Dragons, Close Air Support, and Strategic Attack

Poor intelligence on enemy threats and the enemy center of gravity proves costly for the dragon queen

Badly-integrated intelligence can get  you killed.  That's a key takeaway from last night's Game of Thrones episode, titled, "Beyond the Wall." There are many lessons in this episode for students of military theory, particularly for those interested in intelligence, targeting, and doctrine.  So, let's take a look at what was illuminated in this episode.  

Close Air Support: A necessary but insufficient activity for victory

In the interests of brevity, I'll focus on three things:  the tension between allocation of resources between close air support compared to strategic attack, intelligence on enemy centers of gravity/critical vulnerabilities, and the need for proper intel on the threat.

Let me be clear:  I'm a huge fan of the A-10, and of close air support in general.  Speaking as a US Air Force member who did a deployment embedded with a US Army unit, I am sympathetic for the need for and utility of using airpower to win tactical fights.  Airpower is frequently seen as an asymmetric force multiplier.  The common view of the Battle of Khafji in DESERT STORM is that airpower was the decisive force that defeated the Iraqi incursion into Saudi Arabia (though it's noteworthy that there is to this day significant disagreement on that point among those who dug into the data about the number of Iraqi tanks which were actually destroyed from the air). 

With enemy infantry - wights in the case of Game of Thrones - are advancing in the open with no cover, they are easy prey for airpower, whether that airpower comes in the form of an A-10's GAU-8 cannon or in the form of a trio of dragons.  There is no doubt that Dany's remarkably timely assault saved the lives of the ragged band of defenders on the frozen lake.  Likewise, she destroyed (we shall say "killed," for the sake of argument, though the undead were of course already dead even before she burned them) hundreds if not thousands of wights.  Her nephew Jon Targaryen (for we now know he is not a Snow but in fact a trueborn Targaryen) and his companions owe their lives to her close air support.

Thus, the close air support  allowed Dany to meet her tactical objectives of rescuing the ill-conceived expeditionary force.  But other than that, how useful was it?

In context of reducing the enemy ability to wage war, the loss of even a few thousand wights represents a probably insignificant reduction in overall combat capability for the Night King.  Per the old Dorito's slogan, "Crunch all you want, we'll make more."  When his forces invade south of the Wall, each human they kill will be added to the ranks of his army.  Unlike a conventional military force, the Night King does not need to take time to recruit (or draft) new soldiers, nor to train and equip them.  The number of casualties Dany inflicted with her (now-much-reduced) air force is essentially irrelevant from a strategic standpoint.

This is essentially the tension that has long existed between air component and ground component commanders.  The stereotype (which is a gross oversimplification but has some basis in reality) is that ground component commanders would prefer to have all available air assets attacking those enemies that are engaging them.  The same stereotype suggests that the Air Force would prefer to ignore doing CAS altogether and focus instead on strategic attack and interdiction.

(I'm NOT going to take a position on the long-standing and oft-resurrected controversy about whether the A-10 should be retired).

That being said, in the war between the living and the dead, how might a focus on strategic attack and interdiction play out?  In this fictional world, it would likely be the opposite of how airpower has proven useful in conflicts from Korea onwards. 

Let's consider interdiction first.  In real-world conflicts, armies require food, fuel, ammunition and various and sundry other classes of supplies.  The more drawn-out or intense the fight, the more supplies are generally consumed.  Likewise, an invading army requires significantly more supplies than a stationary army, and these extended supply lines present a significant vulnerability to an adversary who has an air force (given the mobility of aircraft/dragons and the ability to strike along any point of those supply lines).  Without going too far into historical detail, aerial interdiction appears to have been one of the key factors that kept the North Koreans from capturing the allies concentrated inside the tiny Pusan perimeter.  Their long supply lines were being mauled from the air and they could not support a continued decisive engagement even before Inchon changed the game (see http://www.state.nj.us/military/korea/effectiveness.pdf).

But wights don't eat.  They don't need fuel, or ammunition, or letters from home, or replacements for worn-out boots.  They are, in short, utterly immune to the sort of supply interdiction that have proven so effective against conventional armies.  Yes, Dany can attack the stream of wights en route to the warm lands (and future zombies) of the south, but if she does, she's once again simply "crunching Doritos" to little strategic end.

. 

The allies know the Walkers can reanimate non-humans;

will they anticipate the arrival of an undead dragon?  If not, they'll

blame the intel guys

The army of the dead has a critical weakness; if the White Walkers fall, the wights they have reanimated turn to dust along with them.  Presumably, in the judgment of tactical reconnaissance asset Jon Targaryen, the destruction of the Night King would destroy the entire army.  So the intelligence analysis has been done, and the critical vulnerability of the enemy has been identified (so far as we are guessing at this point), but Dany ignores the White Walkers and spends her sorties burning insignificant wights.  Why?

The answer is simple, and it's the sort of thing that has played out time and time again.  Intelligence that hasn't been properly disseminated cannot be acted upon.  Jon knows (or at least "assesses with high confidence") that killing White Walkers will destroy the wights, but the command, control, communication, and intelligence (C3I) system was insufficient to get that information from his ground-based ISR expedition to the air component commander (Dany, of course).

Precision of orders would have helped; telling Gendry to "send a raven" doesn't imply that Gendry is going to send a detailed note about the new intelligence assessment of the enemy center of gravity. 

In theory, Dany's air attack could have been the platonic ideal of airpower theorist's strategic attack notions.  If Jon had disseminated his assessment and targeting recommendations to Dany, one pass from her dragons over the conveniently-clustered White Walkers could have ended the war in a single airstrike. 

"Surface-to-Air Javelin" just doesn't have

the same ring to it as "SAM"

Or not, given the other "intelligence failure" of the night - the unanticipatedly robust air defenses of the Night King.  This can be forgiven for a number of reasons.  First, this is a meeting engagement with a force of unknown strength and unknown capability (indeed, there mere existence of the Night King was not believed by Dany prior to an episode or two ago).  Second, all of Dany's dragons have been assigned to perform CAS; there is no dedicated (or even secondary) consideration for ISR of the Night King's army (nor is there adequate communications infrastructure to communicate the threat if it had been identified in advance).

This is not, in short, a repeat of the old Vietnam trope of American pilots flying blissfully unaware into the teeth of SA-2s (and not being told of the existence of those threats by the secretive intelligence community of that era). This is a genuinely new and unanticipated technological surprise.  Nonetheless, Westerosi blogs would probably call it an intelligence failure.

Russian doctrine assumed it would take thousands of rounds of anti-aircraft artillery to down a single American aircraft; between Bron's scorpion and the Night King's ice javelin, the air defenses of Dany's adversaries have scored two shootdowns out of four attempts.  Perhaps it's time for Dany to reevaluate the circumstances in which she is willing to expose her attrited air force to threats.

Daenerys, Dragons, and Doctrine: an Airpower-Centric Analysis of Game of Thrones

Dany's use of airpower is neither tactically nor strategically wise

"Let's burn all this food so we can't use it to feed our army"

Spoils of War was, I'll admit, emotionally satisfying.  After long years of waiting, we finally got to see Daenerys unleash one of her dragons in a battle on Westerosi territory.  It was a well-shot scene, and depicted a dramatic battle and a decisive victory for our favorite (or second-favorite) Targaryen.  And yet, as I drifted off to sleep after watching the episode, I couldn't help but feel that something about it felt...well, wrong.

When I awakened, I knew what it was.  Dany's dragonstrike was a victory, true, and assaulting the Lannister (and Tarly) army had a certain visceral appeal.  But the part of my brain that thinks in terms of enemy centers of gravity and target analysis was displeased.  Ultimately, from both a strategic and tactical perspective, Dany's current course of action is both inefficient and probably counterproductive.

The lens of airpower theory and doctrine is a good way to examine the situation critically.  How might the more prominent thinkers in the fields of airpower and targeting characterize her approach?  Not very flatteringly, I would submit.

Consider John Warden, one of the men who developed the core idea that became the DESERT STORM air campaign plan  Warden developed the "Five Rings" hypothesis about employment of airpower.  It describes any sort of complex target (for example, Cersei's regime) as being visualized as five concentric rings, from outside to the bullseye, they are:

- Fielded military forces (for example, the army that Dany torched)

- Population (the peasantry, essentially)

- Infrastructure (roads, farms, mines, ports, etc)

- System essentials/organic essentials (for example, the food that Dany torched)

- Leadership (Cersei and her inner circle)

Warden would advocate inflicting paralysis by striking the leadership as hard as possible, with (if resources permitted) simultaneously hitting the other rings.  Warden holds that attacking fielded military troops is actually a generally inefficient and ineffective use of resources. This was, in fact, Dany's first instinct - to hit the capital of King's Landing.  But when her plans went awry, she sought new advice.

Jon Snow-Targaryen and Tyrion both argued against her taking her dragons straight to King's Landing.  Both made the same specious argument - that by attacking King's Landing they could win the war, but would inevitably lose the peace by inflicting what her advisors believed to be inevitable excessive collateral damage.  In this, both men's thinking is bounded by outmoded models of weapon capability.  In essence, it is as if Tyrion and Jon believe that Dany's airpower is capable only of the sort of massive indiscriminate aerial destruction that characterized most of the WWII strategic bombing campaign - in which (effectively), cities were the target rather than specific elements within a city.   (Some of the original airpower theorists such as Gulio Douhet would actually have recommended directly attacking the civilian populace in order to break their will; this was the sort of doctrinal thinking that - combined with the low-level of available technology - led to the massive bombing of cities in the Second World War.)

But Dany's dragons are in essence precision-guided munitions.  As such, she need not raze the capital city.  Instead, she could focus her efforts on the center of gravity - Cersei and the Red Keep.  There is little question that her dragons are capable of handling that target.  With Cersei gone and no Lannister heir, the regime would be no more.  Yes, someone else could step up and claim the Iron Throne (Jamie perhaps, assuming he's not dead), but for practical purposes there would be no more centralized resistance to Dany.  Scattered and uncoordinated resistance would likely still exist, at least for a time, but it's unlikely to be able to pose a direct threat to her consolidation of power.  Indeed, the longer she waits to assault King's Landing, the greater the potential threat from the incipient but growing Lannister air defense becomes.

Leaving aside for another time the political aspects of "winning the peace," let us turn to the tactical action in which Dany attacked the loot train along the Blackwater Rush.  Here we see a number of things that make targeteers, planners and airpower enthusiasts cringe.

First, her tactics unnecessarily resulted in the deaths of several of her Dothraki light cavalry.  The mere presence of the Dothraki in proximity to the Lannister army essentially fixed her enemies in place.  In classic infantry vs cavalry mode, the infantry had little choice other than to use a phalanx formation in square in order to avoid being flanked (which usually results in rapid defeat in an infantry vs cavalry situation - and most other scenarios as well).  Once fixed in place, there was no need to waste the lives of her soldiers by attacking the formation.  Much like the coalition in DESERT STORM (and yes, this is a bit of an oversimplification in order to stay a reasonable length), Dany has air superiority.  As such, she could launch airstrikes at leisure, until the Lannister force was in no shape to offer resistance.  Instead, what she did is the rough equivalent of if General Schwarzkopf had ordered the ground forces to charge into Kuwait on the first day of DESERT STORM. 

Instead, Dany should have taken her time to pick apart the army and break it.  Yes, her first strike created an exploitable break in the lines, allowing her Dothraki to blitz into the rear of the Lannisters, but while that was happening, other soldiers were dying to Lannister spears and arrows unnecessarily.  There will come a day when she will rue the casualties that her own tactics created.  A few airstrikes (parallel to the line of troops, rather than perpendicular to them) would have been more effective at rapidly defeating her foes, ultimately, with probably less loss of life on both sides.

But rather than do this, Dany decides to focus much of her dragon's effort on destroying food.  This is inexplicable and largely inexcusable from a targeting standpoint.  If she thought she was going to lose the fight, she could have made a case for destroying the enemy supplies in order to prevent her enemy from using them.  As it is, she expended a fair amount of effort on burning food that she needs to feed her own troops.  There's little forage in the vicinity (after the Lannisters and Tarlys raided the local farms).  Keeping the supply carts intact (if she could have kept her cavalry from looting the contents - a questionable proposition at best) could also have given her a means to influence the local peasantry.  Giving back even a portion of what her enemy looted would help build a reputation for kindness among the Westerosi.  Burning the food was simply counterproductive (albeit pretty to watch).

In short, there's a great deal that modern doctrinal thinkers could criticize about Dany's employment of airpower on both a strategic and tactical level.  For her sake, one hopes she will learn rapidly from her mistakes.

Winter is coming, after all.