You HAVE to control the air in desert warfare

~ Anyone who has to fight, even with the most modern weapons, against an enemy in complete command of the air, fights like a savage against modern European troops, under the same handicaps and with the same chances of success ~
Erwin Rommel

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Rommel said that based on his experiences while fighting over the very same ground that's being contested in the Libyan civil war and if anything, technological developments in the six decades since his campaign have made the statement even more true.

Air power is not a panacea. There are many conditions (mountains, jungles, urban areas, insurgencies) where its power is muted to some degree or the other. But in the open desert, far from dense civilian targets, the fact is that no army can survive, let alone prevail, against an opponent that controls the air.

Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi is just the latest to discover this truth of modern warfare.
The latest reports from the front indicate that the government forces are in full flight after being pounded by U.S.-led air strikes. The rebels appear to be chasing them in pickup trucks.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110326/ap_on_re_af/af_libya

This isn't the slightest bit surprising. There was never any question that Western air support would be militarily decisive -- all the questions about the long-term wisdom of the intervention rest on political grounds. Color me still skeptical about how we get out of this, but to the extent that we're in, it's good to see success.

The perils of war coverage in the media

Rebel MiG-23 shot down over Benghazi on March 19

Trying to get an accurate sense of what's going on in a combat zone from the mass media is not a new problem, as a moment's perusal of newspapers from the U.S. Civil War or World War II reveals.

To a large extent this is a problem without a solution. The inherently limited viewpoints available from professional journalists and the random eyewitnesses that pop up are guaranteed to miss the critical parts. Even historians working long after the fact -- or even actual participants -- can't know the whole story. This isn't an excuse for simply dismissing news accounts of a military crisis whole, but merely a caution that the inherent limitations are kept in mind. One hopes that the U.S. government's intervention in Libya relies on more than what's appeared in news accounts -- but recent history isn't too comforting in that regard.

But it does make it very hard for an interested observer to know what's really going on. To the extent that the news media could do a better job of explaining what is knowable about the situation they are failing miserably. Overall the quality of the military analysis of this conflict, just like Iraq and Afghanistan has been awful -- much less informative than it was during the 1991 war for example. It really seems like the vast majority of news people have no clue about the basic military facts on the ground.

For example, I have yet to see any cogent discussion about the logistics of organizing and supplying effective military forces in the midst of a civil war, especially won fought across vast desert distances. Interestingly, the current civil war involves fighting over the same ground as the World War II desert war -- so there's precedent.

My guess is that Gadhafi's forces will find it impossible to sustain any kind of offensive military potential in the face of Allied air power's ability to interdict his supply lines. But conversely, its hard to see how the rebel forces could organize and supply a counteroffensive that could dislodge the dictator in a time frame that's measured in anything less than months or even years. But this is just a guess. It would be nice to hear more details about what the reporters on the ground are seeing in order to judge.

70 years later a new battle of Benghazi

It's more than a little ironic that 70 years after Rommel's forces started moving against the British forces not far from Benghazi there's a new deset campaign shaping up on roughly the same battlefield.

While I think the politics behind this intervention are very problematical (yet another war?), militarily the situation is considerably simpler than either Iraq or Afghanistan in an immediate sense. Command of the air is vital in any land campaign, but never more so than in the desert. I don't think there's any question that Western aircraft can make it essentially impossible for Gadhafi's forces to either fly warplanes or mass heavy firepower like tanks and artillery anywhere near Benghazi. I'd expect the No-fly zone and associated "no-drive" zone to have an immediate and dramatic impact on Gadhafi's forces. While it's likley he could still try to take Benghazi with lighter forces (technicals and the like) it's also likely that these wouldn't be enough to root out the rebels who are similarly armed.

What's missing, of course, is a strategic context for all this and what's desired for an end state. It seems that the rebellion never mustered enough support from the key Gadhafi strongholds around Tripoli and I therefore doubt they can win control of the whole country anytime soon, if ever. History cautions us that these sorts of things can dra out for a very long time indeed.

Libyan pilots defect

Here's an interesting development during the ongoing Libyan crisis. Today (Feb. 21) a pair of Libyan colonels flew their Mirage F1 fighters to Malta and defected rather than attack protesters.

This would appear to be a major blow to the regime's firepower. While Libya reportedly has received some 38 Mirage F1s of various models, only a dozen of those are currently operational, so loging 2 of that dozen is major loss of firepower. One suspects that the usefulness oft he remaining planes will be curtailed as well, due to regime fears about more defections.