Draft – Please do not cite without permission
Douglas - 1
Air Power for compellence had a rich, if somewhat checkered, record in the 1990s. Air
campaigns in Bosnia, and later over Kosovo, seemed to achieve critical political aims after
diplomacy unalloyed with force had failed; yet bombing in both cases achieved a majority of the
coercer’s aims before an immanent ground campaign was mustered. However, air power used
against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq produced at best modest gains across more than a
decade of effort until compellence was abandoned for regime change and total war.
The targets of these bombing efforts were cynical authoritarian regimes, not non-state
actors or ideologically motivated theocracies. Also, the United States faced a unique
international context: unipolarity without significant opposition to its coercive aims (or support
for the target regimes) – a situation whose prospects seem to have faded in the current UN
climate. In addition the United States enjoyed a tremendous technological edge which allowed
for both routine precision and relative invulnerability in conducting air strikes.
This paper builds on a dissertation analyzing the success and failure of compellent air
power in the 1990s, which argued in part that the conditions above led to a uniquely favorable
context for coercion and that success came from a strategy of “regime punishment” (targeting
what the ruling elite values as a self-centered, non-ideological group as opposed to the aggregate
national interests of a unitary state) more than traditional military denial or civilian punishment
strategies. However, even if these findings hold, they may be irrelevant in the future if the cases
or contexts diverge sharply from that seen in the 1990s.
In order to assess the prospects for air power as the instrument of compellence in the near
future (roughly the next ten years), this paper takes up five main questions:
a) Will the international context of unopposed unipolarity persist, or does the recent
opposition of countries like France and Germany indicate the permissive environment
for coercion will significantly degrade or give way to outright balancing?
b) Will trends in technology continue to provide the United States with routine precision
and relative invulnerability for air strikes, or will it be of greater benefit to potential
adversaries seeking to build niche capabilities?
c) With Iraq off the “axis of evil,” and with the remaining members being different
types of regimes (Iran a theocratic autocracy, and North Korea a totalitarian state), is
the United States out of “High Value Targets” that are authoritarian?
Convention