From Victory Forgotten to Lessons Unlearned: Desert Storm, Strategic Drift, and the Combat Pilot Training Revolution
Lieutenant General David Deptula’s Forbes piece marking the 35th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm examines how the United States abandoned a proven approach to warfare in favor of prolonged campaigns that failed to achieve strategic objectives.
It reveals the institutional resistance to internalizing lessons from success and the persistent tendency to substitute activity for outcome.
Desert Storm remains “the last major regional war fought and decisively won by the United States.” For three and a half decades, the most technologically advanced military in history has been unable to replicate that decisive victory.
The answer, as Deptula demonstrates, is deeply troubling.
But beyond operational lessons lies an equally critical insight: fifth-generation aircraft demand a paradigm shift in the training of combat pilots to fight in a kill web force.
What made Desert Storm successful was not, as Deptula emphasizes, technological superiority alone, nor numerical advantage, nor favorable geography. It was the application of what he terms an “effects-based, systems approach to warfare”, a methodology that targeted not individual platforms or tactical formations but the integrated system that enabled Saddam Hussein to wage war. This represented a fundamental shift from traditional attrition-based warfare to strategic disruption.
Three elements converged to enable this approach.
- First, precision-guided munitions allowed small numbers of aircraft to achieve effects previously requiring massive formations.
- Second, stealth technology permitted operations deep within defended airspace without the supporting armada traditionally required.
- Third, and most important, was a planning philosophy that valued outputs over inputs, effects over effort.
The results speak for themselves. In the opening 24 hours of Desert Storm, coalition forces attacked more discrete targets than the Eighth Air Force struck in Europe over two years of World War II. Thirty-six F-117 stealth fighters attacked more targets in that first day than the entire non-stealth air and missile force of six aircraft carrier battle groups. Over the campaign’s duration, the F-117, flying just two percent of combat sorties, struck over 40 percent of Iraq’s fixed strategic targets.
This was not efficiency improvement. It was operational transformation.
Yet this transformation required not just new technology but new ways of thinking about air combat, a cognitive shift that would become even more critical with the advent of fifth-generation aircraft.
Deptula identifies another crucial element: strategic discipline at the national leadership level.
The mission was finite, to restore the status quo ante by expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait. No mandate for regime change, no mission to remake Iraqi society, no open-ended commitment untethered from military means. This clarity prevented the mission creep that plagued Vietnam and later undermined Afghanistan and Iraq.
In Afghanistan, initial objectives were rapidly achieved, but American strategy shifted to transforming “a deeply tribal society into a modern democracy”, a non-military task pursued through military means for two decades. Desert Storm treated a crisis as a crisis: identified the problem, applied decisive force, withdrew. Post-9/11 campaigns treated crises as opportunities for permanent engagement.
Perhaps the most significant innovation of Desert Storm and the one most thoroughly abandoned in subsequent conflicts was the employment of airpower not as a supporting arm but as the primary instrument of strategy. As Deptula explains, this reversed traditional military logic. Rather than beginning with ground maneuver and using airpower to support it, General Schwarzkopf made airpower the main effort, with ground forces initially employed as a blocking force.
This was not merely tactical adjustment. It represented a fundamental reconceptualization of how to achieve strategic objectives. The air campaign was designed to attack Iraq as a system, targeting leadership, command and control, critical infrastructure, and fielded forces simultaneously. The goal was not to destroy things but to negate Iraq’s ability to function as a coherent military entity.
The results validated the approach. By the time coalition ground forces advanced, airpower had destroyed or disabled more than 4,200 Iraqi tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces. Iraqi heavy divisions were so paralyzed that they retained little ability to maneuver, reinforce, or conduct coordinated operations. The ground campaign that followed was not a hard-fought contest. It was, as Deptula observes, “the physical confirmation of a defeat already delivered.”
Compare this to the counterinsurgency campaigns that dominated American military thinking after 9/11.
Airpower became relegated to supporting ground operations rather than serving as the primary instrument of strategy. In some cases, as Deptula notes, air component commanders were “intentionally cut out from critical operational planning”, such as in Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, Operation Inherent Resolve against ISIS in Syria, and Operation Rough Rider in Yemen. The military learned to win decisively in 1991, then systematically unlearned those lessons over the subsequent three decades.
During the 20 years after 9/11, the Army was allocated $1.3 trillion more than the Air Force, $65 billion per year, to fund ground campaigns that failed to achieve strategic objectives. Meanwhile, Air Force combat forces shrank to 40 percent of their Desert Storm size. The F-22 program was canceled at less than half its requirement. The Air Force now flies ten major aircraft types that first flew over 50 years ago, constituting over two-thirds of inventory.
As Deptula observes, “The U.S. Air Force has become a truly geriatric force.”
Yet this diminished force is in greater demand than ever, revealing the disconnect between American strategic commitments and resources allocated.
This reflects strategic incoherence: the United States spent three decades optimizing for conflicts it chose to fight rather than conflicts it needs to win.
Nowhere is this more evident than in combat pilot training.
The paradox of fifth-generation aircraft like the F-35 is captured in a phrase I have encountered repeatedly in my research: they are “the easiest aircraft to fly and the hardest to employ.” Modern fighters essentially fly themselves, with flight control systems handling the aerodynamic complexities that once consumed pilot attention.
But they demand sophisticated cognitive management of sensor fusion, weapons employment, and tactical decision-making based on overwhelming data streams.
This creates the “hidden cost” of traditional training approaches. When students train on older, difficult-to-fly aircraft, they exhaust their cognitive capacity just keeping the aircraft stable and on parameters. Little mental energy remains for learning mission systems, information management, and tactical thinking. Worse, they develop deeply ingrained habits and mental models that must be unlearned when transitioning to fifth-generation fighters.
The problem is fundamental: you cannot prepare pilots for effects-based, systems warfare using platform-centric training methods designed for an earlier era. Desert Storm demonstrated the power of attacking adversaries as integrated systems. Fifth-generation aircraft provide the tools to execute such approaches at unprecedented scale.
What is required as part of the shift Deptula is discussing is what I have analyzed as the paradigm shift in pilot training. The connection to Desert Storm is direct. That campaign succeeded because planners thought in terms of effects and systems, not platforms and sorties. Modern combat pilot training must produce aviators who think the same way, who understand their aircraft as information nodes in larger networks, who can synthesize data from multiple sources to support decision-making across the force, and who can shift seamlessly from individual tactical problems to strategic effects.
While American pilot training has been slow to adapt, allies have been innovating. Italy’s International Flight Training School (IFTS), established in 2022, represents the first air combat training facility designed from inception around Live-Virtual-Constructive (LVC) training, the integration of live aircraft, high-fidelity simulators, and computer-generated forces into seamless training environments.
As I documented in my book “Training for the High End Fight: The Paradigm Shift for Combat Pilot Training,” this represents more than technological advancement. It reflects a fundamental reconceptualization of what combat pilot training must achieve. The goal is not to produce exceptional stick-and-rudder pilots who then learn tactical employment. The goal is to produce tactical thinkers who happen to fly aircraft, pilots who can manage information flows, make rapid decisions in contested environments, and operate as nodes in distributed kill webs rather than as individual hunters.
Yet the USAF is still training pilots the old way and creating the “hidden cost of flying yesterday’s trainers.” I discussed this in detail in my book and underscored in discussions with senior USAF officers who clearly understood what IFTS has created and what is missing in the United States.
General Brian S. Robinson when he was Commander of Air Education and Training Command (AETC), United States Air Force described the agreement allowing USAF pilot trainees to attend Italy’s International Flight Training School (IFTS) as a historic milestone in transatlantic military cooperation and a strategic innovation for the Air Force’s training pipeline. He highlighted that this initiative responds to urgent needs, such as delays in the T-7 Red Hawk program and growing demand for fighter pilots, by leveraging the proven capabilities of the T-346A at IFTS.
Robinson emphasized that American student pilots will undergo nine months of intensive, jointly developed training using the “Multiphase Jet Training Integrated Syllabus,” which enables them to earn a Military Pilot License on the T-346A and prepares them for advanced fighter operations.
Robinson has publicly stated that the decision to send American pilots to a NATO-partnered foreign training center reflects a commitment to strengthening interoperability and innovation in NATO airpower development. By collaborating with the Italian Air Force and industry partners like Leonardo, the agreement is positioned as a way to accelerate USAF readiness and deepen allied ties in next-generation aircrew training and force development.
This is the shift from operating in kill chains to operating in kill webs. Kill chains are brittle; breaking a single link collapses the sequence. Kill webs are adaptive and redundant, with multiple sensors feeding multiple shooters across all domains. As one Navy strategist put it bluntly: “We only win if we fight as an interoperable, networked and distributed force.”
While American defense thinking drifted toward counterinsurgency, China studied what worked. China “carefully analyzed the Desert Storm air campaign and built a military designed to counter the advantages it revealed.” Chinese doctrine now emphasizes precision strike, information dominance, and systemic disruption, precisely the elements that defined Desert Storm’s success.
As Deputla underscored: “The challenge the United States now faces in the Indo-Pacific is the result of the U.S. military ignoring lessons that China internalized. Desert Storm showed how to defeat a large, modern military without fighting it symmetrically. China has been working hard to learn how to counter that approach. It established its paradigm of anti-access/area-denial as a result. Meanwhile, the United States military risked forgetting how to execute it while distracted by un-winnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and firing leaders for advocating preparing for war with China—Air Force Chief of Staff, General T. Michael Moseley and Air Force Secretary Mike Wynne.”
Future conflicts will be “fast, intense, multi-domain contests” against adversaries who can contest all domains from the outset. Success will require intelligent application of military power through effects-based, systems approaches, exactly what Desert Storm demonstrated.
But it will also require pilots trained to think and operate fundamentally differently. The lessons are urgent: acknowledging that technological superiority alone does not guarantee success, recognizing that prolonged presence is not strategic achievement, accepting that the United States cannot afford another three decades of drift.
This applies equally to how we fight and how we train. Desert Storm at 35 is a blueprint for how America can win wars against capable adversaries, a blueprint we abandoned as potential adversaries began preparing to face us. General Deptula’s article is a call to strategic seriousness that must extend to how we prepare the next generation of combat pilots.
The transformation from platform-centric to network-centric warfare, from kill chains to kill webs, from crisis management to chaos management, these are cognitive transformations that must be embedded in training from day one. The paradigm shift in combat pilot training is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite for the warfare that Desert Storm previewed and fifth-generation aircraft now enable.
Training for the High-End Fight: The Paradigm Shift for Combat Pilot Training