The Art of Air Power

THE ART OF AIR POWER: Sun Tzu Revisited

Sanu Kainikara

Air Power Development Centre, 2010, 461pp

ISBN 9781920800345

In an era that often seems dominated by the search for the new, it is comforting to see that value is still placed on old verities.  Dr Sanu Kainikara has very effectively linked Sun Tzu’s 2300 year-old classic to air power in the early twenty-first century, a military arm that the great Chinese philosopher of war could hardly have imagined.  In doing this, Dr Kainikara has demonstrated that some principles are so enduring that we ignore them at our peril.

Dr Kainikara makes many useful points that can readily be related to the current undeclared war between the forces of militant Islam on one side and democratic nations and parts of the Islamic world on the other.  His point about the need for a “whole-of-nation” approach to national security is particularly important.  However, a reader who observes current events could draw the conclusion that the leaders of militant Islam have also read Sun Tzu, particularly about strategic manipulation.

Some of the proposals Dr Kainikara has made could be impracticable unless the current conflict becomes much more active, or Australia enters an existential conflict.  As examples, approval of a pre-emptive air strike is unlikely to occur without compelling intelligence, while it is amusing to imagine the reaction of the media in the world’s democracies to a program of “information operations, including the use of deception”.  The same media, unfortunately, routinely reports without question or later correction the product of information operations by militant Islamists.

Dr Kainikara sometimes offers a counsel of perfection.  In the imperfect world in which military forces operate, suggesting that a course of action should be discarded if there is “even the slightest doubt regarding the possibility of achieving victory” is a recipe for paralysis.  Contrarily, suggesting that if certain measures are taken, “offensive actions will be irresistible, and always lead to success” seems over-optimistic.

In places, Dr Kainikara’s attempt to find something to say about each of Sun Tzu’s stanzas leads to many points being repeated to an extent that becomes annoying, and to statements that are trite (albeit even trite points can be overlooked by busy people). The (very frequent) statement that military officers must have “professional mastery” is an example of both.  Does anyone really think that officers (particularly senior officers) need not be masters of their profession?  How often do we need to be told?

The book has refreshingly little jargon.  I recently read another monograph from the Defence Organisation that referred to achieving an “overmatch in effects” through the use of “reach-back”.  I’m sure that this means something, but I suspect the terminology could be as obscure to many other readers as it was to me!

Because Dr Kainikara has commented on every stanza in the original, there is much repetition.  This makes the book excessively long, and it is difficult to maintain constant attention while reading it. A better approach might have been to accept that not everything written 2300 years ago can necessarily be applied to modern air power. Dr Kainikara could then have skipped over many less relevant stanzas, and avoided repetition where a point had already been made.

There are some production issues. An index of the important concepts would be useful, while the binding is too weak for a book of this size – after being read just once, pages started to fall out.

There is much of value in this book, and it deserves careful attention, however difficult it might be to remain focussed through 455 pages of main text.

JOHN DONOVAN