Falcons Against the Jihad

From the dust-filled skies over northern Iraq to the fog-covered valleys of Bosnia, American airmen are finding themselves at the center of US efforts to solve the problems of an increasingly fragmented world. Airpower's new role as the tool of choice for US policymakers confronts the Air Force with challenges never envisioned during the cold war. These challenges include nonstate actors, ethnic hatred, nationalist tensions, and an increasing array of regional conflicts. If our experiences in Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, and North Korea are any indication, the United States is moving toward a general policy of coercive diplomacy to deal with regional conflicts and the challenges they present. Accordingly, USAF planners will continue to find themselves asked to use airpower to support the strategy of coercive diplomacy. Given that the Air Force has focused on supporting cold-war strategies for the last 40 years, it is reasonable to expect that planners would look to the experiences of other air forces to help develop our own coercive strategies. The Israeli Air Force (IAF) presents an ideal candidate for this type of evaluation. Since its creation in 1948 the IAF has had a long history of supporting coercive strategies employed by Israeli leaders to deal with threats posed by the surrounding Arab states. A particularly effective period to evaluate is the experience of the Israeli Air Force in Lebanon between January 1983 and June 1985. This period is significant for USAF planners because Lebanon confronted the IAF with an environment that one RAND analyst concluded is likely to be representative of armed conflict worldwide in the last quarter of the twentieth century: a mixture of conventional warfare, classic guerrilla warfare, and campaigns of terrorism.