From Malaya to Algeria to Vietnam, it was the insurgents who won out and the great power that had to withdraw. This is a lesson, van Creveld insists, that has never really been learned despite the many examples. This might well explain why NATO planes are being forced to crank up their activity; in almost all cases where the efficacy of airpower has not been proven, it has led to escalation. The result has usually been a lot more dead civilians. ~Richard Overy on Martin van Creveld’s The Age of Airpower

This is relevant to the current war in Libya for obvious reasons. The Libyan war has dragged on now for 110 days for several reasons. One is that there really was a belief among the leaders of the intervention that bombing would trigger would an uprising that would end the war, so there was no plan that the bombing would dislodge Gaddafi on its own. Another reason is that the mandate to protect civilians has appropriately required precise attacks and it has ruled out targeting the country’s infrastructure. This limits NATO’s ability to escalate its air campaign very much without compromising the mission’s official justification, and as a result the air campaign’s effectiveness will likewise be even more limited. Relying almost exclusively on air power to carry out this humanitarian intervention seems almost guaranteed to prolong the war at the expense of the civilian population’s welfare. Perhaps there should an additional criterion for any future humanitarian intervention (if there ever is another one): if a government isn’t prepared to take the risks that give the intervention the best chance of success, it shouldn’t indulge in half-measures.

Overy notes that van Creveld is more focused on the practical problems in his book:

On issues of morality, van Creveld plays his cards close to his chest. His real beef is not about the ethical questionability of using aircraft in the knowledge that they will also kill civilians, but about the waste of resources and the unredeemed promises which result from the wrong choice of strategy and weapons. It is not perhaps bad faith on the part of the century’s air-force generals—who seem to have sincerely believed in the power of their armaments—but misplaced optimism and blind disregard of the facts. From Libya in 1912 to Iraq in 2003, van Creveld argues that it is really armies that matter (and occasionally navies).

Misplaced optimism would seem to be an excellent diagnosis of much of what is wrong with the Libyan war, and it certainly seems to apply to the air campaign.

Robert Farley explains in a recent column for World Politics Review that reliance on airpower continues to be appealing to governments for political reasons:

Nevertheless, airpower — including such offshore strike capabilities as submarine-launched cruise missiles — remains attractive to civilian policymakers. Air operations carry less risk of military casualties than ground operations, making them more palatable to domestic audiences. Airstrikes also grant civilian policymakers the illusion of control, as precision munitions have given rise to the notion that strikes can be launched against specific, discrete military targets without serious danger of destroying civilian facilities like orphanages, hospitals and other sensitive sites that risk turning public opinion against the intervention. That airpower rarely keeps its promises is beside the point. Few civilian policymakers study military affairs closely, relying instead on military advice, and air force generals and other airpower advocates offer cheaper solutions than “boots on the ground” zealots.

P.S. Micah Zenko has assembled a reading list on air power and its limitations. Here is his Foreign Affairs article on the myths of intervention I have cited before.