School of War - Ep. 6: Frank Ledwidge on Airpower

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

Biography Frank Ledwidge is a senior fellow of law and strategy at the Royal Air Force College in Cranwell, England. Ledwidge served as an officer in the Royal Naval Reserve and later worked in British foreign policy, focusing on the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central Asia. In 2015, Ledwidge earned his doctorate in War Studies at the King's College in London. He is the author of several books, including Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain's Afghan War, and Aerial Warfare: The Battle for the Skies.  Times 01:14 - Introduction 04:27 - Origins and importance of airpower in the World War I 10:43 - From air reconnaissance to air bombings 12:43 - The Interwar Period and the "prophets" of air war 17:57 - How air bombing theories influence British and American World War II strategy 22:04 - Air raid casualties 29:05 - Control of the air during the Cold War 34:49 - Perceptions of the U.S.'s mistaken bombing of the Chinese Embassy 36:49 - Airpower in modern wars 38:57 - Theories of air warfare applied to space Recorded November 2, 2021

The dream that air power would become an independent and decisive force for victory in war began early and died hard. Early innovations in reconnaissance, attack, air-to-air combat, climax during the Second World War, when strategic bombing campaigns over Europe and the Pacific devastated cities but were decisive only in combination with other elements of war fighting. By the end of the Cold War, precision munitions offered a renewal of the dream that casualty-free wars could be fought, at least for the victors. With unmanned aircraft, the militarization of space, and the new significance of the

competition in the cyber realm, what does the future of air power in war hold? Join us as we talk things through with the man who literally wrote the book on the subject. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. And the people who knock these buildings down will hear all of them. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean, and thanks for joining School of War. On today's episode, we're going to talk about error power. We're going to give a sort of very short introduction to the concept in its major themes, and who better to lead us through that, then Frank Ledwidge, who's the Senior Fellow in Law and Strategy at the Royal Air Force College in Cranwell, England, and the author of Aerial Warfare, The Battle for the Skies, which is published by Oxford University Press, and which appears in their very short introduction series.

Very grateful to Frank for joining us. And, sir, maybe you could start by just telling us a little bit about yourself. You have extensive military experience and maybe tell us as well about how you got interested in the subject matter and why you decided to write this book. Well, thanks, Aaron. It's a real pleasure to be here. It's a privilege. Anyhow, so I started my career as a trial lawyer.

I did law to Oxford University. I served or worked, I should say, for about seven years as a trial lawyer. For most of that time, I was in the reserve forces in the Navy, and I transited across from the sort of maritime approach into the joint environment in the intelligence world. And when the Balkans came up, I got called up, actually, I arranged myself to be called up, and spent about seven years in the Balkans

as a human intelligence officer initially and then as a human rights officer for one of the international organisations. I then got called up in a military role into Iraq, relevantly spent also some time in Helmand in Afghanistan as a justice advisor for the British mission there, did much the same role just as a security officer for the British embassy in Libya during the war there in 2011, 2012, which by the way was there on the centenary. of the world's first airstrike, which was conducted by Italians on Turkish forces there in October 1911. After that, I took a post very happily as a lecturer at the Royal Air Force College, which is in Krammel and Lincolnshire, essentially teaching aviation history, strategic practice,

and theory to our cadets there. Cramm was a little bit different from Colorado Springs. The course So it's very short. It was then it was nine months. It's gone down now to six. We needed to condense the history of air power so that the students or cadets could assimilate it pretty quickly. And I thought it would be a nice idea if we could bring that course together and indeed, perhaps a bit more freely discuss things in a book. So I pitched this to OUP and accepted. I should also say written a couple of other books about British military failure in Iraq and Afghanistan for Yale, which came before this one. But, I really took an interest in air power.

There's so many, but I guess loads of listeners as well have. From when I was a little boy, you know, I always liked the aircraft and military history and try to visit relevant places as much as I could and could identify all the Second World War aircraft. I suppose I'm in a generation where I knew a lot of the people who had fought in the Second World War and was very excited to hear their accounts and carried that into my adult years, I guess a lot of us have. So it was such fun to write this book. Well, maybe we can come back around to the question of military failure.

Towards the end of the episode, you and I are both veterans of Helmand Province. Why don't we start at the start and go back all the way to the First World War? You quote in your book, the Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces, Fosch, saying at the outset of the war, quote, aviation may be fine as a sport, but as an instrument of war, it is nothing. So what happened next? Well, that's right. General, as he then wasn't, he became Fosh, Marshall Fosh, said Cériand air power. And Kitchener and various other allied leaders have been attributed to similar views, Hague and whatnot. We all know of the old trope about lions led by donkeys, and there's some truth to that, you know, bullheaded, out-of-date generals and so forth.

But very many of them weren't like that. Certainly Fosch was one of those, Haig is arguable, although he has his partisans. But it's fair to say that Fosh found out very, very, very quickly that air power was absolutely critical. Now, it had replaced cavalry as the key reconnaissance arm, not only for the infantry, but especially as the lines solidified on the Western Front into trench warfare, particularly for artillery. where 75% of the casualties were dished out from artillery. But very early in the campaign, the role of air power was absolutely central. There was a battle of the Marne, famous incident,

where a French aircraft, which was flown by, I can't remember now his name, it's in the book anyway. The observer was a sign of a famous watchmaking family, which I'll think of. They observed a gap in the German lines, which French forces were able to exploit, that saved Paris. I think it's fair to say that that particular observation saved the Western Front, because had Paris fallen, as it was very close to doing, that that would have put an end to the war in the West.

Not to the war in the East, which of course was equally brutal and large scale. But in that case, the Germans were under the Eastern Front at roughly the same time. they were under heavy pressure from the Russians. And the Battle of Tannenberg, a very similar thing happened. Air power, or air power in the form of a couple of rickety old aircraft, but essentially involving the reconnaissance role, observed the movements of Russian forces. And General Hindenburg there was able to use the information he received

to strike appropriately and win the very famous Battle of Tannenberg, which stabilized the line and continued the war in the East. East for the Germans. So air power acted against the Germans in that respect in the West, but in the East was crucial for preserving their continued role as a force in being there in North East Poland. So from the very start of the war,

senior generals began to realize the potential of air power as a reconnaissance asset. And that solidified as the war went on. And once you understand its power for reconnaissance, the thought then must quickly follow, well, gosh, we need to do something about the other guy's ability to reconnoiter us. And so what comes as a consequence of that? Initially, in 1914, early 1915, you had pilots and aircraft taking shots at each other. But it was realized, at least initially by the Germans, that the best gun platform was the aircraft

itself. So you're going to see in a lot of first world aircraft, crews of two, you have a pilot and you have a gunner. And the gunner has a machine gun on a swivel. And that went on into the Second World War, at least until power of turrets were invented. But it was quickly realized by the Germans, particularly under the guidance of a Dutch engineer, Fokker, that the aircraft itself was the best gun platform.

And that's where the fighter came from in the form of the Fokker-Eindecor, which in German means monoplane, which dominated the skies for the first year. And it had two advantages. First, as a stable gun platform. and second me, most importantly, there was something called an interruptor mechanism. Because if you're going to fire, use the aircraft as a gun platform, a propeller aircraft,

you have to find a mechanism whereby the guns can shoot through the propellers. Now, there were certain French fighter pilots, who, particularly the French, who took the rather risky perspective, that what we can do is we can, we can fire our gun through the propellers, put some armour plate on the propellers, to dive to deflect bullets away and hope for the best. One of the more famous pilots, the most famous pilots who adopted that particular technique with some success actually was Roland Garros.

So those of those listeners who follow tennis or know Wimbledon and all the other tennis centres in Australia, US, etc. And of course the one in France called Roland Garros, it's named after that particular fighter pilot who managed not to shoot himself down as many others did with that technique. Anyhow, the Fokker Eye and had the interrupter mechanism, and it cut British and French reconnaissance advantage to pieces,

really, for the first year or so of the war until lay themselves found out the mechanism, actually through some pretty good espionage and technical intelligence, and develop their own interruptive mechanisms. And that was the fighter. The role of the fighter, of course, is to control the air, or is to challenge for control of the air. Fighters themselves, and that's the case now and then, because one of the messages I want to put through in this book is that the roles of air power, and there are four, there's control of the air which we'll talk you about now, there's attack, which will come to, there's reconnaissance which we've already touched on, and then there's mobility. Now, all of these roles essentially have remained the same from the early days, 1914, right through today, and will remain the same all the way into space, frankly. You talked us through how the reconnaissance function leads to the need to achieve air superiority.

How does attack come up? How does bombing come about in the First World War? Yeah, it was found pretty early on that the strafing of trenches, which essentially means being attacked by machine guns from above, had limited effect. But the application of explosives from the air could achieve some effect. The key example of that was the bombing of London in 1917 by aircraft. And there have been Zeppelin's doing it. The campaign against London and other cities was actually extremely effective. It killed about 700 people, hundreds or thousands more, including many children.

And the political effect of that bombing of cities was truly strategic, in that it prompted the British to develop a system. and it's systems, again, that run through this book. So you have the roles and you have air defence systems and indeed attack systems. And they came from the attack on London particularly. And the system stopped the attacks. It's called the London Area Defence Zone then.

And the attacks themselves forced the foundation of a dedicated air force, the Royal Air Force of the World's first dedicated air arm. separate from the other services. So attack, that attack role at the strategic level, which you and I might take to mean essentially attacking in enemy cities or

key assets, that the fundamentals were there in the First World War. I could talk with great length about how successful they were aside from that. They weren't really very effective materially. That they were affected to the extent that the impression they gave is that cities were

no longer, particularly in Britain, and very well defended, places such as that we're no longer immune from warfare. And of course, that'll come to be brutally illustrated with the events of the second World War. But let's talk a bit about the interwar period and about the profits, as they are often called, of air power. Talk us through the most important of them, the theorists and authors of doctrine in that period, what they predicted. And then we'll talk about what actually happens in Spain and then the whole world in the 40s.

There are three major prophets or seers of air warfare, and they looked at the experience of the First World War. The most important of them, I think, remains Duet, who is an Italian general. So we have Duet at first. Duet comes up with two ideas. Now, all of these have been seen in the First World War, but the best way to gain control of the air, to gain command of the air, and you call this book, That Command of the Air in Italian, is to destroy your enemy's air bases. Simple as that.

and you can exercise that control of the air then freely. This is a second idea and make air forces and navy wrong. Armies and navies are irrelevant and attack their cities and force your enemy into submission that way through terror. And he advocated the use of firebombing, gas and every weapon that could be brought to bear. Now, inhuman though it was, and Du Hay conceded that, he said it's far better than trench warfare or the appalling mayhem that he'd seen on the Italian front, Caporetto and elsewhere, and of course on the Western

Front. So he said, look, that's the most humane way to conduct warfare, and air power offers us that opportunity. So we gain Commander of the Air, we're destroying enemies' Air Force, so he can't do the same to us. And then we use our Command of the Air to destroy their population centres. Mitchell, Brigadier General Mitchell, also had two central ideas. The first was that navies are no longer, or should no longer be going concerns as massive sinks of investment. The battleship is finished, and he famously demonstrated that by using his aircraft to sink an old German ship that the Americans have got hold of as part of the war reparations

called Ostfriesland. He sunk it with 20 or so aircraft. By the way, the whole thing was a setup. He'd arranged a particular rules with the admirals, that there'd be one wave of bombing, and then they'd check damage, and there'd be another, and they'd check more damage. And what the admiral's actually saw was bomb after bomb after bomb fall near this battleship. They weren't allowed to go near it until it sank. I don't think much has changed about the defense industry in the Pentagon to this day.

No, they got their own back on him eventually in 1925. He was cashiered for insubordination. And the final prophet or seer is a guy called Trenschard. Now, Trenschard is known even today as any day as the father of the Royal Air Force. His approach, which is like much else of what Trenschard did, was based on some very clever ex post-factor rationalisation things that really didn't happen in the First World War, but he said they did. But his idea was that the effect of morale on a enemy population is 20 times greater than material damage.

That's partly convenient reasoning on his part because the damage that the Royal Air Force had pitched out to German cities in the First World War was very minimal, but the idea was that the morale damage is far greater, which it wasn't, but that was the argument placed. Now, that played very, very much into the way the Royal Air Force dealt with its bombing campaign in the second world, what's something called morale bombing. So you have these three Cers, one, terror, game command of the air, destroy enemies, air bases, two, that's duet, two. Mitchell, navies are no longer relevant. We can jump over with air forces. That's a sort of collateral to his main idea, which is we use air power to destroy an enemy's capability to fight, factories, networks and so forth, and trend shard, we attack an enemy's will to fight. In some ways, and I'm curious if you agree with this, it seems like that period's parallel today is with respect to cyber warfare. Yeah, I think it's a very fair comparison. I think I'm

just given to think about the way that some cyber attackers are looking at strategy now. You know, do you, do you, if you attack an enemy, let's say you take out the water supply of the city I live near here in England, Oxford. So you're threatened to do so. Now what are you attacking there? You're attacking the capability of the population. Yeah, of course you are. But essentially what you're attacking is that you're creating an atmosphere of fear, playing into,

into the way that those people will look at the possibility of conflict. And that goes right back into the idea, both of terror bomb. from duet and of attacking enemies will to fight as per trenchard. Now, of course, they weren't the first people to come across these ideas. You know, we have a Genghis Khan, was a great practitioner of terror as a form of warfare and the other generals as well. But to apply it to new technology was their innovation. And of course, we're at a very early stage in cyber and space now. We're at the same stage in space warfare as we were in air warfare in 1920s. Really, this new thinking is coming out all the time.

To take it up to the war, then, let's talk about, you know, these famous figures of the war. You have bomber Harris leading the British strategic air campaign. You have Curtis LeMay in the 8th Air Force. Talk about how these theorists and in particular these ideas of, you know, terror bombing and targeting the world to fight on the one hand and industrial targeting or going after means of production. On the other hand, influenced the British and American ways of war. they were all Harris and LeMay particular were and Goering and the other German commanders. They were, as most military commanders, are extremely ruthless people and they had to be. But they weren't inhuman and they were considered individuals and they were looking at ways of ending the war with minimal cost, especially to their own side.

Now, Obama Harris is an extremely divisive figure. Arthur Chief Marshal, Sir Arthur Harris, a very divisive figure still. But someone who, he had the, his aircrews called him Butch for butcher. But it was an affectionate nickname and an ironic one because he was willing to take huge casualties for what he did. But they loved him for his uncompromising approach. Now, Harris is credited with the idea of this of morale bombing. The reason that the British were forced to firebomb German cities was essentially because that's the only thing they could do with the kit they had. They tried what the Germans did in the Battle of Britain.

They tried daylight attacks on military targets, only to find that like the Germans, they were shot out of the sky at a very high. rate, non-sustainable rate. So they defaulted, as the Germans did, to night bombing, and they did so for three or four years. But what the British did was develop technologies, or built technology on top of the technology that already developed, and the investment they'd made in their bombing, their bombing force, which began before the war. And they built on that to form a force which was capable in one night, in favourable for them conditions, of annihilating a city through firestorms. the first time they did that was in 1943 in in in uh i think it's 43 in hamburg operation gomara where 40,000 people were killed. It's probably the bloodiest today in western

Europe's history, certainly since the 30 years war. By the way, Albert's fair, Hitler's architect reported that in his view five more of those were the land of the war and of course Harris was quite keen to do as many as he could have those but never could never achieve the same effect prior to Dresden later in the war. And what were the conditions sorry just to go into that for a second. What did he need that he was unable to replicate to achieve that? You needed good weather, good location. Hamburg's easy to find. It's on the coast.

And therefore, the technologies could locate it. All the bombers found their targets by that time, anyway, it didn't always do. It had been a dry season. You had a city that at that time was very beautiful, that's a beautiful in all there, but it was a Hansa city. It was made essentially in wood.

and the British were able to exploit all those conditions to put together. And I think there's a fair argument to say it was deliberate, what's called a firestorm, where the bombing and the attendant fires created essentially its own weather system, which blew hurricanes of flame and fire through the city where essentially no one could survive. It was achieved again in Fort Time, February 1945, and later that month in Dresden again and one or two other occasions.

And in situations like that, you get tens of thousands and not just thousands of casualties. And that's exactly what happened in Hamburg. The city was essentially destroyed, which is why you go there now. And you're going to see very, very little of the old Hamburg left. And just to illustrate this, I'll say I was recently in Mainz on the Rhine, which, as you know, was the target of any number of raids, both by the Americans and the Brits. And there was one particularly bloody one, I believe in February of 1945, where a couple of thousand people were killed. I took a tour of their air raid tunnels.

It's the old city fortress has these tunnels that existed were built underground in, I think the 18th century, as tunnels to be used by sappers to build up the siegeing force to blow up the siegeing forces from underground. Then they use those tunnels in the 40s to protect the civilian population. or at least those members of the civilian population who qualified, according to the Nazi party, to get into the shelters from the bombing. And the worst night was, you know, a successful raid from the British point of view, but from the German point of view, what they did was they accidentally let everyone out of the tunnels too early. And so they got caught in the bombing. Actually, what happened every other night was people stayed in the tunnels and there was substantial property damage.

For the most part, the, you know, the death count was much lower than what I think the Brits would have hoped for. And that seems to frequently have been the outcome of these raids. Well, yeah, that's right. If you look at the records of Baltimore Command, you'll see that most raids resulted in four, 500, four, five hundred deaths and several thousand injuries. But it's a cumulative effect as well, Aaron, you know. And by the way, those later war raids, and the most famous of which was Dresden, for which the British get nailed, but by the way, the Americans were heavily involvement

as well. You get four times, you get mines and dozens of others actually after it was clear that the main purpose of city bombing had completely changed. And now what was happening, that this is the really controversial piece. So before D-Day, let's suppose putting it very simplicity, but before D-Day, Harris had an argument that morale bombing could work. Let's call it morale bombing for want of a better term. It was separating German industry from its attempt, you know, suppliers, it was shattering their economy to some extent, was taking up huge numbers of guns, of personnel, of damage control, people's civil defence, which we often forget.

By the way, concerning the air campaign, those who oppose it today and say, well, we kill 440,000 Germans for what? And the answer is that 65% of the German fighter force and a similar proportion of artillery tubes were pointed into the sky rather than it's Russian or British or American tanks. Plus two million other personnel could be used for other things. In addition to the vast amounts of damage that the Germans sustained in both the American and British campaigns. The British formed at night, the Americans in the day.

The Americans, just to move on to them, did try their Mitchell theory on the Germans, which was to attack the Germans, industrial network. And the trouble was with precision bombing. The trouble was that precision in Arizona didn't translate across to precision in Europe, especially when their formations being cut pieces by German fighters. Eventually they got the edge on the Germans with the deployment of long-range fighters, namely the P-38s and especially P-51 Mustangs, powered by the British Merlin engine. By the end of the war, the point is, or the last year, the British and American

bombers were ranging over Germany, unintentioned. interfered with by German Air Force. But here's the thing, Aaron, here's one of the other key things that runs through the book, is that, and this goes back to do it in a sense, you can't necessarily get commanded the air just by destroying your enemy's air force, because the enemy has a say in the form of ground-based air defence systems. About 50% of British and American bombers were shot down by flack, but that's to say, by guns. And towards the end of the war, percentage was much, much higher because the German,

Air Force is no longer a going concern. What the American Air Force did in 1944 was essentially destroy the Luftwaffe as a going concern with their long-range fighters and a combination of that and their industrial network theory being applied to the German Aero industry, attacking the engine factories, attacking the fuel, especially the fuel, so that the German air crew didn't have time to train, to replace their pilots, to replace their fighters, to challenge the excellently trained American fighters with unlimited fuel, and effectively over a period of six months or so, the German Luftwaffe was utterly destroyed by American airpower,

a combination of its brilliant fighters and its very well-applied bombing campaign. The British, slightly different, slightly different approach. Fair to say then that the role of air power in the war was vastly significant. Do you think it's the case that the vision of the prophets for its primacy is totally fulfilled, partially fulfilled, not fulfilled at all in the war? I think it's fair to say that this idea of attacking an enemy's will to fight did not work in Germany. There's very little evidence of that. The reports after the war indicated that, if anything, Germans are strengthened by massive losses of civilians. But I think one thing that was indicated was in the Second World War was Mitchell's ideas.

of what's called Industrial School, actually the Air Corps Tactical School, which was a child essentially Mitchell, still exists actually in Maxwell Air Base, in another form. But their ideas, which they developed through the 30s, the bomber mafia, as they were called, of destroying an enemy's ability to fight through attacking key nodes in principle worked. And we see that.

that amply evidenced in the later part of the war, particularly in the campaign called Operation Point Blank, which was just before D-Day, where the idea was to separate the German forces in northern France from any supplies or fuel coming their way or reinforcements from the south of France and Germany itself, which worked brilliantly. And that was contingent, of course, upon annihilating the Air Force and allowing them to range much more freely than the otherwise could have done. So I think Mitchell was vindicated. They'll come to Dewey when we come on to the Arab-Israeli wars, where we see his ideas really coming to the fourth,

particularly of gaining command of the air. Trenchard, less so. But it's also worth, you know, it's also worth saying this. We talk about these profits, and air power theorists talk about this, perhaps a little too much. Harris at a meeting in the, which I actually heard, or read the transcripts, in the 70s, he was asked, did you take any account of duet in your planning of the bombing campaign?

And he said, never heard of him, never had anything. Didn't need to. Just to take us through the Cold War for a second, I have successfully indoctrinated my three-year-old into being an enormous Chuck Yeager fan. And of course, he recently passed away. And one of my favorite sayings of Yeager, who was full of them, was that the first time I saw a jet, I shot it down. After the war, we had these enormously significant technological developments.

What are the big trends of the Cold War as far as the development of air power is concerned? The first thing that comes to mind, of course, is development of the jet, which makes things a lot quicker and actually far more efficient. You know, we see that first of all in the Korean War. It's not a forgotten war, but certainly it's air power. It's in the length that the long shadow of what it did has been forgotten. The US essentially destroyed North Korea as an advanced state insofar as it was, and it certainly is advanced to South Korea at the time, and killed somewhere far north of a million people,

and that legacy subsists today. There are perennials in air warfare, which essentially centre around the roles and the relative supremacy of roles. You know, you go through periods where attack is the case, key element. So you have that in Vietnam. You go through periods where control of the air and the prevention of attack is is is is in vogue and that you get that in the 70s and the 80s I'd suggest. And now we're into I think I think we're into a period where I start intelligence of its target acquisition and reconnaissance. That's that's the key role where perhaps much of the moment,

if not most resources go if you absolutely have 35 of course. So you get these ebbs and flows of of roles and emphases. And those are often based on personality. So in the US, you have the bomber mafia which subsisted in the form of Curtis and May, strategic air command into the 60s. He then had the sort of fighter boys and didn't quite dominate in the 70s and so on.

And today, today I think we've got a far more nuanced air power leadership. But yeah, so that's all I'd say to that. There's one moment, a post-Cold War moment, I'd like to zoom in on before we talk about the present day a bit more. And that's Kosovo in 1999. This was a moment where in certain respects, just to not to beat the dead horse, but to go back to the profits, in certain respects, it seemed as though air power had finally fulfilled its promise of achieving decisive strategic results, you know, against a significant adversary, not a negligible

adversary, not, you know, terrorists in the desert or something like that, but an actual state with state objectives. Does that hold up as a judgment in retrospect? In retrospect, it was a confused campaign act. The initial phase of it involved the attempt to locate and destroy Serbian ground forces who were at the time conducting a campaign of ethnic cleansing. And it's very difficult to strike effectively small groups of people who are murdering civilians and they were not struck effectively. So then focus moved to infrastructure. And then to the capital, with some mixed success, especially when the Chinese embassy managed to get bombed by mistake.

It was a genuine mistake. It was quite a major error. And it was only when Belgrade was attacked that the Serbian leadership, which was really the key element here, felt threatened enough to go to the table. Meloshevich did not care about how many thousands or hundreds of Serbs, soldiers were killed. In fact, the more the better from his perspective. But it's when his personal interest being affected politically and there was a chance that, you know, that other interests

might decide to take an interest in his continuing as a leader. It was only when that happened that Milosevic went, as I say, went to the negotiating table and went to the Russians actually to affect that. So it was a confused campaign. But I'd say it has a very, very, it has a huge legacy, the Balkan campaign to, I think, a lesser-executive. To, I think, a lesser-executive. the Iraqi, various Iraq wars. And that's this, that Russia and China saw that there was little point in taking on the West in the air. They were just going to get shot down. Their kit wasn't good enough. The doctrine wasn't good enough. The training was nothing like NATO or American standards as far as you can draw a distinction. So they thought, well, how can we offset that?

And the result we have now is that both Russia and China have adopted strategies very firmly based around absolutely superb air defense systems, ground-based air defense systems. By the way, something similar happened with the Lake 60s, early 70s in Egypt, where the Egyptian Air Force was destroyed on the ground, as per Dua in 1967. And Egyptians and Russians got together and thought, well, look, we can't take on the Israelis in the air. So let's take them on from the ground. And they did so very effectively with ground-based air defence systems, which eventually Israelis found a way around that in the 80s. And so we're going to have to find a way around the Russian and Chinese offset of what we call anti-axis aeronar, which is a child, I think, of the Balkan campaigns.

It's a bastard child of the Balkan campaigns and to less recent Iraq. And indeed, the only damage that the Serbs did to be into NATO, So they shot down to US aircraft, including a stealth fighter from the ground using very innovative ground-based air defense systems, extremely well-trained people. Other point I would make just about what you just said. Someone recently pointed out to me that the bomb, the mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in 1999 lives on in Chinese culture and thought in a way that is way out of proportion to the extent that it lives on in the United States.

Yeah. In the United States, we sort of moved. passed it. We apologized. But I think most importantly, there's no, you know, reasonable American who thinks that we did it on purpose, right? It was sort of an idea that's dismissed out of hand. It was an obvious mistake, a terrible mistake, mistake that shouldn't have happened, but a mistake. And that is not apparently the case in Chinese sort of discussion of the incident to this day. And it has a significant role in their thinking in popular attitudes towards the United States, that this couldn't possibly have been accidental, given the past.

of American air power, given its precision, given our intelligence capabilities. There's just no way. Now, the fact that doesn't seem to make any strategic sense doesn't appear to matter very much. Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it, perceptions? I think I was in Hellman probably before you. So this was in Isaiah 7, 8. I remember being told then that the common perception amongst Helmandis was that the British were deliberately failing to deliver on their promises to provide development, and construction and all those lovely stuff, as revenge for the Battle of My Wand, which took place in 1880.

Afghans defeated roundy, straight up defeated us. But the perception was that our failure to deliver our promises was absolutely deliberate. The rationale was, well, look, we see all these helicopters flying around, all these troops in their body armour, all this expensive kit, and everybody cruising around

and big cars and tanks and armored vehicles and what heavy. you. And people like that can't possibly be unable to build a few schools for us or some roads like Russians did. Therefore, it must be deliberate. Well, that speaks to the, in some ways, to our theme. I was there nine and ten. And, you know, it's, it's fair to say that we were tactically very successful. Anytime there was a fight and air power played some role in that. Operationally, we did fine, though there's a case to be made that in certain respects, we were frequently stalemated.

And then strategically, I mean, in the long run of the war, there's no way to argue it was a success. It was a dramatic failure in the end. And, you know, five times the amount of air power capability couldn't have changed that. It seems to me, I'm curious to know your take on air power in modern warfare, especially the kind we've been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Well, I mean, you're right about the relevance of air power,

of course, a predominant, Well, there were two roles there, weren't there? There was the I-Star role and the mobility role. Same for all counter-insurgency campaigns, both I-Star and mobility are predominance. And that goes right back into the early days of the 20s. Same thing, reconnaissance, mobility. I mean, I come back to this business of air dominance, you know.

I mean, I'm not sure. Obviously, it's the case that the Taliban or the Israeli Taliban or whichever group it was that they were fighting at a given time, were afraid of air power. But it never offset the strategic advantage they had of a coherent narrative, incapable though they were realistically challenging that airpower. Same applies, of course, in Vietnam or in any insurgency, you care to take into account.

Of course, in Vietnam, the Vietcom could challenge and will shot down thousands of American aircraft. kind or another from the ground. But that speaks to me to Klausovits ultimately. You know, if you have a political narrative, strategic narrative that's coherent and generally accepted, then you're likely to prevail over your opponent who does not. However many helicopters or F-15s or tornadoes, you've got. You mentioned space warfare earlier in our conversation. Is it as a kind of warfare a natural extension of aerial warfare? It is the same sort of logic apply in a kind of linear fashion,

or are there new considerations that are different in kind when it comes to space? This is a huge debate now. And theorists of space, I teach space power for the Air Force. Theories of space power, theorists of space power, now tend to look at things more from a naval angle. So they look at space control as an analogy to sea control, to the wide oceans of low orbit space. But I think when you get out into cis-lunar space and indeed lunar space,

which we will be getting to far quicker, I think, than most people think. And that's where air power analogies, I think, start to strike again, Because you have to defend mobile assets in dynamic space, huge, vast three-dimensional spaces. You have the idea, I think, which currently isn't very present in space power, enthusiasts of mobility. We're beginning to see Space Force look at that now, but only beginning as SpaceX starts to operationalize it, Starship, which I think will be a massive step change in space capabilities, these which NASA are not ready for, no space force yet, that's right, I know.

So I think there are analogies to both sea power and their power, but in fairness to the space people, I think they have their own domain, and they can learn from both, and indeed, Klausovitz and Sun Tzu and others, but they're going to have to develop their own ideas. I mean, just because of the, you know,

the unforgiving volume of space. Frank Ledwidge, author of aerial warfare, We've covered a great deal of ground or space. And it's been a fascinating conversation. I'm really very, very grateful to you. And maybe we can have you back some time to go into more detail on any of the dozens of topics that we've covered that probably merit their own episodes. It's been great. Thank you very much for the opportunity.

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