The United States-led air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has often prioritized tactical air support operations and bombings over strategic “deep attack” missions, according to a new report by Rand Corp.
But while the aggressive effort has damaged some IS strongholds, it has done little to accelerate the caliphate’s long-term defeat, the report concluded.
In “The Air War against the Islamic State: The Role of Airpower in Operation Resolve Inherent”, the researchers conclude that territory-limiting operations were seen as a measure of success during the escalated effort, which ran from 2014 to 2019.
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“Deep attack operations helped to stress ISIS’s finances and hasten its demise, but were peripheral to the overall strategy,” according to the study published on Friday. “How to eliminate the IS prototype was fundamental, the territory was the key measure of success in OIR, which, in turn, meant that fierce fighting was prioritized over deep fighting.”
The 500-page study used open source data and reports, as well as employee interviews.
The conflict was complex, waged in two countries with different authorities and rules of engagement for the United States and coalition partners. As a result, most of the US military support came from airpower, the report says.
The report divides the effort into three phases: degradation (2014-15), counterattack (2016-17) and defeat (2018-19) and focuses on offensive campaigns dedicated to geographic locations and important timelines. For example, it shows how more and more B-1B Lancer bomber and fighter sorties were dedicated to expelling ISIS fighters from Kobani, Syria, during the final four months of 2014.
Attack, fighter and bomber planes released a large amount of ammunition over a six-year period. The attacks in Iraq and Syria continue today.
In a comparison of US-led military interventions in recent decades, the air campaign against ISIS is second only to Operation Desert Storm 1990-91 in terms of weapons deployed: 115,983 to 227,000, according to the report, through the anti-ISIS effort has worked much longer.
The study did not look at other regions, such as Libya and Afghanistan, which saw ramifications of ISIS fighter groups.
Reclaiming Ground
Using airpower to support the ground forces of local partners was the main strategy for restoring the territory, especially during the first two years of the campaign, the report concluded.
“As the United States wanted a ‘limited liability, limited risk’ approach that would also produce a lasting result, the United States identified Iraqi and Syrian partner ground force operations as the primary effort,” he says. “That, in turn, meant that [close-air support, or CAS] was prioritized over strategic attack operations. “
Rand notes a long-standing debate between ground force commanders and airpower theorists about the use of CAS versus strategic attacks.
CAS actions, conducted by attack aircraft such as the A-10 Warthog, aim to cut the enemy’s maneuverability.
But airpower advocates “argue that air forces are most strategically effective when their capabilities are used in strategic attacks against an enemy’s centers of gravity – that is, high-value targets that produce disproportionate effects against military or political will. of an opponent to fight, “states the report, adding that while CAS is essential in any large-scale war, its effects” are localized and tactical. “
The researchers point out that CAS alone was not enough.
The MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper aircraft for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR, were necessary to carry out surveillance of ground forces before and during an attack on the ground. They were also indispensable for deliberate targets, or those that required weeks of scrutiny and planning. As a result, the drones were overloaded.
Refueling tanks were also in demand, hanging around for hours to supply gas to the aircraft that engaged the forces below. “None of these operations would have been possible without the tanks that refueled aircraft that were partners of the junta and the coalition,” says the report.
Slow Goal Approval
Fighter planes such as F-16 Fighting Falcons and F-15E Strike Eagles were instrumental in the early days of the air campaign, flying 1,784 combined combat sorties through the end of 2014.
Even with the rapid pace of air operations, it was difficult to examine the effects of airpower during the first months of the war “because of intelligence problems that prevented the development of deliberate targets,” according to the report. These targets included ISIS safe havens, where the group centralized cash reserves and sources of revenue, such as oil facilities.
Critics argue that Operation Inherent Resolve was also hampered by “an excessive focus on preventing collateral and casualty damage”.
ISIS fighters recognized this and quickly began to modify their behavior, making it more difficult for US and coalition forces to distinguish them from civilians, according to the report.
After that, the targeting time was delayed: American pilots reported that the process of approving dynamic targets – those that were not defined during the planning stages of a mission or sought in advance – usually took “more than 30 minutes and sometimes until hours “before they could attack, says the report.
“Interestingly, we often heard that Iraqi ground forces were frustrated by the slow target approval process and wanted the coalition’s air strikes to better respond to their needs,” said the researchers, adding that the views of the Iraqi government, partners Syrians and other coalition members “may have been different”.
Airspace over Syria became even more contested when Russia entered the battlefield in 2015, along with Iranian-made drones.
The pace picked up when the target engagement authority was delegated to the lower echelons. In 2017, then Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis credited President Donald Trump for that decision.
“[Trump] delegated authority at the right level to move aggressively and in a timely manner against the enemy’s vulnerabilities, “Mattis told reporters during a press conference at the time.
While this was most effective against small, moving targets, the results “improved the results of the battlefield,” according to the report.
Another problem, according to the report, was that pilots were reluctant to engage forces other than ISIS, given the limited US intervention strategy, and needed to be reminded that they could take action in self-defense.
So, Lieutenant. General Jeffrey Harrigian, the Combined Force Air Component Commander, had “to empower airmen and remind them that they were not only supported, but were also required to perform this defensive mission”
In June 2017, an F / A-18E Super Hornet conducted the first air-to-air slaughter of the U.S. armed forces involving a manned aircraft in nearly two decades when it shot down a Syrian Su-22 Fitter south of Taqbah. That same month, the F-15Es shot down two pro-Syrian armed Shaheed-129 drones.
Lessons for the future
The report recommends troops to improve “stunted” skills, including coordinated intelligence collection and selection. There were many shortcomings in the deliberate targeting process, the researchers said, due to the lack of drones and the lack of guidance from the appropriate chain of command channels.
The researchers found that the Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, the US-led international coalition, had few resources to carry out both the tactical struggle and the targeting process.
“After decades of flying primarily on surveillance missions with little more than CAS and dynamic targets since 9/11, the ability and capacity of the joint community to plan and develop deliberate action
attack operation in deep atrophied areas “, they wrote.
It also affected the Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, where airmen needed to “build a defined target from scratch”.
“This meant that many professionals had no experience in applying these processes to real-world operations and ‘muscle memory’ to execute them quickly,” according to the report.
The researchers also emphasized that the pilots took defensive breath more seriously only after they were allowed to do so. In order to better prepare airmen for potential peer conflict, the rules of self-defense of engagement in air-to-air operations “should be emphasized” before the mission begins, they wrote.
– Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @ Oriana0214.
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