No Contest: Aerial Combat in the 1990s

摘要

During the decade of the 1990s, the United States and her allies won three conflicts. In 1991, they forced Iraq to withdraw its army from Kuwait. In 1995, they forced the Serbs of the former Yugoslavia to recognize the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 1999, they forced Yugoslavia to stop an ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo, to withdraw its army from that province, and to allow ethnic Albanians to return. Air power played a larger role in these victories than in any previous conflicts in history. One controls the air by denying its use to the enemy, partly by shooting down enemy aircraft. This can be done with surface-to-air missiles, antiaircraft artillery, or other airplanes. During the 1990s, the United States and her allies chose the last of these options most often. One method of determining the success or failure of aerial combat is by the use of kill ratios, or the number of enemy aircraft shot down by friendly airplanes compared with the number of friendly airplanes shot down by enemy aircraft. In this paper, the author focuses on the kill ratios of the U.S. Air Force (USAF). During the 1990s, USAF pilots shot down 48 enemy aircraft. In the same decade, enemy pilots did not shoot down even one USAF aircraft. What are the reasons for such an overwhelming kill ratio. Surely, the allies had clear quantitative and qualitative advantages over small nation states that were fighting alone. However, the United States enjoyed the same advantages over North Korea between 1950 and 1953, and over North Vietnam in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but the aerial kill ratios were different then. For every 6 enemy aircraft USAF pilots shot down during the Korean War, they lost 1. In Vietnam the record was worse. The USAF lost 1 airplane for every 2 it shot down. How did the kill ratio change from 6-1 and 2-1 to 48-0. Clearly there are lessons to be learned here. The author explores reasons why the USAF was able to enjoy such aerial combat success in the 1990s.