When Air Power Works, And When It Doesn’t by Missy Ryan and Loveday Morris, Washington Post
… The air operation is a central aspect of a military campaign that has cost $12.5 million a day in Iraq and Syria and that has destroyed countless military vehicles, command centers and fighting positions. Since strikes began in the later summer of 2014, U.S. and allied aircraft have conducted over 16,000 strikes in both countries. U.S. military officials estimate that 50,000 Islamic State fighters have been killed.
But even such a massive air operation has not been able to extinguish a resilient Islamic State force in and around Mosul and other militant strongholds. As Iraqi forces have pressed more deeply into the city, fighters have inflicted heavy casualties on Iraqi forces and remaining residents, slowing the battle’s progress and damaging the morale of local fighters.
In recent months, U.S. and allied officials have sought to accelerate air operations in the Islamic State campaign, in an attempt to make greater progress against the group, but the pace remains slower than that of other recent conflicts.
The United States and its allies have flown an average of 20 strike sorties per day in Iraq and Syria since 2014, said Dave Deptula, a retired senior Air Force official who is dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. That’s far fewer than the initial period of the 2003 Iraq War, with almost 800 strike sorties per day; the 1999-2000 Kosovo air operation, with almost 300 sorties per day; or the 1991 Desert Storm operation, with more than 1,200 sorties per day.
Deptula said the nature of the mission against the Islamic State, and especially the battle for Mosul, requires a different kind of air operation. “Desert Storm was a whole-country operation,” Deptula said. “Mosul is a very small subset of that. … Every conflict situation is different.”
The Mosul air campaign is being conducted over a densely packed city whose residents had mostly stayed in their homes, making some strikes impossible and increasing the need for precision, low-yield munitions.
“The level of sophistication is an order of magnitude greater” in Mosul than in some past conflicts, said Army Brig. Gen. Scott Efflandt, who heads the U.S.-Iraqi operations center in Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan to the east of Mosul. “Here the sophistication of the enemy, the complexity and the scope and size of the city” make for a much more difficult fight, he said…