Forward From Vietnam: Air Force Success Late in War Set Stage for Future Airpower

STORY BY // RANDY ROUGHTON

19 January 2016

Operation Niagara
Besieged U.S. Marines at Khe Sanh, Vietnam, watch as a U.S. Air Force F-4 makes close air support strike over the area. (U.S. Air Force photo)

When Dr. Wayne Thompson began working on his book “To Hanoi and Back”about airpower in the Vietnam War, he anticipated a focus on an unsuccessful air campaign in an unpopular war. But as the historian dove into his research, his work soon evolved into a history of how the Air Force learned lessons that it used to dominate the airspace decades later.
Thompson began paying close attention to the bombing of North Vietnam after he joined the Air Force History and Museums Program a decade after he was an Army draftee assigned to an Air Force intelligence station in Taiwan during the Vietnam War. The more he learned about air operations, particularly late in the war, the more the now retired historian saw his project as a positive side of the Air Force’s role in Vietnam.
“When I began to study these events, I thought I would write about one of the saddest portions of the Air Force’s history, but, gradually, I came to take a more positive view of the Air Force’s experience in Southeast Asia,” Thompson said. “The struggle for Southeast Asia helped to transform the Air Force from an almost total focus on potential nuclear warfare against the Soviet Union into a more varied and flexible force wielding increasingly sophisticated conventional weapons.”

North Vietnam: Rolling Thunder
By 1968, typical USAF combat rescue packages included strike aircraft, aerial refuelers and rescue helicopters. (U.S. Air Force photo)

Although the Air Force sustained 1,741 combat deaths and lost 2,255 aircraft in the Vietnam War, statistics show a less costly air war than commonly believed. The Air Force flew more than twice the number of sorties as the Army Air Forces flew during World War II, yet had only a 0.4 loss rate per 1,000 sorties, compared to 9.7 during World War II and 2.0 in the Korean War, according to “The Air Force in the Vietnam War,” published by the Air Force Association and the Aerospace Education Association.
The war also provided a proving ground for new technologies, which Thompson described in “To Hanoi and Back.”
“While the bitterness of many who had served in a frustrating war was exacerbated by declining Air Force manpower and budgets, the service pursued new technologies stimulated by the Southeast Asian experience – new fighter aircraft, new radar aircraft, new means of countering enemy radar, new means of operating in darkness, and new guided weapons,” Thompson wrote.

Focused on nukes

Before the U.S. began combat operations in Vietnam, the Air Force was built around Strategic Air Command with a focus on the potential of nuclear war with the Soviet Union or China. It wasn’t well-prepared for a conventional or unconventional war in Southeast Asia, Thompson said. The emphasis shifted from the big bomber aircraft to fighters such as the F-4 Phantom, F-100 Super Sabre and F-105 Thunderchief.
The Air Force wanted to use the B-52 Stratofortress against 94 targets throughout North Vietnam because of its all-weather capability, large bombload and radar, and could have attacked in early 1965 without being hampered by clouds or surface-to-air missiles. Weather in North Vietnam severely limited bombing with any other aircraft from December through March. However, Johnson decided against the Air Force’s recommendation and restricted B-52s to targets such as depots and transportation routes near the border of South Vietnam and Laos.
The president was concerned about the threat of China entering the conflict, based on what happened during the Korean War.

North Vietnam: Rolling Thunder
F-105 crews played a key role in ROLLING THUNDER. (U.S. Air Force photo)

“The Air Force leadership thought that was silly, that the Korean War analogy was wrong,” Thompson said. “What the Air Force was recommending was to start bombing the targets we knew about quickly, partly because it makes a big difference on the ground, but also because it could make a big difference in Hanoi’s thinking.
“With the B-52s, we could still go in bad weather around-the-clock, and with radar, we could do serious bombing, but the Johnson administration wouldn’t allow us to do that in the heartland of North Vietnam,” he continued. “So that left us to work with the fighters, which were fairly short-range, daylight and fair-weather aircraft.”
Air Force leaders asked to use the fighters to take out North Vietnam’s air defenses to eliminate the potential to develop surface-to-air missile sites. The administration refused because they didn’t want any bombing near the government in Hanoi for political reasons. Pilots were also often frustrated by the limitations on airstrikes, with prohibited zones 10 nautical miles in diameter at Hanoi and 4 miles wide at Haiphong and restricted zones extending 30 and 10 miles wide, respectively

 Start of combat ops

U.S. combat operations in Vietnam began with the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, when a U.S. destroyer exchanged fire with North Vietnamese torpedo boats. On March 2, 1965, the Air Force’s role escalated with Operation Rolling Thunder, a systematic but frequently interrupted bombing campaign designed to discourage North Vietnamese aggression,interdict supplies heading south and boost morale in South Vietnam.
When President Lyndon B. Johnson halted the bombing of North Vietnam in time for Christmas Eve, many pilots had mixed emotions. The Air Force had established a policy of pilots and electronic warfare officers returning stateside after they reached their 100^th mission over North Vietnam until all similarly rated aviators served their tours, said retired Col. Bob Krone, former commander of the 469^th Tactical Fighter Squadron at Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand.
Halting Rolling Thunder meant an interruption in pilots reaching that magic milestone.

South Vietnam: A USAF F-100 of the 90th Tactical Fighter Squadron leaves the target area after dropping napalm on a suspected Viet Cong target, March 1966. U.S. Air Force Photo.

“The U.S. Air Force’s 100 missions over North Vietnam policy was unique in history. It had never been official policy before, nor has it been since the Vietnam War,” Krone said.
After Krone’s 100^th mission on June 3, 1966, he was selected as a fighter pilot member of a new office at Headquarters Personnel at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas, and later helped the National Museum of the Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, create the “100 Mission Exhibit” that opened in 2009.
“The policy was based on the high risks of flying into the North Vietnam air defense system, which was judged to be very dangerous,” he said. “Many pilots did volunteer for second tours, and many of those became casualties.”
To reach their 100th mission, pilots faced MiG-17 and 21 fighters, surface-to-air missiles and a combination of anti-aircraft artillery and automatic weapons. On Nov. 15, 1965, the 469^th TFS lost its first pilot two days after it arrived in Thailand. Krone assumed command of the squadron on April 24, 1966, after Lt. Col. Bill Cooper was killed over the Phu Lang Thuong Bridge.
“Those of us who reached the 100 counters were the lucky ones,” Krone said. “Thirty-five percent of all the F-105D/F pilots and electronic warfare officers who flew in the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1968 did not reach the 100^th mission.”
The 100-mission policy ended as Rolling Thunder began winding down in March 1968. During the operation, U.S. aircraft dropped 643,000 bombs and inflicted about $300 million of damage on North Vietnam, but lost 900 aircraft and failed to achieve any of Johnson’s strategic objectives.

New approach

In the spring of 1972, President Richard M. Nixon responded to the overt North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam by ordering Operation Linebacker I, an aerial interdiction campaign against North Vietnam. After B-52s bombed fuel storage tanks at Haiphong and fighter-bombers hammered a tank farm and warehouse complex outside Hanoi, the Nixon administration extended the aerial interdiction campaign throughout all of North Vietnam.
Linebacker was a considerably less gradual campaign than Rolling Thunder. Bombing throughout North Vietnam disrupted the flow of supplies and reinforcements to the south. Thompson said the use of newly developed laser-guided bombs was effective, especially against bridges. Among the more than 100 bridges destroyed by 2,000- and 3,000-pound laser-guided bombs during Linebackerwere the Thanh Hoa Bridge and Hanoi bridge over the Red River.

Secret War: Green Hornets, Dust Devils and Blackbirds
On alert at Ban Don, South Vietnam, in July 1970. From locations along the borders with Cambodia and Laos, the US Air Force helicopters covertly inserted reconnaissance teams, which included local peoples like the Hmong, along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. (U.S. Air Force photo)

In December 1972, Nixon ordered the most intense bombing of the war, Operation Linebacker II, to force the North Vietnamese into negotiations for a cease-fire agreement. Linebacker II intimidated the North Vietnamese by making unprecedented use of B-52s at night and in bad weather to attack rail yards and other targets near Hanoi. By Dec. 29, the 700 nighttime sorties flown by B-52s and 650 daytime strikes by fighter and attack aircraft persuaded the North Vietnamese government to return to the conference table.
In 1972, 200 B-52s were operating in Southeast Asia, up from 60 in Guam and Thailand in 1967. The use of B-52s and laser-guided bombs made a difference in the effectiveness of bombing operations in 1972, Thompson said. Guided bombs could do more damage than hundreds of unguided bombs exploding in the area around a target.
Two decades later,the lessons the Air Force learned in Vietnam proved victorious in the skies above Iraq when Operation Desert Storm kicked off in January 1991. Six weeks of bombing enabled U.S. and coalition ground forces to push the Iraqi army out of Kuwait in four days, with fewer than 200 American Soldiers killed in action, Thompson said.
“With guided bombs, you can make every bomb count,” Thompson said.“We already had rudimentary laser-guided bombs by the end of the Vietnam War,but by the time we got to the Gulf War, we had laser-guided bombs which we could use at night and could be carried by a stealth fighter. That meant we could basically bomb any target that we knew about, no matter if it was in Baghdad or elsewhere, from opening night. That was a big step forward.”

North Vietnam: Rolling Thunder
Specialized RB-66s helped F-105s bomb in North VietnamÕs frequently poor weather conditions. (U.S. Air Force photo)

- See more at: http://airman.dodlive.mil/2016/01/forward-from-vietnam/#sthash.xzLxiKYm.dpuf

Rolling Thunder: 100th Mission was the Goal for F-105 Pilots in Bombing Campaign 50 Years Ago

ROLLING THUNDER

100th mission was the goal for F-105 pilots in bombing campaign 50 years ago

STORY BY RANDY ROUGHTON

9 March 2015

“Instinctively, my eyes found the patch we coveted the most … the bold, embroidered words read: ‘North Vietnam – 100 missions F-105.’ It was beautiful and signaled the finale I had dreamed about.” Capt. (later Brig. Gen.) Kenneth Bell on receiving the ceremonial 100-mission flight suit after completing his 100^th mission over North Vietnam

The 100 Missions North Vietnam patch. (U.S. Air Force photo)

Operation Rolling Thunder pilots had mixed emotions when President Lyndon B. Johnson called a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam in time for Christmas Eve in 1965. F-105 Thunderchief pilots at Korat and Takhli Royal Thai Air Bases in Thailand knew it would take longer for them to reach the milestone 100^th mission the Air Force had determined would earn them a trip home from Southeast Asia. Still, the pilots of the 469^th Tactical Fighter Squadron, deployed to Korat from McConnell Air Force Base, Kan., celebrated the no-flying Christmas Day with a party in Lt. Col. Bill Cooper’s trailer. Retired Col. Bob Krone assumed command of the 469^th TFS on April 24, 1966 after Cooper was killed when his F-105 was shot down by a missile over the Phu Lang Thuong Bridge. Another pilot, 1^st Lt. Jerry D. Driscoll, was captured and held as a prisoner of war in Hanoi for more than six years.
Two days after they arrived at Korat, the squadron lost its first pilot when Capt. Donald G. Green was killed on Nov. 15, 1965. In the early years of the war, F-105s had such a high loss rate that the squadron had a saying, the supreme optimist was “the F-105 pilot who stops smoking to prevent cancer,” Krone said. So reaching the 100^th mission was on every pilot’s mind.

Col. Krone wearing the hat on display. Attached to the hat is a Royal Thai Air Force pilot’s badge. (U.S. Air Force photo)

“Pure joy is a rare wartime emotion,” Krone said. “But joy comes to an aviator after the solo flight, when doing a roll after penetrating an overcast into a sun-filled sky, and especially when landing with honor after the last combat mission.
“Those of us who reached the 100 counters were the lucky ones. Thirty-five percent of all the F-105D/F pilots and electronic warfare officers who flew in the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1968 did not reach the 100^th mission.”
Rolling Thunder was a systematic, but frequently interrupted, bombing campaign designed to discourage Viet Cong aggression, to interdict the flow of supplies going south and provide a morale boost to South Vietnamese forces. The Air Force flew from bases in South Vietnam and Thailand and hit targets north of the demilitarized zone across North Vietnam. Although Rolling Thunder officially began 50 years ago on March 2, 1965, bombing missions in the North actually began in 1964. The F-105D and the Wild Weasel F-105F flew 85 percent of Air Force combat missions to North Vietnam. Eight of 16 Airmen on the Wild Weasel crews that flew out of Takhli Royal Thai Air Base were killed, wounded or taken as POWs.

Rolling Thunder Missions over the North. (U.S. Air Force Photo)

“The (Wild Weasels) were the guys who had the highest risk of anybody because they would go in and search for missile sites and try to wipe them out,” Krone said. “They would be there before we got there, we would leave, and they would still be there trying to clean up things. They had terrible losses. I have a lot of good friends who were Weasels. They were a huge part of the Vietnam effort.”
The Air Force was the only service that adopted the 100 mission policy. In November 1965, the service established the length of a tour as either one year or 100 missions in Laos and North Vietnam, or a combination of the two, although by February 1966, only missions over North Vietnam counted toward completing a tour. However, to reach 100 missions, pilots faced MiG fighters, surface-to-air missiles and a combination of anti-aircraft artillery and automatic weapons.
“As far as I know, there was never a policy like that before Vietnam, and I don’t think there has been one since,” Krone said. “The policy was we’re sending you there for a combat tour, but you will not have to go back involuntarily until everybody else with the same qualifications as a pilot has gone. That was a historic policy for the military.

Rescued pilot (right) with fellow USAF pilots who helped bring him out of North Vietnam. (U.S. Air Force photo)

“It was continually on people’s minds of getting to that 100. It didn’t deter anybody from flying a mission, but it was a cloud that hung over everybody all the time. It was a cloud that let you know when the sun would come out, and you would be going home.”
Under Krone’s command, the 469^th TFS designed a 100 Mission Patch in 1966 and also initiated the “100 Mission Reception” for pilots returning from their 100^th mission. They were greeted by fire engines and trucks loaded with crew chiefs firing flares to lead the aircraft as it taxied to the parking ramp, where they were met by commanders, pilots and maintenance specialists with congratulations and champagne on a red carpet. They then rode to operations to log their final mission on the mission board, followed by the “Ringing of the Bell” in the bar.
Krone also helped to produce an Air Force Aerospace Audio Visual Service film called “There is a Way” to remind pilots that it was possible for them to reach the 100-mission mark, and established a policy that every attempt would be made to make a pilot’s final three missions routine with low risk, or “a milk run.” His own 100^th mission, when he became the first squadron commander to reach the plateau, was a milk run. His 99^th was not, he said.
No other pilot was available on a huge joint mission to Nghe An Province, North Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh’s hometown, a large military depot on the Red River Delta.
The 100-mission policy ended as Rolling Thunder began winding down in March 1968 without achieving any of the operation’s strategic objectives. After President Johnson ended all bombing north of the 20^th Parallel, aircrews arriving after June served one-year tours, regardless of the number of combat missions.

Specialized RB-66s helped F-105s bomb in North Vietnam’s frequently poor weather conditions. (U.S. Air Force photo)

After his tour ended in June 1966, Krone was sent to personnel headquarters at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas, to set up a crew control shop that would manage the Air Force’s pilot and navigator resources stateside for Southeast Asia needs. He also spent 10 years advising the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, on the planning for the “100 Mission Exhibit” that was opened in 2009.
During Operation Rolling Thunder, U.S. aircraft dropped 643,000 bombs and inflicted about $300 million of damage on North Vietnam; however, the military also lost 900 aircraft, and estimates put the cost of the bombing campaign at about $900 million.
During his career, which ended in 1975, Krone flew a total of 125 combat missions in Southeast Asia, received the Silver Star, Bronze Star, four Distinguished Flying Crosses and 11 Air Medals. He earned a doctorate degree as a colonel at UCLA in 1972 and has been an author, educator and consultant in advanced management theory and practice. He was involved in NASA research in 1980 while on the University of Southern California faculty, which eventually led him to become the president of the Kepler Space Institute in 2013.
Despite the controversy of the war back home, Krone believes the pilots who flew in Rolling Thunder, as well as the thousands of service members who served in Vietnam, made an important lasting contribution that historians are just beginning to fully realize.

The elements of a hunter-killer team: F-105F Wild Weasel with Shrikes and F-105D with bombs. (U.S. Air Force photo)

“My conclusion for the meaning of the Vietnam War was the United States spent 11 years fighting communism in Vietnam and helped the demise of communism, because it tended to make them concentrate on what we were doing, rather than going elsewhere in Southeast Asia, which they were dedicated in doing,” Krone said in a presentation he gave on the meaning of Rolling Thunder and the war to the National Museum of the United States Air Force.
“They didn’t go to Singapore, Indonesia or Thailand, and that was all in their design. I firmly believe that one of the main reasons the Cold War ended on our behalf was the fact that we spent that time and resources in Vietnam.”

Maj. William Robinson, pilot (l), and Maj. Peter Tsouprake, EWO (r), celebrate their 100th mission. Earlier, on July 5, 1966, they flew lead on a large strike mission north of Hanoi. Disregarding their own safety, they braved intense ground fire and several SAMs to attack four SA-2 sites. Three were knocked out and the fourth was heavily damaged. For their valor, they were both awarded the Air Force Cross. (U.S. Air Force photo)

At the 50^th anniversary of the beginning of Rolling Thunder, Krone and other pilots who survived their combat missions on North Vietnam will honor their comrades who didn’t make it home.

- See more at: http://airman.dodlive.mil/2015/03/rolling-thunder-2/#sthash.TKDE3NAe.dpuf

U.S. Maintains Air Superiority For Six Decades

A few months after the D-Day invasion in June 1944, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower surveyed the Normandy beaches with his son. "You'd never get away with this if you didn't have air supremacy," then 2nd Lt. John Eisenhower told his father. "Without air supremacy," the elder Eisenhower replied, "I wouldn't be here." The United States won air superiority in Europe by 1944 and the Pacific by the fall, won it in Korea in 1950 and hasn't lost control of the skies since. No American service members on the ground have died from enemy air attacks since three were killed during the Korean War more than 60 years ago. Control of the air gives a military power the opportunity to exploit height, reach and speed, enabling informed decision-making, the ability to strike freely at a distance, and the ability to maneuver unconstrained by the limits of terrain or ocean, said Dr. Richard P. Hallion, former Air Force Historian and senior advisor for air and space issues with the Directorate for Security, Counterintelligence and Special Programs Oversight. "I go back to David versus Goliath," said Hallion, author of "Storm Over Iraq: Airpower in the Gulf War" and "Strike from the Sky: The History of Battlefield Attack." "There wasn't a manhood issue here demanding he engage in the close fight, where he could have lost. Instead, David hit him with an aerospace weapon - a rock at a distance. In the airpower era, that aerospace weapon is the airplane and missile of today." When the North Koreans invaded the South in June 1950, they did so with overwhelming military force, and initially, without encountering immediate air attacks, Hallion said. Retired Marine Corps Col. Warren Wiedhahn experienced combat in Korea as a private first class, both with and without close air support. During the initial days of the Korean War, "there was no close air support, the North Korean juggernaut moved very rapidly with their tanks, artillery and infantry. They annihilated everything in front of them until there was nothing left in Korea but the Pusan perimeter," Wiedhahn said. But by then, robust air power forces - Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps - assisted by British, Australian and South Korean airmen as well - were taking a heavy toll on North Korean attackers, Hallion said. "During that period of time, the close air support was building up," Wiedhahn said. "The ships were coming in. The Air Force was flying. Now, all of a sudden, we began to see aircraft." After participating in the Inchon Landing and helping to liberate Seoul, Wiedhahn also fought in the battle of the Chosin Reservoir a few months later. United Nations forces chased the North Korean army to the southern tip of South Korea until China sent more than 100,000 troops that surrounded about 30,000 U.N. troops. "When we were up in the Chosin Reservoir, and the Chinese decided to attack, we began to see air - mostly Navy and Marine Corps (Vought F4U) Corsairs off of the carriers. That's how I really began to appreciate close air support. It (Control of the air) is absolutely, positively vital. After a 17-day battle in sub-zero temperatures, the Marines managed to withdraw to the coast, where they were evacuated in December." "Indeed, air power saved the Marines from annihilation as they made their way from the reservoir down to the coast," Hallion said. Five years after Wiedhahn retired as a colonel in 1982, he talked with four of the Chinese he fought against in the Chosin Reservoir during a visit to Beijing as part of his Virginia-based Military Historical Tours organization. About 40 years later, the sights and sounds of American aircraft were still engrained in their memories. "One of the greatest things we feared was your airpower," the Chinese told Wiedhahn. They said, they always moved at night, and never moved when the weather was clear because of their fear of our planes. Air superiority and supremacy are two of the five conditions in the air warfare spectrum, along with air paralysis, air inferiority and air parity. There is actually a huge difference between air superiority and supremacy that can be especially costly in war, Hallion said. "Air superiority is the absolute minimal condition we should ever be prepared to fight with," he said. "Air superiority means that the enemy is still able to undertake air action against you, but you are able to confound and defeat it. What we should really seek is what we had in the latter stages of World War II and what we had in the (Persian) Gulf War, where we had air supremacy, indeed, we had air dominance. That's where you so thoroughly dominate your opponent that they are instantly confronted with air attack, and they are unable to do anything about it. "We had air supremacy, clearly, in the first Gulf War because in that war, the Iraqi air force was simply unable to intervene either against our coalition air forces or against coalition surface forces. At the end of the Gulf War in 1991, by the second or third week, the Iraqi air force was fleeing the country, and the air action there was primarily intercepting aircraft trying to flee to Iran. That's what happens when you have air supremacy, and in the best of all circumstances, air dominance. You can then devote 100 percent of your air effort to ensure that the people on the ground get the support they need to prosecute the ground war." Gen. Charles A. Horner, who commanded all U.S. and allied air assets during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, credited the airpower dominance to the intelligence, preparation and training before the invasion. "When did we get air superiority? We had it before the war began because we had the means to get it - the equipment, intelligence, training, and the courage of the aircrews," Horner said. "But do not get the idea that gaining control of the air was easy. It was not a macho, no-sweat operation. What turned into a turkey shoot in late January and February started out as a bitter struggle; those first few days were the hardest-fought, most-critical aspect of the entire war." Because the Air Force has had almost an unprecedented control of the skies for decades, it might be easy to forget how costly it was to achieve air superiority, especially during World War II. In the European and Mediterranean theaters alone, the U.S. lost 4,325 fighters and bombers before D-Day, with 17,000 killed and 21,000 wounded or POW in the fight for air superiority and didn't achieve theater-wide supremacy until the final days of the war. More Airmen were killed in aerial missions over Europe "than all the Marines who unfortunately died in the entire span of World War II," said retired Gen. David Deptula, who was the Air Force's senior intelligence community official when he was the Headquarters Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Deptula was also the main attack planner during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and a joint task commander for Operation Northern Watch in 1998-99. "If you take a look at how many aircraft we lost in the Vietnam War - 2,781 Air Force and Navy combined, that was against a fifth-rate power with only 206 fighter aircraft. Why did that happen? Because, we were late in achieving air superiority. "It took us some 30 years to apply the air superiority lesson, but we did it in the form of developing the F-15 (Eagle). But those F-15s first flew in 1972, and now some of them are more than 30 years old. In 1979, I flew F-15s at Kadena Air Base, Japan. In 2008, my son was flying the exact same tail numbers I did, but it was 29 years later, and that was five years ago. Today, we have a geriatric combat Air Force, and we badly need to recapitalize it in order to maintain the advantage of air supremacy in the future." Without control of the air, troops on the ground face many hardships and hazards, as the late Gen. Bruce K. Holloway, vice chief of staff during the Vietnam War, wrote in an article for Air University Press. For six decades, American troops haven't had to experience "what it's like to lose mobility except at night; to be cut off from supplies and reinforcements; to be constantly under the watchful eye of enemy reconnaissance aircraft; to be always vulnerable to strafing and bombing attacks; to see one's fighters and bombers burn on their handstands; and to be outnumbered, outgunned and outmaneuvered in the air," Holloway wrote in his article, "Air Superiority in Tactical Air Warfare." However, there are some who aren't convinced the Air Force's decades-long dominance of the air is a certainty, especially with recent cuts in weapons systems such as the F-22 Raptor, which Deptula calls "the most capable aircraft ever built specifically to achieve air superiority," and F-35 Lightning II. In 2009, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates called for capping the original 722 Raptors to 187. Three years later, across-the-board defense spending cuts have put the F-35 at risk. "There are newer threats out there, quite frankly, that could defeat the aircraft that we currently have," Deptula said. "That's why the Air Force works so hard to recapitalize those aircraft by building F-22s and F-35s that can operate, using modern technology, to achieve air dominance by networking capabilities with sensors that we never had in the past. "Our challenge in the future is we're not going to have time to do what we did in World War II - bring America's industrial might to bear over the time necessary to create the kinds of aircraft to maintain our superiority advantage. It falls on Airmen of today, to articulate the air superiority lessons of the past and to make the Airman's voice in the defense of our nation heard. Today's Airmen need to be unabashedly clear about the lessons of history in order to maintain our capabilities in the future." As vital as Eisenhower perceived air superiority to success on D-Day, some airpower experts wonder if the day will come when the U.S. won't have the control of the skies needed for a crucial confrontation with another military power. "I think the greatest danger we face as a nation today is to assume that air and space power is a God-given right to the United States of America, and we will always enjoy it," Hallion said. "We see that sometimes, unfortunately, in our sister services. They have labored so long with perfect freedom of maneuver because of the American airpower shield that we've put over their heads that I think many individuals fail to realize that it is perishable. Air dominance is like freedom itself - you have to constantly nurture it, care for it and invest in it to ensure that you will still have it."

Desert Storm 20 Years Later: Lessons from Vietnam Guided Commanders as They Planned Gulf War Strategy

Two decades ago, the United States fought a new kind of war, but commanders used lessons from an old one as inspiration. Mistakes from the Vietnam War guided commanders as they planned Operation Desert Storm, which began 20 years ago in January.
Unlike several competing command authorities like there were in Vietnam, Army Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander-in-chief of U.S. forces during Desert Storm, assigned air operations to one commander. As the joint force air component commander, retired Gen. Charles A. Horner was the architect of the air campaign that launched the Persian Gulf War.
 “If you aren’t part of the air campaign under Horner, you don’t fly,” General Schwarzkopf said to one of his commanders, according to the Gulf War Airpower Survey.
“I think the lessons that really came out in Desert Storm were the ones we’d been honing and altering in operations from the previous wars,” General Horner said. “In World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam, we did things wrong that we learned from, so in Desert Storm, we did a lot of things right.
“We learned bitter, bitter lessons in Vietnam that really paid off in Desert Storm. Our shared experiences in Vietnam [were] one of the reasons Schwarzkopf was so willing to let airpower rule the weight of that war. He wanted to get the job done with the least cost in human life on both sides.”
The U.S. military had 148 battle deaths and 145 non-combat deaths during Desert Storm, according to the 1991 Defense Almanac. Fourteen of 20 Airmen killed during the war were battle-related. The air war was crucial to the ground war that sealed the Iraqi army’s fate on Feb. 23 and ended 100 hours later with a ceasefire on Feb. 28. Coalition aircraft flew more than 65,000 sorties and dropped 88,500 bombs. The aerial bombardment “placed Iraq in a position of a tethered goat,” General Horner said after the war.
“Our loss rate overall in the Gulf War was lower than normal training,” he said. “We lost fewer airplanes in the Gulf War than we would’ve lost flying that number of sorties. It was amazing. One of the problems we had was we made something very difficult look very easy, so people get misconceptions about what it takes to pull something like that off.”
A United Nations-authorized coalition force, led by the United States and United Kingdom, began the first phase of Desert Storm on Jan. 16, 1991 after Iraq failed to meet a UN Security Council’s deadline to leave Kuwait by Jan. 15. Desert Shield began five days after Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990 when President George H.W. Bush ordered air and ground forces to Saudi Arabia. It became the largest American deployment since Vietnam. More than 30 other nations joined the coalition, and 18 other countries contributed with financial and humanitarian aid. The coalition built up its force in the Arabian Peninsula during the next six months.
The day General Horner received the call that eventually launched Desert Shield on Aug. 7, 1990, he and his F-16 Falcon were engaged in an air-to-air training mission near the North Carolina coast with two F-15 Eagles from Langley Air Force Base, Va.
General Horner, then commander of 9th Air Force and U.S. Central Command Air Forces at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C., had expected to hear from General Schwarzkopf since Saddam Hussein moved 120,000 Iraqi troops into Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia several days earlier on Aug. 2. But once the call from the Federal Aviation Administration came for him to return to Shaw, he knew instantly what it meant. He was on the way to brief President Bush on possible military responses with General Schwarzkopf.
“We’d been following the invasion since it happened,” General Horner said. “In fact, I had the 363rd Tactical Fighter Wing at Shaw and the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing at Langley on alert for about a month to the point it was affecting their peacetime operations. My boss, Gen. Bob Russ, called me and said, ‘Chuck, you probably need to take them off alert. You’re affecting operations.’ I said I can’t. Suddenly, the invasion occurred, just like everybody was predicting.”
Even though the death toll was comparatively low in Desert Storm, it hit one of the largest Air Force Reserve organizations particularly hard months before hostilities began. On Aug. 28, nine Airmen in the 433rd Military Airlift Wing at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio died in a C-5 Galaxy crash at Ramstein Air Base, Germany. Wing members wore black bands over their unit shoulder patches when their 68th Military Airlift Squadron was recalled to active duty the next day.
Long before the Gulf crisis began, the American military trained for an eventual showdown with Iraq, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union. A month earlier, a U.S. Central Command war game had a scenario of a “Country Orange” attacking Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from the north. When General Schwarzkopf accepted command of U.S. CENTCOM in November 1989, he told his military leaders since a war with Russia wasn’t likely, “we have to find a new enemy or go out of business,” General Horner said.
“He said he was concerned about Iraq because they came out of the Iran-Iraq War with a huge military, dead-broke and owing a lot of money,” General Horner said. “So he told us to think about that. So I had been thinking about it and in March, I’d gone to brief him about things like using the MM-104 Patriot for ballistic missile defense.
“I knew if we’d ever gotten into a ground war against Iraq, our Army would never know what they’d come up against until they came up against it. So what I wanted to do was to make sure they’d get all the air support they needed when they needed it and where they needed it, but they didn’t tie down the Air Force in anticipation. Those sorties could be out killing the enemy instead of sitting on the ground waiting on the Army to call. Schwarzkopf bought the idea immediately because he was very intelligent and easy to work with.”
When Desert Storm began, General Horner and his staff planned only the first two-and-a-half days of the war. He sent then Maj. Gen. Buster Glosson, his key air war planner, to each base so he could consider the input of Airmen fighting the war.
“We listened to what the captains and sergeants have to say because they’re the ones who have to exercise the war, and they know very well what’s going on,” General Horner said. “I always reserved the right to override them, but nonetheless I wanted to hear what they had to say.”
The air war caught Iraq by surprise, especially Hussein who told Dan Rather in a CBS interview days before the war: “The United States depends on the Air Force. The Air Force has never decided a war.” Then came the opening night of the war Hussein had called “the mother of all battles” when Lt. Gen. Larry L. “Puba” Henry launched unmanned target drones on all Iraqi sand sites in Baghdad and Bazra.
“The next day, they reported shooting down 49 enemy aircraft, and that was exactly the number of target drones we sent up,” General Horner said. “I was amazed – either it was blind luck or they were extremely good at collecting data. The same time they were shooting at these target drones, we had these anti-radiation missiles raining down on both Bazra and Baghdad. As a result, they rarely turned on their guidance radars. The reason was they knew if they turned on that guidance radar, they were going to get a missile.
“On the second night, the Iraqi air force was very reluctant to fly, other than trying to escape. So we went after their minds, as well as their physical capabilities, and it really paid off.”
The coalition organized for both Desert Shield and Desert Storm gave U.S. military services an opportunity to work closely with forces from other nations, as they would do a decade later during Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. An Air Combat Command exercise called Blue Flag in the early 1980s was intended to train servicemembers who would deploy to Europe or Korea to augment the air operations center. General Horner insisted that his 9th Air Force units work closely with Army, Marine Corps and Navy contingents, “who we would actually be going to war with,” he said.
In addition to learning from Vietnam battle strategy, General Horner also sought help from the history of the Middle East. He took advantage of learning from history, and it served him well during Desert Storm.
 “The thing I used to worry about the most was what was I not doing that I should be doing,” General Horner said. “What mistakes am I making that may cost somebody’s life? That bedeviled me every minute of every day, so I did a lot of thinking, and I listened to a lot of people. I got some great help from Air Force and aviation historian Dr. Dick Hallion, and he used to send me boxes of books about wars in the Middle East. I read those books, and believe me, they helped my feeling of the region and my sense of what to do. You never know where you’re going to get information that’s going to pay off.
“That’s why I think every general ought to be a historian.”