Friday, May 12, 1972
A Low Rating For Sen. Gravel As Air Power Prophet
by Brig. Gen. (Ret.) S.L.A. Marshall
Now that the Mike Gravel papers have followed the Pentagon papers and the Anderson papers, the wordsmiths who fatten dictionaries should take note.A paper is no longer simply a theme or part of the makings. By latest definition it is classified information filched from an official file with the object of making headlines when it is "zingy" enough.Due to the content of his papers, Sen. Gravel deserves to be rated among the high priests and prophets of air power, though if Who's Who has him cased, he has not had one day of service or heard one bomb go boom.Earlier prophets, such as Billy Mitchell or Giulio Douhet, had no such handicap. Though they operated in an era of minibombs and milk-run aircraft, their backgrounds of experience, qualified them to be great claimers and they went all out.Douhet wrote that once air power grew great wings there wouldn't be an alp where a rifleman could hide and the survival of all large cities would be in doubt. He said it 20 years before the atom bomb was dreamed.Mitchell forecast that in the next great war armies and navies would be dead and only air power would have the stuff of victory. He didn't live to see World War II make him a bum prophet.Now we come to Mike Gravel, the latest prophet. His pitch is that air bombardment is practically valueless, and hence the President deceived the country by relying on it.Apart from the purported revelation of air power impotence, the Gravel papers said mainly that in the conduct of war, government agencies and individuals do not always agree in their estimates of the impact of operations, how the enemy may be thinking and what should come next.Is there any news in that? The same thing has happened in every war. It also occurs within families. Now if we could just get on with the job of producing faultless humans we could develop infallible institutions. Currently there is much caterwauling about the overclassifying of official paper. The basic problem, however, is the over-classifying of people when there are too few equally strong and wise to fill all of the slots.True, it is a bit disappointing to learn that Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker advised the new Nixon administration that he expected a turnaround on the Communist side of the table following the inauguration. The usually hard-headed Bunker was either thinking wishfully or yielding to Henry Kissinger's hunches. The cleavage in the United States had much earlier convinced Hanoi that time was on the Communist side, as every experienced field hand soon learned. The military certainly did not anticipate any change in Paris. The lifting of air bombardment of the north dashed any such hope.But if Bunker was fooled, he was not more so than the Lyndon Johnson crisis managers when they concluded early that a token air bombardment would make the Hanoi crowd buckle. There was a gross, fundamental miscalculation. Nowhere, but in the attack on pantellaria in World War II has air bombardment on its own brought about submission. On that island the small Italian garrison was already scared witless, well knowing that any other end would be more miserable and deadly.The heavies in the Gravel papers are the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Once Mr. Nixon was seated, they recommended resumption of the bombing of the north, a practical proposal militarily speaking but politically hazardous and almost certain to be rejected by the President under the circumstances. The pre-election suspension of bombing by LBJ had pretty much closed the door.Gravel's white knight is the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA being his authority for the statement that strategic bombardment north of the DMZ was pretty much a failure. It is difficult to read this citation and keep a straight face, the CIA being little better qualified to do bomb and battlefield survey than is Mike Grave. In view of the Bay of Pigs follies, anyone who still gives full credit to the judgment of the CIA on a tactical or strategic matter would peddle sewage and call it wild honey.Worse than reckless, it is simple damfoolishness to discount strategic bombing or question that North Vietnam was weakened by its use, thought it was much too daintily applied. Like every other weapon, an air bomb is most effective when it hits directly on target, which is too seldom. In battle it takes more than 200 artillery or mortar rounds to K.O. one man, and twice as many bullets. The Gravel papers come up with the weird statistic that 1 ½ Charleys bite the dust for every U.S. sortie made. Well, maybe.That is still no way to measure the value of strategic bombardment. What counts is its disrupting impact, morally and materially, the added friction to operations, the delaying effect, the drain on nervous energy. As for the folk tale that people harden and resistance stiffens when the bombs begin to fall, Sen. Gravel probably believes that one, also."A Low Rating for Sen. Gravel as Air Power Prophet", by Brig. Gen. (Ret.) S.L.A. Marshall, published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes Friday, May 12, 1972 and reprinted from European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, a Department of Defense publication copyright, 2002 European and Pacific Stars and Stripes.