National Experiences - British Commission for Military History

346 ai r p o w e r in 20 t H Ce n t u ry do C t r i n e s a n d em p l o y m e n t - nat i o n a l ex p e r i e n C e s
Later that year, American airpower again played a key role in slowing the
onslaught of the Chinese forces that had intervened in the war. However, although
airpower could severely hurt the enemy, it could not prevent the Chinese forces from
holding a defensive line across the peninsula and stalemating the conflict from 1951
until an armistice was negotiated in 1953. The American military found the Korean
War to be an exceptionally frustrating experience. Although the Communist nations
had been foiled in their attempt to overrun South Korea, the readiness of Communist
China and North Korea to lose vast numbers of soldiers, and the relative lack of
strategic nodes and targets in North Korea, meant that American airpower could not
have the kinds of effects it had demonstrated in world War II. 32
While Korea was a new type of limited war that was played out on the margins
of the American national interest, the extensive use of airpower in that conflict
resulted in few new doctrines for American airpower. The indecisive nature of the
war convinced American airmen to avoid limited wars if at all possible. So during
the 1950s and early 1960s American airpower thought concentrated on the issue
of nuclear warfare. The initial delivery method of nuclear weapons was the heavy
bomber. With the invention of the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s a single bomber
could carry more firepower than was deployed by all the armed forces of World
War II. It was not just an issue of destruction and heavy casualties— such firepower
threatened the very existence of civilization. By 1954 the situation became more
interesting when America fielded its first tactical nuclear weapons. These bombs,
ranging in effect from a few kilotons to 100 kilotons, weighed less than one ton and
could easily be carried by a jet fighter bomber. Such small weapons meant that naval
aircraft could also be nuclear capable. The army developed artillery pieces that fired
small nuclear rounds. Soon the army, Navy and Air Force all began development
of a host of missile systems ranging from small tactical cruise missiles to huge
intercontinental missiles that could be based in America and send huge warheads
onto targets deep in the Soviet Union within an hour of launch. The sheer variety of
nuclear weapons made available in the 1950s changed military thinking to accept the
idea that a nation might fight a largely conventional war with small nuclear weapons
in support, or employ small nuclear weapons as a signal to an aggressor nation as a
means of stopping an invasion before total nuclear war was initiated. 33
Vietnam and the Era of Limited War
By the late 1950s American strategic and military thinkers realized that an approach
to war that emphasized the nuclear holocaust option did not answer the likely threat
of small, limited wars initiated outside of Europe by allied or client states of the
32
On the U.S. Air Force response to the Korean War and the issue of limited war see Futrell, Vol. 1.
pp. 273-352.
33
For a discussion of U.S. Air Force thinking in this era and the debate about flexible response see
Futrell, Volume 2, pp. 39-64.