The Airpower We Need for Irregular Warfare

Irregular Warfare Podcast

This episode examines the persistent gap between acquiring advanced aircraft and building sustainable partner air power in irregular warfare contexts. Drawing on extensive field experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, retired

Key takeaways

• Lt. Gen. Anthony Rock reveals that Iraqi leadership pressured for F-22s in 2011 for prestige, highlighting the disconnect between equipment requests and actual operational needs.
• Tobias Switzer's RAND report distinguishes between formal 'air forces' (inventory counts) and functional 'air power' (combat capability), advocating for the latter in partner capacity building.

Main topics

• Security force assistance & partner capacity building
• Air power vs. air forces distinction

Notable quotes

"Don't confuse those two things. There's a whole long pathway to operational relevance."

Conclusion

The episode delivers pragmatic guidance for future advisors by prioritizing sustainable, low-cost

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) you Speaker 1 (0:06) At the delivery of the first F-16, he looked at me and said, General Rock, look what we can do. And my answer was, Sadie, I look at you and I say, this is what you have, not necessarily what you can do. Don't confuse those two things. There's a whole long pathway to operational relevance. Speaker 2 (0:25) We should think about that holistically in the context of force generation. You know, this distinction between air forces and air power and that the most sustainable solution for the partner is a solution that they probably can maintain, or at least that they can maintain with what they will do from a contracting and maintenance perspective rather than what we would do. Speaker 3 (0:48) And so what's most important, I think, is to embrace a different approach for aviation security force assistance in these counter-insurgency and irregular warfare contexts and try to come down off of the gold-plated solutions. Speaker 4 (1:05) Welcome to episode 166 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Atwell. Today, I'm joined by an exceptionally qualified panel to explore a central question. How can the United States help its partners build the air power they actually need and sustain it after American forces leave? Drawing on experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, we examine how militaries adapt to new technology, what kinds of aviation assets America and its partners need for irregular warfare, and why providing equipment is only the beginning when building foreign militaries. The Irregular Warfare podcast is a joint production of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project at Princeton University and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. You can find many more resources at www.irregularwarfare.org. Support for the Irregular Warfare podcast comes from Hadian, an AI company focused on synthetic environments for training, planning, and decision support. Support is also provided by Leidos, a company focused on cyber and technology innovation, intelligence analysis, and mission support. You can find more information about both IWI partners in the episode description. Without further ado, here is today's conversation on the role of air power in irregular warfare. Speaker 4 (2:31) Lieutenant General Anthony Rock led the effort to rebuild and advise the Iraqi Air Force. Mike Horowitz is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, whose work explains why some militaries successfully adopt new technologies while others do not. And Tobias Switzer, whose new RAND report is The Reason We Are All Here, commanded a special operations advisor team supporting Afghanistan's special mission wing. Tony, Mike, and Tobias, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast. Speaker 1 (2:54) Thanks a lot, Kyle. I really appreciate the opportunity to discuss these important topics. I wish I would have had this kind of forum and this kind of information before I deployed to Iraq and then eventually to Pakistan. Thanks so much for having us. Speaker 3 (3:06) Yes. Thank you, everybody, for having us. It's an honor to be here with Mike and Tony on the Irregular Warfare podcast. Speaker 4 (3:12) And Tobias, I also want to highlight that you served as IWI's editorial director, overseeing both the editing and vetting of all written articles published by the organization. Just want to say thank you on behalf of the community for that work. And we miss having you on the leadership team. Speaker 3 (3:26) Well, thank you. It was a great year and I really loved the team. And what I really think is important about IWI is, you know, you guys and your community have just continued to beat the drum about the importance of regular warfare. You guys aren't letting this go. It has never left. It will still be a part of our security across the world. And we need to keep talking about it and figuring things out. Well, it's not Speaker 4 (3:47) you guys. You're still part of Speaker 3 (3:48) the Speaker 4 (3:48) team. It's we guys. You're on board. So I love this topic because air power appears to have been central to many of America's most significant security force assistance campaigns. I'm thinking places like El Salvador and Colombia and the Philippines. Yet in Iraq and Afghanistan, after investing enormous amounts of money and time, the partner air forces remained heavily dependent on American advisors and contractors. So, Tobias, I'll start with you. As a former Air Force practitioner who transitioned after retirement to doing research, what motivated you to publish this report and why should our listeners care? Speaker 3 (4:20) Yeah, I think the motivation for me is just the importance of leaving lessons learned and some thoughts for the next generation to come. The U.S. Army, the U.S. Marine Corps have invested time and money in writing down the histories of their engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. And to a large extent, the United States Air Force hasn't. So I took it upon myself with other folks that I've interviewed and talked to and pitched to my leadership at RAND the need to put down something, some thoughts on paper to at least continue the discussion about what we learned and when, not if, we go do this again down the road. How could we do this better and differently? I'd Speaker 1 (4:58) like to pile on a little bit with Tobias. You said when and if, and it really is going to be when we go do this again. We do a pretty good job of... having after action reports and end of tour reports and lessons learned. But quite often, as we get ready to deploy, we find ourselves in such a crush, especially the crisis mode that we forget to, or we just don't have time to break out all of the good information that's out there. And having this kind of forum where there's an audio recording that you can listen to in 50 or 55 minutes. Who doesn't have time when they're driving to do that kind of thing? So hopefully the warriors that do this as advisors in the future will have time to pull these kinds of things off the shelf and take advantage of what we learned along the way. And we had some scraped knees and some bumped elbows, and hopefully they'll learn from that. Speaker 4 (5:44) One thing I'd like to ask about Iraq and Afghanistan is with the building of air power and our security force assistance missions. Were these cases of failure? And is this a pattern of failure or are these exceptional cases in the world of security persistence? I don't know if I'd call them failures or successes. I would say Speaker 3 (6:02) they're unsatisfying for the amount of time and money and resources we threw into these two engagements to build up air forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think we're all surprised that we did more out of it, that the Iraqis and Afghans were not able to stand on their own. create self-sufficiency. So I think it was really worth looking at when we do this again, how can we go faster? What can we do to create better effects on the battlefield more quickly? It's also important to keep in mind there's exceptional cases in the scale and scope of the U.S.'s engagement in these countries. The other that you mentioned already had, to some extent, air forces or air power or army aviation units. Iraq and Afghanistan had none, as Tony has mentioned. We destroyed the Iraqi Air Force twice in the two engagements. And so when air advisors came in to rebuild the Iraqi Air Force, it was starting with zero. It was also starting with populations that were decimated by war and undereducation, high rates of illiteracy. And so we're trying to draw military age males into a highly financially intensive, technology intensive endeavor to build air power. And that was another challenge. And oh, by the way, the third part of... really made this difficult was both of these countries were in the middle of raging insurgencies when policymakers decided that we needed to provide them with an Air Force and tag the United States Air Force to lead those efforts. So I think those were just very difficult, extreme circumstances, but we can't just say, well, it was too difficult. We still have to look for better ways to do this next time. Speaker 2 (7:37) It seems to me in some ways, Tobias, you're describing in a microcosm the way people now, even a lot of the expert community, thinks about the RAC and Afghanistan operations in and of themselves. Is it surprising that in the context of A, an insurgency, B, a population that doesn't have a ton of educated, pre-trained pilot population, et cetera, that a lot of these things would be challenging? It's not that surprising in some ways. And so, I mean, one thing I sort of wonder about in this context is what The challenge was a building partner capacity in the air domain in Afghanistan and Iraq compared to the ground domain. And how do those differ? Speaker 4 (8:16) Yeah, I mean, one thing I had to respond to that, Mike, and I'd like to get a little more insight from you is when you say that these are very difficult cases of counterinsurgency because of local context, because of ethnic divisions, because of all the things, right? I feel like that takes away some of the onus on the U.S. as the security forces provider to say maybe we could do things better. Of course, it's hard to say whether a certain approach works when the overall probability of success is low because the conditions are hard. But does that mean that what we did could or could not have been done more efficiently, even given the low initial expectations? Speaker 2 (8:49) I mean, I'm sure. I'm sure we could have done it more efficiently and effectively. I'm curious what, you know, Tony and Tobias and you, frankly, think about this, you know, having more, all having more direct experience with this than, you know, like with this than I do. My instinct, though, is that given the organizational capital that it requires to build a sophisticated Air Force of the type that the United States. decoys that we were setting ourselves up for a very challenging task. Why don't I put it that way? Like even relative to, say, trying to teach the Iraqi army, say, small unit tactics or decentralized command or something on that front. But I'm curious what others think. Speaker 1 (9:33) A couple of things. You know, we started this with, would we look at this as a failure? You know, democracies are not good at fighting long wars. They just aren't. And Iraq was eight years. Afghanistan was at least twice that, right? And so General Austin, I remember early on in my tenure sitting as an adjunct member of the staff in one of the staff meetings, General Austin said, look, this is going to be a really tough year, 2011. People are going to ask you at the end of this, was it worth it? And that's not the right question. The question is, and one you have to answer is, did you make a difference? And that gets to the point that Tobias made. What were our alternatives after we had twice destroyed the Iraqi Air Force in a very deliberate manner and we had taken the Ba'athist out of the position? Had we not done this, what would this have looked like? And that's always a tough thing to say. How do you prove the negative, right? And so those are the things that we have to understand. And then the last thing I would say is when it comes to our society and sometimes when it comes to us as military members, we are tactically fascinated, but we're strategically impatient. And so... having to play the long game and to say what we did for eight years in Iraq and for 20 years in Afghanistan, roughly, did that make a difference? And I think it did, and history will prove out. But as we saw with the rise of ISIS, when we had to go back into Iraq, at least we had some relationships that we could lean on. Speaker 3 (10:58) But Tony, I want to respond to something. You talk about the timelines. We're not typically going to have eight and 16 years in a conflict zone to build something. The U.S. is not typically going to stick around. We should look at those as aberrations and not the standards. And a great RAND report on the length of insurgencies puts the median length of an insurgency about 10 years, but it doesn't mean we necessarily have 10 years to do this. I think when we get called in, In Iraq and Afghanistan, these were in extremist situations that the Air Force needed and advisors and the advisement and coalition and joint air