Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority - Air Force ...

KOREA
have fallen apart. The regularity of that coordination was no accident. It
was built on World War I1 experience and maintained through close contact
between Fifth Air Force and FEAF commanders and through the many
visits of General Vandenberg, USAF Chief of Staff. The USAF’s combat
experience, gained in a number of theaters in World War I1 by officers and
enlisted men at all levels of command, was an asset that the fledgling
Chinese Communist Air Force could not overcome-even with extensive
Russian aid and some direct Russian support.
Korea showed that war experience was as important as war materiel.
The U.S. Army, Air Force, and Navy were short of the latter in 1950, but
the three services made up for materiel deficiencies with officers and enlisted
personnel skilled in wartime operations. Fortunately for U.N. air
units, the large MiG fleet of the People’s Republic of China chose to wage
an air war in which the experience of U.N. air personnel made the difference
between defeat and victory. That experience, coupled with a gradually
mobilized U.S. war economy (which eventually produced improved aircraft
and tactical nuclear weapons), was decisive. FEAF and Fifth Air
Force commanders, for example, relied on lessons drawn from World War
I1 experience as they dealt with each other and with their Army and Navy
counterparts. As the official Air Force history of the war noted, the close
cooperation between FEAF and Naval Forces, Far East, which had developed
by the end of the war stemmed “from the fortunate personalities of
the commanders concerned rather than from more stable dictates of command
authority and organization.”“h
Indeed, the lesson of the air superiority campaign waged in Korea was
that, in a ‘‘limited’’ war, USAF units would be engaged in a war of attrition-a
war which they could contain and even win so long as their enemy
fought on terms favorable to the USAE Were the terms of combat to
change (as they did in Southeast Asia), or were the political restraints on
USAF action to grow more severe (again, as happened over North Vietnam
in the 1960s), then the battle might turn in favor of the enemy. But Korea
did not trigger a major reevaluation of USAF air superiority doctrine, primarily
for two reasons. First, the war was perceived as unusual, as the
consequence of diplomatic and political miscalculation. The USAF came
out of the Korean conflict determined to avoid such a struggle in the future.
Second, the combined campaigns of air superiority and air interdiction
appeared to have succeeded, so the notion of restructuring the light attack
and fighter elements of the USAF to meet new strategic and tactical
requirements on the basis of war experience was not considered. There
were significant postwar changes in USAF tactical air weapons and doctrine,
but they were driven mainly by the introduction of tactical nuclear
weapons, not by an assessment of combat in Korea. In a sense, the success
of USAF F-86s and B-29s against the air and antiair forces of the People’s
Republic of China obscured the vulnerability of U.S. forces to well armed
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