Many Libyans considered Stevens a hero for his support of their uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qadaffi a year earlier.
In March of 2011, a multi-state coalition intervened in the Libyan civil war, pitting air power support and "rag-tag" rebel forces against Qadaffi's ground operations.
When I learned NATO was intervening in the Libyan civil war
I assumed quick and dramatic results, because I assumed they would realize they
had a readymade blueprint to follow.
The Libyan rebel forces looked very much like the Afghan
forces that had rebelled against the Taliban and the Kurdish rebel forces that
had fought Hussein in Northern Iraq; in each case air power, teamed with these
rebel forces, had proved an insurmountable team, first in bringing down the
Taliban regime in 2001, and in tying up significant Iraqi forces in Northern
Iraq during the 2003 invasion.
The blueprint seemed perfect: link NATO air power with the
Libyan rebels the same way it had been linked with Afghan and Kurdish rebels.
After watching events unfold through major media channels
for several months, however, and seeing no dramatic results, I became
suspicious and started questioning contacts in the reporting world. One lead led to another, and before long I
was corresponding with Chris Chivers, a Pulitzer-prize-winning writer for the
New York Times who had been reporting on the rebellion.
He said that they too at the Times were wondering about the
apparent lack of results, and when I asked if he knew of any tactical air
controllers on the ground in Libya he said emphatically that they were not
being used; my suspicions were confirmed.
As anyone who even mildly agrees with my thesis in DangerClose: Tactical Air Controllers in Afghanistan and Iraq (Texas A&M University Press, 2007) will know, tactical air controllers were the key to making the marriage of air power and Afghan and Kurdish rebels so devastatingly effective.
These specially trained Air Force “ground troops” live and
work with friendly ground forces and coordinate ground efforts with those of
the aircraft overhead. By not having
tactical air controllers on the ground, NATO air leaders were not only losing
the essential synergy of air and ground working together, they were severely
hampering their own efforts.
The reasons for this are simple. Working independently against unopposed enemy
ground troops, as in NATO’s air campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo, aircraft have
great difficulty finding ground forces, especially at altitudes necessary to
escape enemy air defenses because the enemy disperses his forces to minimize
the impact of air power. Even if the
enemy is confronted by a ground force that makes them consolidate so they can
fight effectively, friendly ground forces and air power will be working at
crossed purposes if they are not coordinated.
For one thing, friendly ground forces could be launching an
offensive in one region while aircraft are operating in another region, and as
a result, pilots will still find it hard to locate enemy ground forces that
have no need to consolidate. And if
aircraft are operating in the same region as the friendly ground offensive, pilots
cannot tell friend from foe without someone on the ground telling them which
forces to strike.
This problem was dramatically highlighted in Libya when a
NATO aircraft dropped a 500-pound precision bomb less than 100 meters from
reporter Chris Chivers – he was lucky to have survived.
NATO did a very effective job bombing fixed sites and enemy
air defenses, but with Gaddafi fighting for his life, he was not going to
surrender just because his country’s infrastructure was being destroyed; to
defeat Gaddafi, the rebels and NATO had to close with and kill his regime’s
ultimate support: it’s fielded forces.
Had NATO used tactical air controllers to link the air and
ground campaigns in Libya, the rebels would have forced Gaddafi’s troops to
expose themselves to effectively directed air strikes, thus helping the rebels
succeed. Without such coordination, what
resulted was two separate campaigns that dragged on for over seven months.
To me, the lesson learned is clear: to effectively employ
air power in any scenario where enemy ground forces must be defeated, you must
make tactical air controllers the central component linking air and ground
operations.
Steve Call is author of Danger Close: Tactical AirControllers in Afghanistan and Iraq (Texas A&M University Press, 2007) and
Selling Air Power: Military Aviation and American Popular Culture after World
War II (Texas A&M University Press, 2009). Danger Close is Texas A&M's
best-selling ebook, selling seven times more than any other ebook the press has
released. It is number 14 on the Amazon Best Sellers Rank for Kindle ebooks inaviation,
and is available for $9.99
here.
Call is an assistant professor at Broome Community College
in Binghampton, New York, teaching both American and military history. During
his 20-year career in the U.S. Air Force, Call held many command and staff
positions, including liaison officer with the army, Pentagon staff officer, and
squadron commander.
Thanks so much for this tutorial! I did this for a friends wedding party and it worked jolly good. It lasts the whole evening
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