Air power, in the mountains of North Korea, could not stop the continuing reinforcement of the CCF front, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), any more than it had been able completely to choke off the German armies in Italy during World War 2:
It was only — as in Italy, at Anzio and other places — when ground action put inexorable pressure on enemy ground forces, forcing them to move or to displace, that conventional tactical air could come into its own. Massed to attack, the CCF became vulnerable. When they broke through U.N. lines, and their artillery and supply were forced to move out into the open, to displace, U.N. air could pounce upon them and chew them mercilessly. When they were forced by U.N. ground pressure to retreat, to stream down the roads and corridors of escape, air again could inflict deadly wounds.
Conventional air action, in Korea, could be decisive only when coupled with decisive ground action. It is impossible to interdict the battlefront, in mountains, of an army that eats only a handful of rice and soya beans and carries its ammunition forward piggyback.
The only problem with conventional air action is the “conventional” part.
In Korea they had helicopters. If it had occurred to them to stick guns on those helicopters, I think they could have got by with fewer ground troops. Strafe the enemy from a helicopter with suppressing fire while the infantry pick them off with rifles.
Improve the design into a proper attack helicopter with missiles and you can kill the enemy from the air. Then all you need on the ground are scouts to find the target. At least until FLIR comes along.
Something I’ve thought about just reading about this topic.
While WW2 was the real proving ground for air power as a decisive factor I think it took Gulf War 1 before air power had reached the technological height that proves its dominance in conventional warfare. It may be tempting to run down Saddam’s military but they were still enormous and they got so incredibly brutalised by air power that the Soviet Generals (USSR was in the process of falling at the time) remarked they were going to have to rethink everything, and they weren’t slouches about air power to start with.
It may have been impossible at the time of Korea, and even Vietnam, to fully interdict but we can sure do it now. That’s why unconventional warfare experienced an explosion, you see a big column of troops without air cover today, they aren’t going to make it, they aren’t going to go unseen either. To compete at all with superior air power you either have to go unconventional and hope to be enough of a pain the ass the other guy decides it’s not worth it, or invest an extraordinary amount in your air forces, just an extreme amount that vanishingly few countries can attempt.
Tale as old as military aviation: Vietnam, Serbia…
Recently the Armenians lost bad after drones winkled out their exact positions in detail for artillery and air attack. That is the future.
Harry, due to the Key West Agreement, the Army was then prohibited to use aviation for anything other than recon or medevac.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_West_Agreement
The Key West Agreements are one reason I think that the US Army is fundamentally unserious about making war, and generally incompetent at it.
I don’t know how any rational person who looks at that entire charade can come to any other conclusion.