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

AIR SUPERIORITY
committed to the viability of long-range offensive bombardment striking
power as the means for gaining overall air superiority and ending a war with
victory.90
Nowhere were the incongruities of air superiority definition more
apparent than in the contrasting doctrinal statements of the RAF and the
U.S. Army Air Corps (after June 20, 1941, the Army Air Forces). Whereas
the U.S. Army’s Field Service Regulations had been clear in 1923 concerning
the primacy of pursuit aviation, declaring that its general mission was
“to establish and maintain aerial supremacy” by “seeking out and defeating
the hostile aviation” (as close to a definition of air superiority as one
might find), the situation was less clear by 1939-40. No such distinct definition
of air supremacy (or air control or air superiority) could be found in
the Tentative Field Service Regulations FM 100-5 of the American Army,
or in the Air Corps Field Manual FM 1-5, Employment of Aviation of the
Army. FM 100-5 talked about dividing pursuit aviation into interceptor and
fighter segments and the indecisive nature of “air fighting,” but nowhere
could the reader find a clear and succinct definition of “air superiority.” No
one in American military circles established the parameters of air superiority
as clearly as manual writers in Great Britain.”
The British War Office document, The Employment ofthe Air Forces
with the Army in the Field (1938), devoted a major section to air superiority.
The document’s writers declared that air superiority “is a state of moral
and material superiority which enables its possessor to conduct air operations
against an enemy and at the same time deprives the enemy of the
ability to interfere effectively by the use of his own air forces.” In terms of
army cooperation, air superiority implied to the British that their reconnaissance
and bomber aircraft could carry out their assigned tasks effectively,
as well as insure that the army would suffer “the minimum of
interference” from enemy bombers and reconnaissance. The authors readily
admitted the transitory nature of air superiority and concluded that the
struggle for it would begin as soon as opposing air forces came within range
of one another and would even continue for the duration of a campaign. Air
superiority could be transferred from one side to the other with varying
rapidity by the advent of superior numbers of aircraft, of new and better
models, of fresh tactics, and of new commanders of outstanding personality.
Eschewing “purely defensive measures” to accomplish this task, RAF
authorities suggested that while affected by questions of superior equipment
and organization, air superiority was “even more dependent on superior
morale and it can be obtained only by the combined offensive action of
bomber and fighter aircraft.”92
Few aviators anywhere understood the complicated and perplexing
questions of air superiority until entering the actual cauldron of combat.
What one modern author terms “the problem of friction in war” eventually
blotted out most of the prewar theorizing and agonizing arguments over
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