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

AIR SUPERIORITY
while the Germans have been criticized for attacking British bomber factories
during the Battle of Britain in 1940 rather than concentrating on
those facilities turning out fighters, surely the British were making an
even greater mistake. Although RAF doctrine accorded first priority to
air superiority, the British continued to produce obsolete bombers such as
the Whitley and the Battle, which could not hope to dent the German aircraft
industry, instead of devoting the productive resources to fabricating
fighter components.
Whatever the doctrinal manual may have proclaimed about the
priority of air superiority, RAF leaders were overwhelmingly bomberminded.
As Air Commodore L.E.O. Charlton put it, “air power is bombing
capacity and nothing else.”’ This bomber orientation of the RAF
was further reflected in the training program where Bomber Command
had substantially more students in the training program than did Fighter
Command. Certainly both fighters and bombers were necessary in the
drive for air superiority, but during the Battle of Britain greater numbers
of fighter pilots would have made more of a difference in the immediate
outcome.
The principle of the offensive, sometimes described simply as retaining
the initiative, is closely related to that other major principle, surprise. The
dividends accruing to those who apply this principle are often spectacular.
By a successful application of surprise in their opening assault on Russia in
June of 1941, the Germans all but eliminated Soviet air power and achieved
virtual air supremacy almost immediately. Had they then not lost sight of
the objective, failing as they did to finish the job by destroying the major
Russian aircraft factories before they could be transported to eastern sanctuaries
beyond the range of German bombers, the outcome of the war might
well have been far different. But there is no gainsaying the success of the
initial resort to surprise.
The leaders of the Israeli Air Force have repeatedly demonstrated a
high order of intellectual rigor in assessing the problems of national survival.
Their operational plans seem to conform consistently to the principles
of war. Heavily outnumbered as they are, it is little wonder they have
resorted to the principle of surprise to achieve air superiority. In 1956 and
again in 1967, they relied upon preemptive strikes to this end. But here a
word of caution to the prudent commander is in order. The Israelis paid a
price for the surprise they achieved; preemptive strikes cast a nation in the
role of aggressor, no matter how great the provocation which induced the
strike. So, in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, despite Israeli Air Force plans
for knocking out enemy surface-to-air-missile (SAM) sites preemptively in
an early bid for air superiority, the political authorities forced the abandonment
of this tactic in a bow to world opinion.
The ability of the Luftwaffe to move rapidly into captured Polish airfields
by air transport illustrates the principle of mobility as well as the
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