EBAO History

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EFFECTS-based operations is the term used to describe a method offighting that focuses on results achieved through military actionoutputsrather than on meansinputs. For example, a desired effectmay be to prevent an enemy ground unit from occupying a road inter-

section. The means to achieve that effect may be to defend the intersec-tion with friendly ground forces and defeat the enemy unit when itarrives; or, it may be to attack the enemy from the air several milesaway; or, it may involve using special operations forces to drop a bridgethat the enemy would need to cross in order to approach the intersec-tion. Theeffect of all three courses of actions would be the same, but themeans used would vary. This tactical example is rather straightforward.

The Journal of Military History 71 (January 2007): 13968 Society for Military History

Phillip S. Meilingerserved thirty years in the Air Force as a pilot and educator

before retiring to become a defense analyst in Washington, D.C. During his mil-itary career he flew airlift and rescue aircraft while also serving on the Air Staff

in the Pentagon and as the Dean of the School of Advanced Airpower Studies. He

received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and has authored five books

and over seventy articles on military theory and operations.

A History of Effects-Based

Air Operations

Phillip S. Meilinger

Abstract

Effects-Based Operations focus on results achieved from using mil-

itary operationsthe output. Too often, military commanders and

their staffs concentrate on the meansthe inputssterile metrics

like body counts, bomb tonnage, or the number of sorties flown.

U.S. airmen have always recognized the inherent logic and desir-

ability of concentrating on effects, and their doctrine going into

World War II emphasized this focus. Unfortunately, the intelligence

apparatus necessary to analyze a complex enemy economic sys-

tem did not then exist. Since then, new technologies and new ana-

lytical toolswhich came into their own during the Persian Gulf Warof 1991have made this decades-old concept a reality.


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As military operations move to higher levels of war, conducting effects-based operations becomes more difficult to achieve and to measure.

The term effects-based operations is a new one, coined at the time

of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, although the idea itself is not new at all,dating back at least to the interwar period.1Airmen have long pushed theconcept, but acceptance of the term as part of U.S. joint doctrine tookdecades.

The U.S. Joint Warfighting Center defines effects-based operations asfollows:

Operations that are planned, executed, assessed, and adapted based

on a holistic understanding of the operational environment in order

to influence or change system behavior or capabilities using the inte-

grated application of selected instruments of power to achievedirected policy aims.2

In short, the success of a military action must be defined by the resultsit achieves in furthering political objectives. Another definition is pro-vided by an analyst at the RAND Corporation:

Effects-based operations are operations conceived and planned in a

systems framework that considers the full range of direct, indirect,

and cascading effects, which maywith different degrees of proba-

bilitybe achieved by the application of military, diplomatic, psy-

chological, and economic instruments.3

This definition is useful because it alludes to indirect or cascading effectsthat may and usually do occur from the application of airpower. It is thischaracteristic that is so unique to the air weapon, while at the same timebeing difficult to measure.

Airmen have always hoped to conduct effects-based operations, evenif they did not use that term. Unfortunately, up through much of WorldWar II airmen did not have the analytical, cognitive, or intelligence toolsnecessary to determine the effects or the effectiveness of their strategic

air operations. As a consequence, airmen began doing what theycoulddo: they began solving the hundreds of tactical and technical problemsthat constantly cropped up, hoping that by doing things efficiently andcompetently they would also be doing them effectively. As a tool toachieve this hoped-for effectiveness, they took to counting things, mis-taking that practice for evaluation and measurement. In addition, air-

1. Air Force doctrine writers pepper their writings on effects-based operationswith quotes from Sun Tzu and Napoleon to show an ancient lineage. In truth, how-ever, these analogies are a stretch.

2. Joint Warfighting Center, Operational Implications of Effects-Based Opera-tions (EBO), 17 November 2004, 2.

3. Paul K. Davis,Effect-Based Operations: A Grand Challenge for the AnalyticalCommunity (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 2001), 7.

PHILLIP S. MEILINGER


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MILITARY HISTORY 141

men often mirror-imagedthey looked at their own complex systemsand vulnerabilities, and then assumed that an enemys would be similar.It was not a question of airmen being intellectually lazy or being remiss

in thinking through the challenges of planning, conducting, and evaluat-ing effects-based operations. Rather, it was simply a question of lackingthe requisite experience and methodologies. Today there are more capa-ble analytical tools available, and this capability has been demonstratedin wars over the past decade.

In 1917 Lieutenant Colonel Edgar S. Gorrell, a member of the U.S.

Air Service in France, wrote the first conceptual paper regarding strate-gic bombing by an American military officer, which also hinted at theimportance of emphasizing effects. Gorrell noted the stalemate on theWestern Front and called for a new strategy. German artillery continu-ously and mercilessly pounded Allied positions, but these millions ofshells were produced in only a few specific, well-known factories. If thesefactories were destroyed, shell production would cease. In other words,if the effect desired was to halt artillery attacks, it was not necessary todestroy or capture all German artillery pieces on the Western Front.

Rather, destroying the factory that made the guns would have the sameeffect, but could be achieved more quickly and with less loss of life. Thesame was true of any number of critical war industries.

Gorrell then looked at the German economy as a whole and arguedthere are a few indispensable targets without which Germany cannotcarry on the war. Regrettably, Gorrell was vague on just what thoseindispensable targets were. Instead, he identified four major industrialregions in Germany, all of which housed munitions plants, steel works,and key resource areas.4 This was a bit general, to say the least. Those

geographic regions contained hundreds of potential targets. Which oneswere to be attacked and in what order? Gorrell did not say. Unfortu-nately, those who came after him during the next two decades could dolittle better.

In 1925 Brigadier General William L. Billy Mitchell wrote that airforces should strike the enemys manufacturing and food centers, rail-ways, bridges, canals, and harbors.5 Despite his position as AssistantChief of the Air Service, it is apparent that he had made little improve-ment on Gorrells very general thinking of eight years previously.

4. Maurer Maurer, The U.S. Air Service in World War I, 4 vols. (Washington:Office of Air Force History, 1978), 2:14157, reprints the Gorrell memo in its entirety.

5. William L. Mitchell, Winged Defense: The Development and Possibilities ofModern Air Power, Economic and Military (New York: Putnams, 1925), 12627.

A History of Effects-Based Air Operations


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Italian Brigadier General Giulio Douhet was similarly indistinct inThe Command of the Air, first published in 1921 and revised in 1927.Douhet argued that the effect desired in war was the collapse of enemy

morale, and this could be achieved through a bombing offensive. Regard-ing the proposed targets for such an offensive, Douhet identified peace-time industrial and commercial establishments; important buildings,private and public; and certain designated areas of civilian population aswell.6 Realizing that this said very little, Douhet admitted that theselection of objectives, the grouping of zones, and determining the orderin which they are to be destroyed is the most difficult and delicate taskin aerial warfare, constituting what may be defined as aerial strategy.7

Indeed, this is where the air commander must prove his genius. What is

frustrating about these theorists was their assurance that decisive effectswould result from bombing key targets, without giving any real guidanceas to what those key targets were or how their destruction would lead tothe effects desired.

Unfortunately, the official doctrine with which the Royal Air Force(RAF) and U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) entered World War II offered lit-tle more than the standard laundry lists of broad categories. In theUnited States, Army Field Manual 1-5, Employment of Aviation of theArmy, stated that important objectives may be found in the vital cen-

ters in the enemys line of communication and important establishmentsin the economic system of the hostile country. Besides concentratingon enemy forces, the manual suggested such targets as rail communica-tions, bridges, tunnels, rail yards, power plants, oil refineries, and othersimilar objectives.8

In Britain, the RAFs War Manual stated that a nation was defeatedwhen its people or government no longer retained the will to prosecutetheir war aimthe desired effect. It could be achieved partly by strate-gic bombing, which would concentrate on what had by then become the

usual suspects: the enemys industrial and economic infrastructure,which included such things as public utilities, food and fuel supplies,transportation networks, and communications.9

Such bromides were insufficient: at some point airmen needed toput pencil to paper and devise actual plans. In truth, throughout theinterwar period there were airmen in Britain and the United States whograppled with the problem of how they would actually go about con-

6. Giulio Douhet,The Command of the Air

(New York: Coward-McCann, 1942;repr., Washington: Office of Air Force History, 1983), 20.7. Ibid., 50.8. U.S. Army Field Manual, 1-5, Employment of Aviation of the Army, 15 April

1940, 11, 36.9. Royal Air Force Manual AP 1300, War Manual, February 1940, VI/ 12.



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ducting a strategic air campaign, and one that focused on the effectsachieved.

At the Air Corps Tactical School in Alabama, two events occurred, a

minor one that was blown out of proportion, and one not so minor. It isan oft-told anecdote that one day the instructors-cum-pilots of the Tac-tical School learned they were unable to fly because all of their planeswere grounded. There had been a failure of a certain spring that wentinto the propeller assembly, but replacement parts were on back order.It seems the springs were manufactured at a factory in Pittsburgh, butdue to recent floods, that factory was temporarily closed. No factory; nosprings; no flying.10 This seemed important. If an enemy wished to gaincontrol of the air over the United States, perhaps it was not necessary to

attack every airfield or shoot down every plane. Perhaps it was only nec-essary to destroy one factory in Pittsburgh.

This was an almost childish example upon which to hang a theory ofwar, but there was more to it than that. During the 1930s the UnitedStates, and indeed most of the world, was in the depths of the GreatDepression. Businesses and banks, large and small, were closing theirdoors on an almost daily basis. The economy was a shambles. Greatnations were brought nearly to their kneesand not a shot had beenfired. It certainly seemed to air planners that economies were fragile

instruments. If the desired effect was to render an enemy incapable ofcontinuing a war, then perhaps strategic airpower could more directlydestroy an economy, quickly. Victory in war would then inevitably fol-low. But economies were very big things. One could not possibly expectto destroyevery factory, power station, rail line, bridge, and steel plantin an enemy country. What targets were more importantor perhapsmore vulnerablethan others? The propeller spring seemed to offer aclue, because it implied there were key nodes within an economic sys-tem that were more important than others, upon which the system

depended. All targets were not created equal. The propeller springbecame a metaphor for a way of looking at air warfarethe search forthe strategic bottleneck.

Before the war, it was difficult for American airmen to obtain infor-mation on the economies of potential enemies. There was no funding forsuch an intelligence organization, and the U.S. policy of isolation madesuch an endeavor inappropriate. Instead, the instructors at the TacticalSchool tried a different approach. They looked at the industrial north-east of the United States. Via letters, phone calls, and visits, the officers

gathered information on how American power grids, steel mills, oil

10. Thomas H. Greer, The Development of Air Doctrine in the Army Air Arm,19171941, Air Force Historical Study No. 89, Maxwell AFB, 1955 (repr., Washing-ton: Office of Air Force History, 1985), 81.



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refineries, and transportation systems worked.11More importantly, theytried to deduce how those systems didnot work.

To summarize, going into World War II air leaders had an inherent

belief in the importance of achieving results through effects-based oper-ations. They also had a rudimentary understanding of how such effortsneeded to be measured and evaluated. They did not, however, have theanalytical tools at hand to conduct that measurement and evaluation.

Once war broke out in Europe in September 1939, both British andAmerican air leaders expanded their efforts at planning and measuring

effects-based air operations. For example, the AAF later established anair war plans division in Washington and charged it with devising targetsets for air attack should the United States enter the war. The initialsteps were small and hesitant, but businessmen, engineers, and bankerswere contacted for information. In some cases this information con-cerned plants and factories in Europe that American banks had helpedfinance or that American construction companies had helped build. Inother cases, these experts simply instructed the planners on how U.S.systems and networks operated, assuming those in Germany would be

similar. This was very hit and miss, often dependent on who knew ofsomeone in business and how much they were willing to help. There wasan obvious danger here, what could be termed the blueprint availabil-ity syndrome. The types of intelligence available and examined willnecessarily shape ones view on how a system operates. If planners hadcopious information on the German ball bearing industry, for example,then they might place too much emphasis on that industrys role in theoverall war economy, while at the same time overlooking the importanceof another target system. Yet, it was a beginning.

Three other organizations were established in Washington and Lon-don to study vulnerabilities within the German economic structure. Thefirst, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, was formed by the British gov-ernment prior to the war. The second group, a collection of Americanbusinessmen, lawyers, and economists, was the Committee of Opera-tions Analysts. A third organization, created in late 1942 in the Ameri-can Embassy in London, was the Enemy Objectives Unit. For theremainder of the war these three new and unusual intelligence and plan-ning unitsas well as various other intelligence agencieswould serve

as advisers to Allied air leaders.

11. Stephen L. McFarland,Americas Pursuit of Precision Bombing, 19101945(Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 9398.



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Although the objective of these economic analysis groups was simi-lar, they did not always work in harmony. When Colonel Guido Perera,head of the Committee of Operations Analysts, arrived in England he

encountered resistance not only from U.S. Eighth Air Force headquar-ters, but from the Enemy Objectives Unit and the Ministry of EconomicWarfare as well. For its part, the Enemy Objectives Unit encounteredresistance from the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Air Ministry.As the official history phrased it, Capt. Barnett, with ineffable tact,probed the resources of the somewhat reluctant Air Ministry intelli-gence. Basically, the Air Ministry felt itself continually harassed byvisiting officers bothering them with questions.12 Relations improvedover time, but competition and friction remained.13

All three of these organizations, as well as the air war plans divisionon the American air staff, suffered from similar problems. They did nothave access to the types of information necessary to make reasonedjudgments on the German economy. As the AAF official historians elo-quently phrased it:

But there existed in almost every instance a serious shortage of reli-

able information, and the resulting lacunae had to be bridged by

intelligent guesswork and the clever use of analogies. In dealing with

this mass of inexactitudes and approximations the social scientist

finds himself in a position of no special advantage over the militarystrategist or any intelligent layman; and an elaborate methodology

may even, by virtue of a considerable but unavoidably misdirected

momentum, lead the investigator far afield.14

To overcome the impediments hinted at here, the analysts initiallylooked for information in German magazines and newspapershardlylikely to be very revealing during wartimeas well as industrial andfinancial contacts located in the United States or Britain.15 Such poorsources led to a great misconception shared by all of these groups: that

12. War Diary, Research and Analysis Branch, OSS London [Enemy Objec-tives Unit or EOU], 1945, file 520.056-167, 42, AF Historical Research Agency(AFHRA), Maxwell AFB, Alabama; History of the Committee of Operations Analysts(COA), 1945, file 118.01, 35, AFHRA.

13. Guido R. Perera,Leaves from My Book of Life, vol. 2, Washington and WarYears (Boston: privately printed, 1975), 99. Perera states that he met his coldestreception from the AAF intelligence section in Washington. Upon paying a courtesycall to the Director, Major General Clayton Bissell, he was quickly informed: I havequite a file on you here in my desk, and I want you to understand that I dont wantany nonsense in the future.

14. Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, The Army Air Forces in WorldWar II, 7 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 194858), 2:369.

15. F. H. Hinsley et al., eds.,British Intelligence in the Second World War, 5 vols.(London: HMSO, 197090), III/1, 54; COA History, 28, 52.



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the German economy was drawn taut and therefore susceptible to attackwith devastating results. Actually, for most of the war the German econ-omy actually contained a great deal of slack. Because the economies of

the Allies were on a wartime footing, it was simply assumed that Ger-manys was as well. This was not the case. As an example, the Germanautomobile industry, the largest sector of the economy in the 1930s, wasutilized at barely 50 percent of its capacity during the war.16 On theother hand, some air planners believed that oil offered a special case.

Germany had extremely limited oil reserves within her boundaries;only about 7 percent of her peacetime needs were met by domesticsources. As a consequence, she either had to import this vital commod-ity, gain access to oilfields and refineries through conquest or alliance, or

devise a substitute. In peacetime, Germany imported most of her oilneeds from Venezuela and the United States, but once war broke out theBritish blockade removed this option. In 1940, Germany thereforeformed an alliance with Rumania to gain access to her vast oilfields,which then supplied 60 percent of German crude oil supplies.17 At thesame time, German scientists perfected a method of producing oil fromcoal in a process called hydrogenation. This process was, and indeed stillis, inefficient and expensive.18Allied air planners thus saw Germany ashighly vulnerable in the area of oil. It was not known, however, how

much oil Germany had in reserve when entering the war, nor how muchit had produced and consumed since then. Indeed, based on little morethan guesswork, in 1942 the Committee of Operations Analysts esti-mated that Germany had somewhere between 2.4 and 6.0 million tonsof oil in reserve. That is quite a range. The Ministry of Economic Warfareput the figure at 3 million tons.19 Because there was no agreed-upon for-mula for determining which groups methodology was superior, the issuewas decided by picking a number in between the two estimatestheGermans were deemed to have 4 million tons of oil reserves. As a result,

when air planners met at Casablanca in January 1943 to determine tar-

16. Alan S. Milward, War, Economy, and Society, 19391945 (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 1977), 298; Richard J. Overy, Why the Allies Won (London:Jonathan Cape, 1995), 203.

17. Craven and Cate,Army Air Forces, 2:358.18. U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), Over-All Report (European War),

February 1947, 3940. Another process, Fischer-Tropsch, was also used, but hydro-genation remained far more important while also providing all of the Reichs syntheticaviation gasoline.

19. Stephen Rosen,Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military

(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 16163. USSBS, Over-All Report, 39,states that Germany had only 1.6 million tons of fuel in reserve at the start of thewarless than six months supply of wartime requirements. However, this figure actu-ally grew over the next several years despite the demands of military operations,because Germany captured more refineries and hence more fuel than it consumed.



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gets for the Combined Bomber Offensive, oil was placed fourth on thelistGermany had so much oil in reserve that making it a high prioritywould do little good. This decision, at least as far the Americans were

concerned, would later be seen as an error.As time went on the Committee of Operations Analysts, Enemy

Objectives Unit, and Ministry of Economic Warfare became more capa-ble in determining effects achieved through air attacks. To a great extentthis was due to their formulation of criteria and methodologies for gath-ering information on the German economy, accessing it, and then look-ing closely at the targets themselves. The economists, engineers, andmathematicians who comprised the bulk of the three organizationsdefined their field as they went along. They looked at such issues as the

indispensability of the product to the enemy war economy, total pro-duction of a given commodity, minimum operational requirements, sur-plus capacity, ability to substitute other materials, the time needed torepair damaged facilities, the actual degree of damage sustained, and theratio between pool and production.20 This last was important becauseit noted the distinction between commodities that could be stored,stockpiled, or simply used for an appreciable length of time, versus acommodity where such activities were impractical. Thus, for example,the oil reserves noted above were seen as a large pool, and destruction

of production would have little immediate effect; hence, the initial deci-sion to give it a low priority. Similarly, U-boat production was slow, andmost submarines were actually in service or in port, so hitting the facto-ries building the boats would have little immediate effect on operations.On the other hand, German aircraft were used up quickly in combat;there was no real pool to draw from. In this case, destroying the facto-ries would have a significant and almost immediate effect on the Luft-waffes combat status.21

Eventually, the Enemy Objectives Unit became adept at examining

various industries in detail and preparing aiming-point reports thatgave specific instructions on how best to destroy those industries. This

20. COA History, 43; EOU War Diary, 3637. The EOU diary also includes thefactor of risk to Allied aircrewsan important consideration, as planners would cer-tainly attest today. See also Walt W. Rostow,Pre-Invasion Bombing Strategy (Austin:University of Texas Press, 1981), 99104; Mancur Olson, Jr., The Economics of Tar-get Selection for the Combined Bomber Offensive, Royal United Services Institute

Journal 107 (November 1962): 30814.21. EOU War Diary, 4346. Nonetheless, sub pens were a top priority for the

Combined Bomber Offensive, largely because the Battle of the Atlantic was so crucialto Allied success. All efforts, even those of marginal utility, were expended to reducethe U-boat menace. The AAF actually saw the sub pen missions as relatively easyalmost training missionsbecause their location along the French coast allowedfighter escort.



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was a major accomplishment.22 Once planners had determined whichnodes, industries, systems, or commodities were more important thanothers, and then how to most effectively attack them, they then had to

ascertain whether their bombing operations were actually working.There were two fundamental questions to be answered. First, were airstrikes actually destroying or neutralizing their intended targets; andsecond, if they were tactically successful, was that destruction or neu-tralization having the intended ripple effect throughout the Germaneconomy or war machine that had been predicted?

The first question, were the bombers actually hitting and destroyingtheir targets, did not have an obvious answer. The inaccuracy of earlybombing efforts was detailed in the Butt Report of 1941. Essentially,

researchers discovered that only 33 percent of the bombs dropped bythe RAF landed withinfive miles of their intended target. On moonlessnights accuracy was far less.23

Two years later the Committee of Operations Analysts formed a sub-committee on Probabilities to determine the accuracy of Eighth AirForce strikes. The task was not easy. The Eighths headquarters was pro-tective of its data regarding bomb accuracy, probably because it revealedthat accuracy was not very good. When the Committee finally obtainedthe information, it decided the numbers were too pessimistic as a cri-

terion for the future.24

This was not a helpful start. In addition, therelated question of how much damage was achieved when the bombs didhit the target was not obvious either. Then, as today, bomb damageassessment was as much an art as a science. Post-strike photographsshowed, for example, that the bombing strikes against Schweinfurts ballbearing factories in 1943 caused extensive damage. After the war it wasdiscovered, however, that many bombs detonated upon hitting the fac-tory roofs. This collapsed the roofs and such damage appeared impres-sive in photos, but in reality the machines on the floors below had been

largely untouchedfewer than 5 percent were damaged and most ofthose were quickly repaired.25

Beyond this first level of analysis, planners had to confront the sub-ject of second and third order effects. In truth, all military actions havesuch indirect effectssome are anticipated and some are not. Identify-

22. EOU War Diary, 2233.23. Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive

Against Germany, 19391945, 4 vols. (London: HMSO, 1961), 4:20513.24. COA History, 20. In Britain, RE 8, a department in the Ministry of Home

Security, handled the bomb damage assessment task. For the accuracy of the EighthAir Force, see USSBS, Bombing Accuracy, USAAF Heavy and Medium Bombers inthe ETO, January 1947.

25. Perera,Leaves from My Book of Life, 2:139; USSBS, The German Anti-Fric-tion Bearings Industry, November 1945, 1, 31, 38.



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ing these indirect and secondary effects was crucial. To do this it wasnecessary to specify the measures of effectiveness that would link objec-tives to targets.26 The analysts realized this connection and stressed that

air targeting boiled down to three basic questions: (1) will damage to thetarget hurt the enemy; (2) can you hit it and at what cost; and (3) canyou damage it if you hit it?27 Of these, the first was crucial and hingedon what type of evidence, specifically, should analysts examine to deter-mine if their chosen targeting strategies were working and achieving thepolitical goals established. There were several instances during WorldWar II air campaigns when trying to answer these questions caused dis-agreements, such as during the oil plan versus rail plan controversy ofspring 1944.

The argument over the most appropriate targets for the heavybombers traces back to the Casablanca Conference of January 1943. Atthat conference U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British PrimeMinister Winston S. Churchill had agreed to a directive that was to bethe guiding charter for the heavy bombers. The Casablanca Directivestated that the goal of the Combined Bomber Offensive was the pro-gressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrialand economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the Germanpeople to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally

weakened.28

This deliberately ambiguous directive allowed the reader to takefrom it whatever he wished. Air Chief Marshal Arthur T. Harris atBomber Command saw the order to undermine the morale of the Ger-man people as a vindication of his night area-bombing strategy. Lieu-tenant General Carl A. Spaatz, the senior American air commander inEurope, saw the progressive destruction and dislocation of the Germanmilitary, industrial and economic system as the goal of his daylightbombing campaign. On the other hand, General Dwight D. Eisenhower,

who would eventually be named Supreme Allied Commander for Over-lord, focused on the need for an invasion. In his view, the bombers mainfunction was to support that inevitable assault on the French coasttoensure that armed resistance was fatally weakened.

26. For an excellent discussion of how the formulation of measures of merit canaffect strategy, see Scott S. Gartner,Strategic Assessment in War (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1997).

27. EOU War Diary, 39. All three criteria were important. The sub pens on theFrench coast unquestionably fulfilled conditions one and twotheir destructionwould grievously hurt the German war effort, and they were hittable. Unfortunately,the concrete on the pens was so thick that bombs usually bounced off, doing little ifany damagecriterion number three failed.

28. Craven and Cate,Army Air Forces, 2:305.



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In June 1943 the diverse objectives of the Combined Bomber Offen-sive were formalized in the Pointblank Directive. RAF and AAF bomberoperations were to be a coordinated effort, each operating against the

sources of Germanys war power according to its own peculiar capabili-ties and conceptsthe RAF bombing strategic city areas at night, theAmerican force striking particular targets by daylight. In other words, itwould not be much of a combined effort at all. Yet, Pointblank alsounderscored that the Combined Bomber Offensive was to prepare theway for the climactic invasion of Europe.29 In short, the problem ofCasablanca was still unresolved: differing objectives or effects desiredwould mean differing strategies, which in turn would mean a different setof targets. Would these varied strategies work in harmony or at cross-

purposes?By early 1944 planning for the Normandy invasion was in full swing,

and the question of how best the bombers could complement the land-ings was discussed. By this point, American analysts had revised theirestimates of the German oil situation and decided the reserves availablewere not as great as originally thought; therefore, oil should become atop priority for Allied bombers. If the oil refineries in Rumania wereknocked out, along with the hydrogenation plants in Germany itself thatproduced synthetic fuel from coal, the flow of the vital black gold that

propelled the German war machine would be haltedone of the statedgoals of Pointblank.

Other air planners focused on the German rail network. Troops, sup-plies, equipment, and raw materials all moved around the Reich primar-ily by trainalthough road and river traffic were also significant. If therail lines could be cut and the trains stopped, so this argument went, theGerman war machine, indeed, the entire German economy, would stopas well.

This debate broke along national lines with the Americans pushing

for the oil plan and the Britishnotably Air Chief Marshal Arthur W.Tedder, the Deputy Supreme Allied Commanderadvocating the railplan. It should be recalled, however, that the Casablanca Directive hadbeen interpreted by Bomber Command to mandate the undermining ofGerman morale. According to this requirement, Harris thought that bothoil and rail systems were panacea targets that were distractions fromhis primary task of area attacks. In Harriss words: Had I paid attentionto the panacea-mongers who were always cropping up and hawking theirwares, Bomber Command would have flitted continually from one thing

to another during the whole period of my command.30

29. Ibid., 2:665.30. Sir Arthur Harris,Bomber Offensive (London: Collins, 1947), 223. See chap-

ter 10 for a spirited denunciation of panacea targets.



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The question of oil versus rail was resolved on 25 March 1944, whenEisenhower opted for the rail plan.31 The critical factor that decided theissue was time. His measure of effectiveness was specific: he wanted

Allied air superiority to isolate the beachhead from German reinforce-ments. He wanted that done for the invasion, not sometime in themonths that followed. Although Eisenhower agreed that the collapse ofthe oil supply would have a catastrophic effect on the German warmachine, such a collapse could not occur until the fall. That would betoo late for his troops in Normandy. The rail plan of Tedder won the dayfor the quite logical reason that it promised a solution to Eisenhowersimmediate problemit promised the effects that he desired.

To illustrate how much of this was groping in the dark, the U.S.

Strategic Bombing Survey later discovered that there actually was a bot-tlenecksimilar to the Tactical Schools propeller spring episodethatAllied analysts missed. Tetraethyl lead is a chemical that when added togasoline raises its octane level. This additive, discovered in the 1920s,was used routinely to boost the gasoline octane level from 87 to 100.This high performance fuel was crucial to the engines used in fighter air-craft like the Spitfire, P-51, and, significantly, the Me-109 and FW-190.In Germany, there were only a handful of plants that produced thischemical, and all were highly vulnerable to attack. Had the Allied

bombers destroyed these plants, German aviation gasoline would havebeen rendered nearly useless.32

Another difficulty often experienced in targeting debates was that ofmirror imaging. Time and again Allied air planners and analysts, in theabsence of hard data or credible intelligence, made decisions based ontheir own experience or common sense. Sometimes this worked, but onother occasions it induced errors into calculations. For example, it wasassumed that German hydrogenation plants were operated similarly toAllied oil refineries. They were not. The Germans, in an effort to consol-

idate several processes for efficiency, folded rubber and chemical pro-duction into their hydrogenation plants. Thus, an air strike on one ofthese plants affected not only gasoline production, but that of rubber and

31. Much has been written on the oil/rail plan controversy. For the official his-tories, see Craven and Cate, Army Air Forces, 3:4264; Webster and Frankland,

Strategic Air Offensive, 3:4264; Lord [Arthur] Tedder, With Prejudice (Boston:Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 51324; Solly Zuckerman, From Apes to Warlords (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1978), chapter 12; and, Rostow,Pre-Invasion Bombing Strat-

egy, 8898, which includes the complete minutes of the climactic meeting of 25March.

32. USSBS, Oil Division Final Report, August 1945, 2, 4346. Of interest, theCOA submitted a report in December 1943 identifying the five tetraethyl lead plantsin the Reich, concluding: It is believed they are good targets. Apparently, their sug-gestion was ignored. COA History, Tab 7.



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chemicals as well. In turn, these chemicals (notably methanol and syn-thetic nitrogen) were often used in other applications so there was a cor-responding cascading effect in, for example, the explosives industry.

Allied planners were not aware of this symbiotic relationship until afterthe war.33 This is precisely the type of cascading effect prewar plannershad hoped to achieve. Had this information been available in 1944 (alongwith the vulnerabilities of tetraethyl lead plants noted above), it wouldno doubt have moved the oil targets higher up the priority list.

Even among rail plan advocates there was a spirited debate. If theeffect desired was to halt rail traffic, then what specific parts of that railsystem should be targeted? There were numerous possibilities: rail cars,locomotives, repair facilities, round houses (switching mechanisms),

marshalling yards in general, and rail bridges.Solly Zuckerman, a British anatomist and primate specialist at

Oxford before the war, worked on Tedders staff in the MediterraneanTheater. Applying himself to the question of what precisely was the bestpart of the rail system to hit, Zuckerman studied the results of Alliedbombing of rail bridges versus marshalling yards in Sicily and Italy dur-ing 1943. He concluded that marshalling yards were more desirable tar-gets simply because they were larger. Given the poor accuracy of Alliedbombers at the time, bridges were so small that it would take a dispro-

portionate tonnage of bombs to knock one out. Because marshallingyards were so expansive, however, Allied bombers were far more likelyto hitsomething of value when the yards were targeted. Zuckerman con-cluded, based on the accuracy argument, that bombing marshallingyards was moreefficient than bombing bridges.34 Tedder agreed with thisreasoning and directed his planners to concentrate on marshalling yards.

When Tedder and Zuckerman left the theater several months later,the new air commander, Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, reviewed themarshalling yard decision. His analysts concluded Zuckerman had been

mistaken. Examining the data from many more air operations thanZuckerman had used in his sample, they discovered that bridges werenot as difficult to hit as previously thoughtespecially when mediumbombers were used rather than heavy bombers flying at high altitude. Inaddition, the analysts determined that the results of the bridge bombingswere more lasting than were those of the marshalling yards. Repairs thatwere often effected within days in the latter case generally took severalweeks when a rail bridge was dropped.35

33. USSBS, Oil Division Final Report, 1, 3; Burton H. Klein, Germanys Eco-nomic Preparations for War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959),226; Rosen, Winning the Next War, 165.

34. Zuckerman,From Apes to Warlords, 20910, 22023.35. Craven and Cate,Army Air Forces, 3:37173; James Parton, Air Force Spo-

ken Here: General Ira Eaker and the Command of the Air (Bethesda, Md.: Adler and

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This discovery became important as planners grappled with thesame targeting issue while preparing for the Normandy invasion. If thedesired effect was to isolate the beachhead by preventing German rein-

forcements from reaching the areaEisenhowers stated goalthen howbest could airpower achieve it? Tedder and Zuckerman, now in London,dusted off their analysis from the year before and once again pushed formarshalling yards. Other analysts in London, led by Charles P. Kindle-berger and Walt W. Rostow in the Enemy Objectives Unit, begged to dif-fer. Referring to Zuckermans analysis as tart and turgid, they sniffedthat his main conclusions did not, in fact, flow from the mass ofappended evidence.36 Using the more recent analysis obtained from theMediterranean, they argued for a bridge campaign.

As with the broader question of oil versus rail, this more specificquestion of what rail broke down by nationality and generated bitterdebatefor the next four decades.37 In the event, air leaders resolved theissue of what to strike in their usual mannerthey bombed both mar-shalling yards and bridges. There was enough Allied airpower by mid-1944 to follow a number of different targeting strategies. By D-Day, theU.S. Ninth Air Forceone of three Allied tactical air forces in the the-aterconsisted of over 4,000 aircraft and was larger than the entirecombat strength of the Luftwaffe. Moreover, from March until Septem-

ber 1944 Eisenhower also controlled the heavy bombers. Given thisabundance of air, questions of whether it was better to bomb rail bridgesor marshalling yards became almost irrelevantas for that matter wasthe question of whether it was wiser to bomb rail or oil. There was morethan enough air available to hit all of the aboveas well as submarinepens, V-1 and V-2 launching sites, airplane and engine factories, and theenemy front lines.

Yet, this is not a trivial issue. It is of more than academic interest todetermine whether Zuckerman or the Enemy Objectives Unit was cor-

rect. Air planners would not always have unlimited air assets at their dis-posal, so they should know where to get the most bang for their buck.They should know precisely what to hit in order to achieve the greatesteffect, and this effect should fulfill policy objectives.

Adler, 1986), 38083; Sir John Slessor, The Central Blue: Recollections and Reflec-tions (London: Cassell, 1956), 56777. Slessor was Eakers deputy in the Mediter-ranean Allied Air Forces.

36. EOU War Diary, 101.37. For a thorough discussion, see Zuckerman,From Apes to Warlords, chapter

12; Rostow,Pre-Invasion Bombing Strategy, chapter 8; and Richard G. Davis, CarlA. Spaatz and the Air War in Europe (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press,1992), 4038. For the caustic response of Harris to Zuckermans plan, see HenryProbert,Bomber Harris: His Life and Times (London: Greenhill, 2001), 29192.



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As noted, the debate over rail bridges versus rail yards carried on forfour decades. That was a good thing, because it allows us to revisit themethodology and assumptions used by the analysts at the time. In 1970

Lord Zuckerman published his memoirs in which he once again laid outthe arguments for striking marshalling yards. Never a man to mincewords, he was less than charitable to those who had disagreed with him.Not surprisingly, his old antagonists, Kindleberger and Rostow, rose tothe challenge and there ensued a series of increasingly nasty exchangesin the journal Encounter.38 This exchange of letters to the editor drewout another contestant, Henry D. Lytton, an economist who had workedon both the U.S. War Production Board and Economic Warfare Boardduring the war. He sided with his countrymen in a strident article inMil-

itary Affairs.39

Lyttons article is interesting not only for his conclusionsregarding the relative importance of bridges versus marshalling yards,but also for his insights into the methodology and assumptions used bythe respective protagonists.

Basically, Lytton revealed, using the words the proponents had writ-ten in 1944, what were then being used as measures of effectiveness.Zuckerman was interested in the density of the bomb patterns within thedesignated target area. Marshalling yards were large; thus, a far higherpercentage of bombs landed within that area than was the case when the

target was a small rail bridge. Kindleberger and Rostow, on the otherhand, were less concerned with bomb density than they were with railmovement. If only one bomb in 1,000 hit the bridgeand dropped itthat was preferable to having all 1,000 bombs landing within the confinesof a marshalling yard, if rail lines were left intact in the yard, allowingthe traffic to keep flowing.

The analysts at the Enemy Objectives Unit also argued that thebridges, usually located outside of urban areas, were less heavilydefended and thus were less risky to the Allied aircrews attacking them.

Moreover, this location meant there would be fewer civilian casualtiesand less collateral damage than if the bombers were going after mar-shalling yardsalmost always located in city centers. Given that mostrail targetseither bridges or marshalling yardsbeing struck in themonths preceding and following Overlord were located in France, thiswas a major consideration. In fact, around 10,000 French civilians werekilled in the marshalling yard strikes. At the same time, nearly 300 Allied

38. This exchange of letters appeared in three issues ofEncounter: 51 (Novem-ber 1978): 3942; 52 (July 1979): 8689; and 53 (August 1980): 100102.

39. Henry D. Lytton, Bombing Policy in the Rome and Pre-Normandy InvasionAerial Campaigns of World War II: Bridge-Bombing Strategy Vindicatedand RailyardBombing Strategy Invalidated,Military Affairs 47 (April 1983): 5358. Lyttons titlepretty much says it all.



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bombers were lost attacking them. In contrast, Lytton argued that Alliedlosses were light when hitting bridges, as were casualties incurred by theFrench on the groundalthough, suspiciously, he did not provide the

statistics to back this up. Finally, it took, on average, five times morebomb tonnage to stop trains by hitting marshalling yards than it did byhitting rail bridges.

Thus, measures of effectiveness were crucial in determining targetsfor Allied bombers in World War II. If the goal was to put bombs effi-ciently on a target, then marshalling yards made a great deal of senseit was difficult not to destroy something when 500 bombers droppedtheir loads on such a complex. On the other hand, if the objective wasto stop trains, while also limiting casualtiesboth in the air and on the

groundthen bridges made more sense, even if less efficient when mea-sured in terms of bombs actually placed on target.

But the story is not quite over. To relieve some of the duplication andcompetition between the economic analysts, in October 1944 a new orga-nization was formed, the Combined Services Targeting Committee, whichcontained representatives from all of the other target intelligence agen-cies. The benefit of creating yet another such group was questionable. Asthe British official history noted dryly: Neither of the two commanders[Spaatz and Harris] was prepared to accept the advice of the Committee

except when he agreed with it.40

Nonetheless, Tedder hoped to use thisnew analysis unit to help prod Spaatzwhose heart still belonged to oilinto a greater emphasis on rail targets. Although he had won the earlierbattle over the oilmen, Tedder had seen his influence slipping ever since14 September when the heavy bombers passed from Eisenhowers control(and hence his own) back to that of Harris and Spaatz. Initially, thebomber barons were not conducive to Tedders urgings. After the first ofthe year, however, Tedder received unexpected support.

The Allies had broken the German top secret codes, transmitted by

Enigma machines and whose products were referred to as Ultraintelligence, early in the war. The vital importance of this special intelli-gence source is well known. However, in January 1945 the German rail-road system, which had been using its own teletype network ortelephones for transmitting its status reports, now began using Enigma.Hitherto, signals intelligence personnel had largely ignored rail trafficmessages, believing them of little import, but when the railroad systembegan using Enigma, they started to pay more attentionperhaps thiswas useful information after all.41 Enigma traffic quickly revealed the

40. Webster and Frankland,Strategic Air Offensive, 3:216.41. Alfred C. Mierzejewski, The Collapse of the German War Economy,

19391945: Allied Air Power and the German National Railway (Chapel Hill: Uni-versity of North Carolina Press, 1988), 16769.



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crucial role that coal played in the German economy, powering virtuallyall industrial production. Indeed, 90 percent of all Germanys energyderived from coal: without coal, there was no German economy. More to

the point, coal was moved around the Reich largely by train ever sinceBomber Command had so effectively mined German rivers and canals,thus essentially eliminating all barge traffic.42 Since the rail plan hadbeen in effect, the movement of coal had slowed, causing a seriousdecline in German production. The implication was clear. In order todeliver a death blow to German industry, and thus German militarycapability, the Allies had to stop the flow of coal. The best way to do thiswas by stopping the trains.43

In essence, Tedder may have been right all along, if for the wrong

reasons. Neither he nor his staff had identified coal as the key commod-ity that made the Reich function. His plea in October 1944 for a majorcampaign against German rail lines (as opposed to those in France thathad been the essence of the preinvasion bombing plan) emphasized dis-rupting the flow of German reinforcements and supplies. The goal of anexpanded rail campaign was to rapidly produce a state of chaos whichwould vitally affect not only the immediate battle on the West Wall, butalso the whole German war effort.44 Coal was never mentioned. Tedderwas not, therefore, interested in studying intelligence related to its ship-

ment. When his staff finally did so, almost by accident in February 1945,coals importance quickly became apparent. But the evidence had beenthere all along. It merely required someone to establish coal as the cru-cial link, and then to identify the effect desired with an appropriate mea-sure of effectivenessthe halting of its movement by rail. Once this keyrelationship, desired effect, and metric were articulated, the bombingcampaign could be focused on its achievement.

One further item on this issue highlights the often serendipitousnature of war. As mentioned above, the German rail system switched

from its own teletype network and the use of telephones to the Enigma

42. Around 60 percent of the oil from Rumania was transported to Germany viabarge on the Danube River. When the RAF mined the Danube, it brought this trafficto a halt. When it is realized that one barge of oil was equivalent to a 100-car train, itis obvious how important these mining operations were in throttling Germanys oilsupply. Robert Goralski and Russell W. Freeburg, Oil and War: How the Deadly

Struggle for Fuel in World War II Meant Victory or Defeat (New York: Morrow, 1987),271; Ronald C. Cooke and Roy C. Nesbitt, Target: Hitlers Oil, Allied Attacks on Ger-

man Oil Supplies, 19391945 (London: William Kimber, 1985), 70.43. This entire argument is spelled out in detail in Mierzejewski, Collapse of the

German War Economy.

44. Webster and Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, 4:29092, contains theentire text of Tedders Note on Air Policy to be Adopted with a View to Rapid Defeatof Germany, dated 25 October 1944. It is also interesting that neither the COA norEOU histories ever once mentions coal as a target.



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coding machine in early 1945. The change was made not because any-one in the Reich hierarchy thought such information needed to besecured at such a high classification, but simply because Allied bombers

had knocked out the teletype network, as well as most telephone linesand the postal service. Had this not been the case, it is probable Enigmawould never have been used, and the Allies would not have been curiousenough to finally look into the movement of coal by rail.

Another example of the need to use the correct measure of effec-tiveness was demonstrated regarding the issue of air superiority. It was aprime dictate of airpower that air superiority was a crucial objective, andgaining it prior to Overlord was an intermediate objective of overridingpriority. But how does one measure air superiority? There are several

possibilities: the number of enemy aircraft destroyed on the ground or inthe air, the number of Allied bombers shot down, the ability of bombersto penetrate to their targets and effectively hit them, the number ofenemy aircraft produced, the number of German aircraft operational atany given time, or the number of enemy sorties flown. All of these areimportant data points, but what was the appropriate metric for deter-mining air superiority?

A common criticism of the Combined Bomber Offensive was to notethat the production of German single-engine fighters continued to rise

throughout 1944, this despite the growing intensity of Allied bombing. Ifone were to use German production figures as the measure of effective-ness for achieving air superiority, it would be logical to conclude that theair offensive was a failure. But was that the appropriate metric?

We now know there were large discrepancies between the numbersof aircraft allegedly produced and those actually delivered to Luftwaffeunits.45 In addition, the losses suffered by the Luftwaffe were so enor-mous that even increased production could not keep pace. As a conse-quence, by D-Day a mere 300 German fighters were in France to oppose

the 12,000 aircraft of the invading Allies. On the Eastern Front, Luft-waffe strength stood at 500 fighters, versus the Soviets 13,000. Another500 German fighters remained in Germany itself for air defense. In thefirst twenty-four hours of Overlord the Allies flew 12,015 sorties to 319for theLuftwaffe.46 Despite the statistics purportedly showing increasingfighter production, it was obvious that by D-Day the Allies controlled theskies. Clearly, German aircraft production figures were an inadequate

45. U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Over-all Report (European War), 1822;Richard Overy,Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (New York: Pen-guin, 2001), 298, quotes Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, thatthe production figures were padded to make the deputy armaments minister, Karl-Otto Saur, look good.

46. Overy, Why Allies Won, 124; John Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy (NewYork: Viking, 1982), 143.



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test for determining the effectiveness of strategic bombing in general orthe air superiority campaign in particular.

To muddy the water further: A key theorist and planner in the AAF

was Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell. He had been an instructor inthe Bombardment Section at the Tactical School in the 1930s, hadhelped write the AAFs first airwar plan for Germany, and had also par-ticipated in writing the Casablanca Directive. Hansell was not just a deskgeneral. In 1942 and 1943 he served as a bomb wing and then bomb divi-sion commander in the Eighth Air Force; the following year he was givencommand of the B-29s in the XXI Bomber Command based on Guam.More than two decades after the war Hansell wrote of his experiencesand, buttressed by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, opined that the

Allied bombers made a mistake in not attacking German electricity.Although this was always seen as an important aspect of the Germanindustrial infrastructure, it was also deemed a poor target because of itssmall and dispersed nature. Not so, said Hansell in 1972. If 72,000 tonsof bombs had been directed at the sixty-five targets comprising the Ger-man electrical power generating network, the power grid would havebeen irreparably damaged, having a catastrophic effect on Germanyswar production.47

Who was correct in all of this? Was there a key node that should

have been concentrated on by the heavy bombers? At various timesthere were several contenders for this magic bullet: oil, coal, rail lines,electricity, and ball bearings. Were these truly key, or were they merepanacea targets, as Arthur Harris suggested?

It is useful to ask what the Germans thought of all this. Albert Speer,the German Minister of Armaments and War Production, later wrote:

I shall never forget the date May 12, [1944] . . . On that day the tech-

nological war was decided. Until then we had managed to produce

approximately as many weapons as the armed forces needed in spite

of their considerable losses. But with the attack of nine hundred andthirty-five daylight bombers of the American Eighth Air Force upon

several fuel plants in central and eastern Germany a new era in air

war began. It meant the end of German armaments production.48

On the other hand, in November 1944 he wrote Adolf Hitler regardingthe bombing attacks on the Ruhr that focused on rail lines:

We are on the verge of the most serious coal production crisis since

the beginning of the war. . . . For more than six weeks now, in the

matter of transport the Ruhr has become more and more cut off from

47. Haywood S. Hansell, Jr., The Air Plan that Defeated Hitler (Atlanta: Higgins-McArthur, 1972), 28697; USSBS, German Electric Utilities Industry, October1945, 13.

48. Albert Speer,Inside the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 346.



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the areas it supplies. . . . It is clear from Germanys overall economic

structure that in the long run the loss of the industrial area of

Rhineland-Westphalia would be a mortal blow to the German econ-

omy and to the conduct of the war.49

To confuse things further, when Speer was interrogated after the war,he stated that the crucial targets the Allies should have bombed morevigorously were chemicals, ball bearings, and electrical power, implyingthese target systems were more important than either oil or coal.50 Itwould seem that not only were Allied planners and analysts uncertain asto what was going on in the German economy, but the head of Germanarmaments production was similarly confused regarding the status of hisempire.

To summarize the World War II experience: Although effects-basedoperations were at the root of what airmen hoped to achieve through air-power, going into the war air planners had no real precedents for deter-mining appropriate objectives, targets, and measures of effectiveness forstrategic bombing. At the same time, they had almost no experience withgathering the types of intelligence necessary to conduct such a cam-paign. These two processes, both of which required massive resourcesand conceptual skill, had to be created from scratch.

Following World War II things at once both got better and worse foradvocates of effects-based operations. Strategic Air Command and itsbomber fleet carrying nuclear weapons, eventually joined by nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, formed an enormous organization, the JointStrategic Target Planning Staff, to study the Warsaw Pacts economic andmilitary structures. This highly secretive body, which was based onwartime organizations like the Enemy Objectives Unit, had access to the

sensors, intelligence sources, and analysts needed to conduct an in-depth study of the Warsaw Pact, its economy, and its infrastructure.Unfortunately, the emphasis on the Soviet Union, as well as the relianceon nuclear weapons, made the Target Planning Staff of limited utilitywhen conventional wars broke out in Korea and Vietnam.

When the United States entered the Korean War in 1950, air plan-ners were intent on repeating their success of World War II in Europe.Although true strategic targets in China and the Soviet Union were offlimits, rendering the detailed nuclear studies irrelevant, airmen believed

49. Webster and Frankland,Strategic Air Offensive, 4:34956, has the completetext of Speers letter to Hitler of 11 November 1944.

50. Webster and Frankland,Strategic Air Offensive, 4:384.



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they could at least so isolate the North Koreans (and later Chinese)forces as to make them harmless. As a consequence, the Air Forcelaunched a series of interdiction campaigns with impressive codenames

like Strangle and Saturate. An enormous amount of effort was funneledinto these campaignsaround 50 percent of all Air Force combat sortiesduring the war were interdiction. When Navy and Marine sorties areincluded, the United States flew over 320,000 interdiction sorties duringthe waron average nearly 9,000 per month.51What were the results ofthis massive effort? If the effect desired was destruction of enemy equip-ment, then the results were impressive indeed. By the end of the war air-men claimed they had destroyed or damaged a total of 5,087 bridges,2,345 locomotives, 41,882 rail cars, and 111,623 vehicles.52 Even assum-

ing some exaggeration, one could certainly expect that the communistforces would have been virtually immobilized by such destruction. Theactual effects achieved were disappointing. In July 1951 the enemy firedaround 8,000 artillery rounds at United Nations forces; less than a yearlaterafter ten months of concentrated air interdictionthey were ableto fire over 100,000 rounds.53

Clearly, something was wrong. The old bugbear of the previouswardetermining a reliable and useful measure of effectivenesshadreturned with a vengeance. If the metric used was destruction of equip-

ment, the number of sorties flown, or the tonnage of bombs dropped,then air interdiction was a great success, but if the key criterion usedwas the ability of the enemy to fight, the conclusion was far different.This same problem continued throughout the next minor war in Asia.

During the Vietnam War it was common to criticize the U.S. Armyfor its body count mentality. This was the epitome of a measure ofeffectiveness gone wrong. But airmen were just as guilty. Vietnambecame an exercise in countingsorties, bomb tonnage, jungle trailscut, trucks destroyed, and bridge spans dropped. As so often occurs in

such situations, the drive to gather data became an end in itself. As aresult, although there was a severe bomb shortage in the early years ofthe airwar, planes were sent out anyway, sometimes with only one or two

51. Edmund Dews and Felix Kozaczka, Air Interdiction: Lessons from PastCampaigns, RAND Note N-1743-PA&E, September 1981, 4951.

52. Ibid., 55. One of the reasons for the disconnect between the supposeddestruction results and the enemys actual military capability was mirror imaging. AU.S. Army division required around 500 tons of supplies daily to sustain itself; a Chi-nese or North Korean division required only 48 tons. Even if interdiction was stop-ping 90 percent of supplies flowing south, the 10 percent that got through was enoughto keep the enemy going. Gregory A. Carter, Some Historical Notes on Air Interdic-tion in Korea, RAND Note P-3452, September 1966, 4.

53. Dews and Kozaczka, Air Interdiction, 57.



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bombs. A sortie was, after all, a sortie, and The Graph must not showa decline.54

Virtually all preplanned targets struck by air in South Vietnam were

selected by the staff at Military Assistance Command Vietnam located inSaigon. This largely U.S. Army organization had only token Air Forcerepresentation, and because the Army selected all targets based on aground situation they alone saw, the measures of effectiveness for the airstrikes were not clear. So airmen invented their own: aircraft readinessrates, tons of ordnance dropped, the rapidity of response, and sortierates. In essence, the task of the Air Force was merely to service a list oftargets for the Army. The criteria thus became a determination of howquickly, effectively, and efficiently airmen were able to service that list.

The divided responsibility for selecting, planning, conducting, and eval-uating air strikes meant that targets, at least as far as the airmen wereconcerned, were divorced from the political and military objectivessought. If such a causal link was made, it was done by the Army staff inSaigon, the keeper of the target list, not Seventh Air Force. Effects-basedoperations were nonexistent.

The problem of counting things and mistaking that for effectivenessobtained regarding the airwar over North Vietnam as well. After theLinebacker II strikes of December 1972, the Air Force stated that the

North Vietnamese rail yards had suffered the greatest amount of damageof all the targets struck: a damage level of 60 percent or better wasachieved against two-thirds of the railroad yard targets representingdamage to the most important rail facilities, other than bridges, in NorthVietnam. The study is mute, however, on whether this level of damagehad any effect on the shipment of supplies or armaments to North Viet-namese forces. Moreover, the study also notes that because of earlier airstrikes, most traffic had already been moved from rail to roads.55 Inshort, what was the effect desiredto limit movement of military sup-

plies, or simply to destroy marshalling yards and rolling stock? If the for-mer, then the air strikes were ineffective, regardless of the amount ofdamage allegedly produced.

The core issue, as it had been in World War II, revolved around mea-sures of effectiveness. The U.S. goal was to stop the communist insur-gency in the South and to ensure a safe and democratic regime there. Inorder to accomplish that, the Viet Cong had to be eradicated and/or theirsupply of troops, ammunition, and equipment from the North must beeliminated. If those were the military goals that would fulfill the political

54. John Schlight, The USAF in Southeast Asia. The War in South Vietnam: TheYears of the Offensive, 19651968 (Washington: Office of Air Force History, 1988),69, 78, 154, 190.

55. Pacific Air Forces, Linebacker II USAF Bombing Survey, April 1973, 56.



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162

mandate, then all of the data points noted above seemed to have somerelevance, but as always, the key question remained: which metrics indi-cated whether the U.S. strategy was succeeding or failing?

Following the Vietnam War, the U.S. Air Force underwent a funda-mental reorientation. The doctrine of strategic airpower, at least as rep-resented by nuclear weapons, increasingly receded to the background.So, too, did the bomber pilots who had held most of the key leadershippositions within the service for several decades. Fighter pilots, who hadborne the brunt of the war in Vietnam, now took over the top slots in theAir Force. The backbone of the air fleet, which had been the heavybombers and ballistic missiles, similarly decreased dramatically in num-bers and importance.

One of the important results of this organizational, structural, anddoctrinal shift was the recognition of the importance of strategic con-ventional air operations. Airpowers unique ability to operate at thestrategic level of war immediately upon the outset of hostilities was stilla fact, even if airmen had given it little thought for the previous threedecades. Two Air Force colonelsJohn Boyd and John Wardenled theintellectual journey back to serious thinking about air strategy. Bothmen moved away from a concept of air strategy that had focused on anenemys economy, and instead focused on its leadership. This is not to

say that either man eschewed the targeting of an enemys industrial oreconomic infrastructurethere were often sound reasons to continue toneutralize such targets. Instead, thefocus was to be on the leadershipwhat made them susceptible to coercion? In some cases the attackagainst a particularly important industry might have a powerful impacton the minds of the leadership. In other cases, an attack on the leadersthemselves, even if unsuccessful, might still prompt a desirable changein behavior.

For advocates of effects-based operations, this shift in targeting strat-

egy introduced new problems. A leadership or coercive strategy is moredependent on cultural, psychological, religious, or political factors thanone focused on the economy. If the goal is to shut down an economy,then it is possible to measure the results of an air strike on a power grid,rail network, or communications system. But how does one measure thecoercive effect of hitting such targetsor any otherson the minds of anations leaders? The main problem with effects-based operations inWorld War II, and to some extent today, lies mainly in the realm of pre-dicting human behavior in a crisis. It is difficult to model uncertainty,

randomness, chance, and the nonlinear and often seemingly irrationalthinking of human organisms, because different people respond differ-ently to the same stimuli, and some people respond differently to thesame stimuli at different times. Human behavior, especially when underpressure or when operating from a different cultural mindset, is incredi-

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bly difficult to predict. In short, effects-based operations moved into aneven more nebulous and complex area than it had been in previously,and yet, the problems of measuring effects in an economic model have

not been completely solved.Nonetheless, by the Persian Gulf War in 1991, effects-based opera-

tions had become increasingly ingrained in the minds of key airmen.One participant tells of how initial air plans called for each Iraqi airdefense sector control center to be targeted by eight F-117s to ensuretheir destruction. This would have required a great many sorties for thehigh-demand stealth fighter-bombers. He then postulated that a singlebomb would no doubt shut down operations physically, while also caus-ing any technicians still alive inside to flee. The number was then

reduced from eight sorties per facility to two.56

The desiredeffect was toshut down the air defense system; total destruction was therefore notnecessary. Not everyone was on board, however.

Colonel John Warden, a key air planner in the Pentagon during thewar, tells of talking to an intelligence analyst who assigned bomb damageassessment figures to specific target sets. Regarding the strikes againstelectricity, the analyst gave a damage assessment of 10 percentnot animpressive figure. When Warden asked why he had given such a low esti-mate, the analyst replied that there were a specified number of electri-

cal power plants in Iraq, and Coalition bombs had destroyed only 10percent of them. The arithmetic was pretty simple. Warden remon-strated that the lights were out in Baghdad, and indeed throughout mostof Iraq. Was not that the effect desired? What did it matter how manysmoking holes there were across Iraq? Clearly, the bombing of electric-ity had been virtually 100 percent effective! The analyst hung up.57

The debate over air strategy today remains what it has been for thepast century, an argument over targeting. The main thrust of air theoryover that period focused on an economic theory of war. Airpower wasseen as a more direct and more rapid form of traditional seapoweralthough few airmen or sailors would ever admit that. This concept isstill with us. For example, General Michael C. Short, the air commanderin the air campaign against Serbia in 1999, has argued that air strikes onthe first night of the war should have concentrated on the critical infra-structure of Belgrade: the power grid, bridges over the Danube, and key

56. Brig. Gen. David A. Deptula, Effects-Based Operations: Change in theNature of Warfare, Aerospace Education Foundation paper, 2001, 12.

57. John Warden, The Enemy as a System of Systems, presentation to theSwedish National Defence College, Stockholm, 27 January 2003.



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factories.58 These targets should have been quickly and preciselydestroyed. An instructor at the Air Corps Tactical School or the RAFStaff College in 1935 would have said much the same thing.

There have been, however, important variations over time. Some,like Arthur Tedder in World War II, focused on an enemys transporta-tion system so as to produce paralysis. More than a decade ago, JohnBoyd and John Warden instead looked at leadership. In a sense, theirgoal was also paralysis. In addition, some, like political scientist RobertA. Pape and nonairmen like U.S. Army Generals Wesley K. Clark andGordon R. Sullivan, have argued that wars are won the old-fashionedwayby killing armies; only today airpower can kill armies faster andwith less risk than armies can kill armies.59

In sum, the natural tendency of planners and analysts to countthings, although necessary at the tactical level, has severe limitations asa strategic measure of effectiveness and can indeed distort the entirestrategy/planning process. There must be a method of translating sta-tistical destruction into a broader strategic context. If such a method isnot devised, then it will be easy to fall into the trap of being efficientlyineffectiveof destroying targets that do not matter.

Effects-based operations depend upon developing the most appro-priate measures of effectiveness. Combatant commanders must think

this issue through and recognize that effects-based operations are aniterative processdesired effects and metrics selected one day may bewrong or may change later in the war as conditions or intelligenceappraisals change. Unfortunately, there is a tendency in war to selecteither criteria based on traditional methods of war that may no longerapplyan attrition-based modelor metrics that become dogmatic andunchangeable.

The ability to measure effects, especially for military operationsabove the tactical level, has always been an enormous challenge. It has

taken the use of high speed computers, systems analysis methodology,and the revolution in precision weapons to finally make impressivestrides in this area over the past decade.

The first question air planners confronted in World War II centeredon knowing the structure of an enemys society and economy. Today,increasing globalization has made the economies, networks, and systems

58. Interview with General Michael Short, War in Europe: NATOs 1999 Waragainst Serbia over Kosovo, PBS, February 2000, website: www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/kosovo/.

59. Robert Pape,Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1996),passim; Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, Lessons That Still

Apply, Washington Times, 3 March 2001, A31; Gen. Wesley K. Clark, Waging Mod-ern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat (New York: Public Affairs, 2001),passim, but especially 221, 24142, 425.



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of most countries far more transparent than in the past. Although closedsocieties such as in North Korea still exist, the explosion in business con-tacts between countriesto say nothing of open sources like the Inter-

nethas provided enormous and readily available information. Formore hidden details on the infrastructure and inner workings of complexsystems in the countries of potential adversaries, there has been anequally dramatic explosion in the growth, pervasiveness, and complexityof intelligence-gathering sensors and methods, whether operating in theair and space or on land and sea. These new capabilities have providedenormous (perhaps too much) information for military planners toabsorb. Intelligence agencies have grown to keep pace with this delugeof data.

It is quite possible the methodologies and computer models/simula-tions used by the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff mentioned earlierhave been useful in helping planners sort through the complex processof identifying key targets in enemy countries. Although the Target Plan-ning Staff was designed to focus on nuclear operations during the ColdWar, the need to model Soviet systems and networks was apparentjustas similar analysis is required today for conventional targeting options.

The development of precision-guided munitions has been one of theremarkable and revolutionary breakthroughs in warfare during the past

few decades. The accuracy problem in World War II bombing operationsdescribed earlier is now effectively solved. Precision weapons, whetherlaser, optically, or satellite guided, have consistently achieved accuraciesof less than ten feet. In fact, the reliability of these weapons is so greatthat air planners can nowassume that if a precision weapon is launched,it will hit its target. So, the second big question facing air planners dur-ing the warcan we hit and damage what we are aiming athas beendecisively answered. The next question, did the hitting of that targethave the desired effect, is also being worked.

A recent example of putting new capabilities and methodologies touse in evaluating the effects of air attack can be seen in the formation ofthe Joint Warfare Analysis Center. Established in 1994, the AnalysisCenters activities are shrouded in secrecy.60 In essence, however, a staffof nearly 500, composed of engineers, economists, computer program-mers, mathematicians, political scientists, and others work to providemilitary planners with effects-based targeting options employing themodeling of complex systems. For example, the Center may be asked tosimulate a specific countrys electric power grid. Once it knows precisely

how such a system operates, it is then possible to determine, with

60. The Joint Warfare Analysis Center has a charmingly benign and uninforma-tive website that gives a scanty history and mission statement, with few details orinsights into its work: http://www.jwac.mil.



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also prove invaluable in determining how air campaigns work and howsometimes they do not.

Of course, many challenges still remain for these types of operations:

the need for adequate intelligence of various kinds; the distressing lack ofcultural sensitivity regarding potential adversaries; the dangers of study-ing inputs rather than outputs; and the need for models and simulationsthat adequately account for cognitive, cultural, political, and social fac-tors. These are serious problems, but for too long military commandersand planners have hidden behind the fog of war argumentthat war isso imponderable and freighted with friction and uncertainty we cannothope to rationalize it. Such an attitude is no longer acceptable.

Airmen have always hoped to achieve effects-based operations. For

much of the first century of air warfare that goal was beyond reach, duenot only to the technological limitations of aircraft and weapons, but alsoto inadequate intelligence and analytical tools. The tools and technologyhave caught up.


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