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

CONCLUSION
commander must avoid dissipating his forces on secondary or less important
objectives. At the same time, he must not “leave the back door open,”
as it were, by thinning down his covering forces so far as to expose his vital
areas to enemy initiatives.
A good illustration of the principle of security may be seen in the deployment
of the Luftwaffe during the German excursion into Czechoslovakia
prior to World War 11. By prompt neutralization of Czech air bases, the
Luftwaffe not only immobilized the Czech air force and thus gained freedom
of action for the Wehrmacht ground arms but at the same time made it
virtually impossible for the Soviets to send assistance to the Czechs by air,
the only way they could do so fast enough to avoid a fait accompli by the
Germans.
Conversely, the Norwegians, in failing to deny the use of their airfields
to the Germans, even if only temporarily with ill-trained and ill-equipped
reservists, lost their best opportunity for delaying the arrival in their ports
of the invader’s seaborne troop transports. Even a brief delay in landing
these vulnerable troop-laden ships would have given Great Britain’s Royal
Navy a better opportunity to catch them off shore without air cover. This
was a most costly and disastrous lesson in the importance of the principle
of security.
There are other dimensions to the principle of security beyond the
business of allocating sufficient aircraft to counter enemy initiatives in
areas apart from the main points of thrust. Security also involves decisions
on what resources to expend in providing revetments and blast shelters and
how far to disperse aircraft. Dispersal may minimize damage, but requires
extensive taxiways which make concealment difficult and target identification
easier.
Another aspect of security is the problem of air base defense. Here the
painful experience encountered at Iwo Jima should not be forgotten. After
the capture of the island, when the installation had become fully operational,
Japanese survivors had hidden in caves on Mount Suribachi, crept
out at night and attacked the base, killing forty-four and wounding twice
that number. Although subsequent operations in Vietnam may have
aroused somewhat more interest in air base defense, this has long been a
neglected aspect of the air superiority equation in air arm thinking. Surely
the perceptive commander will recognize from this that the quest for air
superiority cannot rest entirely on warmed over doctrines from World War
11; for want of adequate air base defense in Vietnam, the USAF lost more
aircraft to guerrilla attacks on the ground than it did to surface-to-air missiles
in the air.
While it is easy to visualize the idea of economy of force in terms of
the way a commander allocates his available aircraft to objectives of
varying importance or priority, the principle applies in other ways as
well and often in relation to the principle of the objective. For example,
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