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Soft Power – An Air Force Perspective

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I just finished reading The Soft Side of Airpower by Major John W. Bellflower, Small Wars Journal, and I have to say the Air Force appears to be putting a bit more thought into who they are and what they can do, at least in regards to what is being said publicly. This sample sets the stage for a very interesting article.

Contrary to the advice of General Lorenz and Secretary Wynne, most articles discussing the employment of airpower in irregular warfare often adhere to a myopic view of airpower that considers only what airpower can do to the enemy. Although these articles do indeed discuss such operational functions as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) or airlift, they typically do so only in the context of putting steel on target or assisting ground forces in doing the same. This enemy-centric focus causes many airpower advocates to champion the lethal application of airpower to the near exclusion of its non-lethal aspects. Indeed, this enemy-centric airpower focus has also infected Army thinking as its new counterinsurgency manual devotes merely a single sentence to population-centric airpower. However, the focus in irregular warfare is typically on influencing the population rather than destroying the military capability of the enemy. Certainly irregular warfare will sometimes require killing bad guys, but tailoring the airpower effort to the people would demonstrate that airpower offers much more to the irregular warfare fight – much that is typically ignored.

It is an article worth checking out. The Air Force Live blog apparently enjoyed the article too, the graphic above was posted by Captain Faggard in response to commentary on the article. I think the graphic is interesting too, a reminder that history is a great place to start when building discussions of strategic vision looking into the future.

While I find the content of Major Bellflower’s article stimulating on its own, what I am really finding interesting is the new found interest by the Air Force to tell a broader story. Air Mobility Command has long been involved in supporting humanitarian operations, by itself there is nothing new about it. What is new though is that someone in the Air Force is finally proud enough of these efforts to highlight it, and proclaim it as important enough to tell as a narrative. On the internet, that is VERY new.

A few examples. We never heard anything about the humanitarian response the US Air Force was involved in regarding the earthquake in China. It wasn’t small, or trivial. Same for the Cyclone off Myanmar. Same for the response in Georgia. Any details you know about Air Force involvement in those operations came straight from the mainstream media, and it consisted almost entirely of statistics. Could we be on the verge of learning what the Air Force is doing in global operations other than a statistical total? Does the Air Force have an actual story behind the statistics? We appear to be moving that direction.

We all know the USCGC Dallas (WHEC-716) went to Georgia to deliver humanitarian aid, and that the Navy had several ships off the coast of Myanmar ready to assist, and that Admiral Keating went to China to see the devestating effects of the earthquake in China. Why did we know about these things? Because the Navy and Coast Guard are proud of their soft power efforts. It will be interesting to observe whether the Air Force’s new found desire to tell ‘the rest of their story’ regarding their global operations has any long term influence regarding the perception of the Air Force, much of which isn’t generally very positive in the Web 2.0 space.

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