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

AIR SUPERIORITY
potential of aircraft was somewhat uncertain, nevertheless the warring
powers had employed aircraft in virtually all the roles in which they have
appeared through to the present: air superiority, strategic bombing, close
air support, interdiction, and photo reconnaissance all played their parts
(only air transport did not receive significant attention). However, the lack
of clarity over the lessons of World War I, unfortunately, led many interwar
theorists to emphasize the theoretical and to ignore the practical realities
of air power.
One lesson should not have been ambiguous: the fundamental principle
on which all World War I air operations rested was the need for air
superiority. Without that basic attribute, photo reconnaissance aircraft did
not return with intelligence; tactical bombers on close air support or interdiction
strikes suffered shattering casualties; and strategic bombers suffered
prohibitive losses that soon ended bombing campaigns. On the other
hand, bombers and reconnaissance aircraft, sheltered by air superiority,
could carry out their missions without prohibitive losses. The achievement
of air superiority, however, posed a difficult and costly challenge. Even
when air forces gained local superiority, whether through quantitative or
qualitative advantages, that superiority usually proved transitory. The
enemy could master numerical inferiority by reinforcing contested sectors.
In the case of qualitative inferiority, he could redress technological imbalances
by advances of his own. This resulted in an air war with shifting
balances and heavy casualties. Ironically, the lesson on the importance of
air superiority and the difficulties inherent in achieving it did not strike a
responsive chord among interwar airpower theorists.
The seeming paucity of ‘‘lessons’’ on other aspects of aircraft employment
failed to inhibit evolution of theories arguing that the aircraft would
be the dominant weapon of the next war. Two major threads in such thinking-
evolved: the ancestors of the modern schools of “counterforce” and
“countervalue” nuclear strategies. British theorists placed primary emphasis
on direct attacks on enemy population centers (particularly the working
class), while American theorists stressed the vulnerability of enemy economic
systems to precision bombing attacks directed at nodal points in the
industrial structure. As the future Air Marshal Sir John Slessor suggested
in 1936, a nation could gain and maintain air superiority only through a
“resolute bombing offensive” against enemy cities and industries.’ A more
general, but certainly representative, discussion on air power in a future
conflict appeared in an RAF Air Staff memorandum of 1924 arguing that air
forces
can either bomb military objectives in populated areas from the beginning of the
war, with the objective of obtaining a decision by moral(e) effect which such attacks
will produce, and by the serious dislocation of the normal life of the country, or,
alternatively, they can be used in the first instance to attack enemy aerodromes with
a view to gaining some measure of air superiority and, when this has been gained,
can be changed over to the direct attack on the nation. The latter alternative is the
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