded: a competent, reasonably armed and well-led ground capacity. In the Libya case, this will require time, money, equipment and leadership with far more on-the-ground NATO assistance. For those who think otherwise, they would do well to recall the conclusion Johns Hopkins University strategist Eliot Cohen — the director of the U.S. government’s Persian Gulf War evaluation — made in Foreign Affairs in 1994: “Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength, in part because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment.”
In Libya, gratification will not suffice.