I was struck by your tag line about an unbeatable air strategy to deal with the Ba'athist Bastard, Sadistic Saddam. I have been thinking along similar lines but my title to an essay on my thoughts would have been along the lines 'Why American Air Superiority Can't Win'.
The USAF, God bless 'em, and everyone else's air forces too, have consistently failed to bring anyone to their knees without the intervention of ground forces. Taking out Saddam in person with a lucky shot (or well-disguised assassination) MIGHT work, or simply result in some sphincter of equal magnitude stepping up to the plate.
If you go back to the air strategists like Mitchell or Douhet, true stategic aerial warfare as originally formulated involved an absolutely unretricted use of weapons of mass destruction (poison gas, at the time) as well as dumb bombs directed at the enemy's cities (specifically the civil population). You can see a bit of this reflected in the horrors of war in the 1936 classic "Things to Come", made in the era when the strategists were writing. It might have worked, though for reasons which would become apparent later, probably not.
Post-WWII, the USAAF conducted a strategic bombing survey. They came to the unsettling conclusion that the entire air war was vastly less effective than they thought it was when they were prosecuting it. German communications through Alps, for instance, were never interrupted for more than 24 hours. German and Japanese civilian morale never came close to breakdown of civil order. Much like England in the Blitz, the effect on morale was to drive the populace to stronger and stronger efforts of production and resistance, despite the infliction of individual tragedy on a truly monstrous scale. It also had the side effect of ensuring the civil population in the target area giving shorter and shorter shrift to downed enemy airmen, especially Brits in Germany.
Since nuclear bombardment had brought the Japanese to surrender, the U.S. forces (or so it seems to me) took the view that the survey had really only shown the limitations of conventional weapons rather than basic conceptual problems with strategic air. The fact that the Germans were being devoured in the East, and that the Japanese had been driven to their final redoubt by successive and increasingly-massive amphibious attacks were never given great weight by strategic air proponents.
Paradoxically, the one effective Axis strategic weapon (U-Boats) were eventually neutralized by the large scale use of tactical air and surface forces to protect the shipping resource targeted by the subs. This brings up an interesting fact about response to sophisticated weapons such as submarines, aircraft carriers, and strategic bombers: There are really two ways to counter them, either build something bigger, or build a lot of something smaller. Except for America and the USSR, the 'bigger' approach has never worked very well; on the other hand, the 'bigger' stuff has been very effectively countered in the past by dispersing its targets or wide dispersal of small units of the anti-weapon (such as Stingers in Afgthanistan, which at one point accounted for approximately one Soviet aircraft a day for a three monthe period, very expensive and demoralizing).
In Southwest Asia, I would have to say that bin-Laden has a better intelligence appreciation of the U.S. military than the U.S. military (or at least our National Command Authority) has of him. He understands perfectly that we will throw any amount of expensive robot bombs his way but that we will not risk ground forces. All he has to do is manage to be where the Tomahawks don't land. He therefore successfully cahracterizes us as cowardly dogs because we are unwilling to die for anything. We, on the other hand, think firing 70 milliion bucks worth of missiles into the boondocks to kill a couple of dozen sentires or possibly goat-herders isgoing to demonstrate how mighty and powerful we are to the locals, when in fact this type of stand-off action has generally had the opposite effect even against targets of our own cultural background, such as the V-weapons of WWII. To the mid-easterner in the unpaved street, we probably DO look more like cowardly dogs each time we do this. Far from driving them from power, our air-only strategy is actually strengthening bin-Laden and Saddam Hussein each time we use it.
Attacking the Republican Guard is subject to the same analysis: All they have to do is disperse from their barracks and we end up hunting down single $50,000 Chinese-built tanks with $1,500,000 missiles (not even counting the megabucks to get the launch platforms and their logistic tail within launch range). It's not a winning return on investment, and every one we launch leaves bits and pieces which in the long run will compromise our technological edge when dissected and reassembled in China, Pakistan, Russia, or God knows where. Much like U.S. troops hanging every SS they captured toward the end of WWII, such actions by external forces do not often have the desired effect of making the enemy quit/run away/defecate himself. Just as with his civil population, the external threat of extinction seems to drive them closer together and make them resist more fiercely than ever.
What does work, at least much more than not, is leaving them an easy out when confronted with imminent bloody death (which random air attack is not). The comparatively-good chance a German soldier had of surviving the surrender process in Europe was a big factor in the Allied victories and especially the rapid advances of 1945, compared to the horrific 'last stands' in the East. Revolting against a totally ruthless dictator after spending your military career slaughtering others who revolted against him does not strike me as an 'easy out', and I expect the average Republican Guardsmen see it the same way. The Guard has very bloody hands, and deposing their Godfather could ultimately result in some serious payback from whoever takes over, or even a War Crimes Commission on the faint chance the UN would step into the void of a complete social breakdown.
I have also been giving some thought to methodologies for defeating or countering high-tech and super-high-tech weapons. I'll save that for another time as I must get back to work now.
Chris Engle's reply to his brother in law
Excellent points on why air power won't work on Saddam. I agree that the Republican Guard probably can't kill Saddam since to do so would expose them (unless we let them put up their own candidate to replace him). The Iraqis are not astute political animals like the French. (I love how Tallyrand was able to serve in every government from the 1780's to the 1820's. No greater a lieing sack of shit every existed! Viva la Merde!)
Still, the Iraqis do respond to terror. As late as the early 19th C a Russian diplomate was able to cow the natives (who had just kept him waiting far to long) by saying "How dare you treat a descendent of the great Khan (ie Genghis) in this manner!" The Iraqis still remember the Mongols. But this still begs the question of effective strategy. I would hate to see the US become Mongols! We are after all the good guys. I understand that our good treatment of Germans in 1918 greatly contributed to those surrenders in 1945. I hope we figure out a way to take the moral high road and not follow the Israeli strategy of bombing day care centers in Southern Lebanon.
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