Strategic bombing to win a war doesn’t work,
we’ve figured this out after about 50years of trying to make it work. World War 2, Korean War,
Vietnam – it’s one clean line of air power doctrine centred around the adage that enough
bombs will lead to the surrender of the opposing force. Except that it never happened.
I won’t go into the claims of strategic bombing doctrine or the effects because this
[video ] has done that – including the whole Desert Storm campaign and many other cases.
To put us on the same page however, in a nutshell, strategic bombing doctrine
stipulated that a country can be forced to surrender by bombing alone. Forced to
surrender is different than having military capabilities reduced by attacking key nodes
within the enemy’s defences or infrastructure – bombing can do the latter , but not the former.
To make it short – we need to separate strategic effect from strategic victory to understand the
value of air power – and it is this difference that took more than half a century to realize.
Yet both are often conflated: take the bombing of Germany or the use of atom
bombs over Japan in WW2, they helped reduce the military capabilities of both nations,
but strategic bombing advocates framed the war as a victory of strategic air power. We
now know that neither bombing campaigns delivered this result. For example, Japan had been subject
to heavy bombing before the atom bomb , it did not surrender. It is the atom bomb plus other factors
that changed things, not the strategic bomber. Then why did we stick with the idea? Well,
it’s complex, books have been written about it but I’ll break it down to the core issues.
Ever since World War 1, a discussion raged whether an Air Force should be an independent force or
subordinate to the Army and Navy. Typically, we get pulled into the details, the different
applications of air power on both the tactical, operational, and strategic level. But beyond
that lies the question, if an air force is to be independent, it needs to justify why it must be
independent – and can it do so irrespective of its mission set? For air theorists,
the advent of airpower presented a paradigm shift that did away with the old truths of warfare.
The narrative of the “aeromanics” often went as follows. For hundreds of years, if you wanted to
compel another kingdom or state to change its political-military behavior once and for all,
you had to pressure it indirectly. Your army had to collide with, knock down,
and attrite or defeat an intervening defensive force. Need less to say,
this time-honored method typically wasted time, treasure and lives.[…] Instead of relying upon
indirect and outside-in methods to compel others, why not use airpower to work from the inside
out and strike opponents directly. In short, instead of clashing armies,
airpower would strike the vital organs of a nation and thus prevent its ability to wage war. It is
worth noting that much of this discussion came with a severe World War 1 hangover,
an experience of attritional trench warfare no one wanted to see a repeat of. With some variance,
this sort of thinking existed in all air forces, even those that nominally were not
independent yet as the example of the United States Army Air Corps shows:
On 2 July 1926 the U.S. Congress […] passed the Air Corps Act. While it did not establish
a separate air service, it did establish the Air Corps as an organization capable
of military action both as an auxiliary force and as “an independent force operating alone on
a separate mission,” formally defining airpower as a new and separate form of military power.
Amongst airpower theorists, the drive to establish an independent branch to be separate from the Army
or Navy rested on a self-made promise that air power would not just substitute them but
rather change the nature of warfare. It is important not to conflate mission sets with
warfare as a means to an end . Every single major bureaucratic battle fought over this ultimately
comes back to what purpose airpower serves as an extension of political decision-making.
To sum up, strategic bomber theory is the product, or rather the obvious and you may say only mission
set supporting the promise of circumventing traditional armed forces and striking at the
heart of the enemy’s power centre – so to fulfil that purpose of warfare. Anything else, from
reconnaissance to interdiction brings us back to classical warfare of armed forces vs armed forces
on the field of battle. Why many theorists held on to this self-declared truth that strategic bombing
as a mission fulfils the premise of airpower as a shift from classical warfare and the only means
to an end, even in the face of evidence that says otherwise, we must analyse two interlinked
aspects: the perceptions of decision-makers and technical and tactical innovation.
Let’s start with the perceptions of decision-makers. I can talk a lot
about how their ideas were formed (but I already have a video on that ) so rather I want to talk
about how air theorists interpreted the facts they were confronted with,
in the manner that suited them. That’s not unique to them, we all do that – it’s easier to shape
reality to how we would like to have it rather than accept where it is inconsistent with our
assumptions. We can see this for example with the bombing campaign against Germany in World
War 2 where through a variety of factors a lack of progress was explained away rather than prompting
a revaluation of the core assumptions. Blame for the air campaign’s lack of
progress could fall in one or all of three places: (1) lack of resources,
which would reflect poorly on [Generals] as force providers; (2) [Army Air Force] doctrine
was proving a failing experiment, which might jeopardize the need for independent airpower;
or (3) [Eight Air Force command] had lacked creativity and flexibility as it had underutilized
and underperformed the forces commanded. [Generals] chose to articulate the third.
While basically all air forces in World War 2 recognized the limits, the underappreciated
aspects of airpower, its interdependence with naval and land power, but also the value of its
independence from the Battle of Britain over to the bombing campaign , the drive to make it work –
somehow – is evident from the constant adjustments to strategic bombing during the war, but also
later as various countries but especially the United States transfer over to nuclear airpower.
The newly independent Air Force [1947] desired to establish an organization devoted to centralized
strategic bombing. Externally, the nation struggled to develop a strategy to confront
a new threat – the Soviet Union – and a new war, the Cold War. At the same time,
the Air Force competed with other services for legitimacy and resources. To show its
technological advantage and growing independence, the Air Force embraced the atomic bomb and the
intercontinental bomber. The strategic bomber represented distance from Army culture.
This is one example how technological advances were framed in such a way as
to finally bring forth the promise of airpower – which is my segway into the next section about
technical and tactical innovation. You know what else is important about
perceptions and segways…..? Being exposed to them so you can form your own
I talked about the perceptions of decision-makers, and that’s sort of the high level stuff – how do
you interpret the data you get and coalesce it to your aims. Yet this is interconnected
to the operational and tactical level, where its about what and how actual missions get flown.
Here we start seeing an arms race – I don’t refer to the one between nations – but the
one between the realities of airpower and the demands of air theorists. To achieve
the effect air theorists wanted, they invested heavily in technical capital – plane designs,
engines, bombload, navigation, bombsights, radar – and human capital – so training and tactics.
Where the human role was to manage the complexity in the system, the machine’s role was to simplify
specific aspects of that complexity for the human […]. Doctrine was the key contextual element in
the bombardment system – the “why” that bound together the humans, machines, and ideas. Its
role was to provide the purpose, the design, and the direction for the system’s use. .
In this light, planes like the B-17, Lancaster, B-29, or systems like the Norden bombsight or
H2S radar quickly rose to popular acclaim, carried forward by air theorists as technical
manifestations of airpower’s ultimate promise. This can also be clearly seen by the importance
they placed on their success, for example in the US with General Arnolds support of the B-29
Arnold saw the B-29 “Superfortress” not only as the war-winning weapon but also the future of
an independent Air Force. As he reflected in his memoirs, “It was the B-29s and the
B-29s only that could put tons and tons of bombs on Japan. The Fleet couldn’t do it;
the Naval Air couldn’t do it; the Army couldn’t do it. The B-29s could.” A lot was riding on
this, as Arnold would frequently remind Hansell. And let’s make no mistake, the introduction of
technical and tactical solutions from new bombsights, radar, lead bombardiers and so on
certainly improved the capabilities of strategic bombing forces. However, when the core assumption
on which these very rational improvements are based on are, in lack of a better word, incorrect
assumptions – then any change will ultimately fall short of the desired success. Instead, they become
a way to rationalize temporary shortcomings that will simply be overcome by the next big change.
The difference between expectations and realities caused both the RAF and USAAF to make constant
wartime adjustments to their plans, tactics and machinery. The kinds of shifts they made
were consistent with (and articulated in terms of) their individual circumstances and predilections,
but in some cases the practical effects were nearly identical .
There are many ways to rationalize shortcomings in airpower without questioning the core tenant that
air theorists had laid out: Perhaps the bomb loads weren’t big enough, perhaps the data is wrong,
perhaps crews aren’t accurate enough, perhaps you attacked the ‘wrong targets’, perhaps you
didn’t hit the targets long enough and so on. To sum it up in a pop culture reference, this means
in practice that you fly the same missions over and over again, expecting different results.
All these options, funnelled through the perceptions of air power theorists promoted
the search for technical or tactical solutions to the problem but they don’t question the
premise itself . It is not the only example or a pure air-related problem, you could extend
that to other cases like the ‘body count’ premise in Vietnam. Over time the old battle
lines of strategic vs tactical effect becoming a well-trodden ground ending almost in a compromise.
What we call the modern iteration of airpower comes to light slowly, Israel demonstrated it in
the 1960s, for America that happened post-Vietnam, and Western style air forces followed suit. It’s
a type of airpower that does not shy away from the strategic dimension, but it has a
firmer understanding of its place in delivering strategic effect rather than strategic victory.
Airpower professionals live in a different world in which their real task consists of
conceiving and executing strategy that is not a function of winning battles. In the world of the
third dimension, strategy is the only legitimate starting point because third-dimension operations
can and should have a direct strategic effect on the opponent. Failure to understand and
use the principles of strategy means that airpower will either fail when employed or
will achieve far less than it otherwise should. Now there are many ways we can take that quote,
I would be interested what some naval or space theorists have to say about it, but yes airpower
sits in that uncanny intersection between being able to deliver strategic effect that attrites,
cripples and paralyses an adversary, but without ultimately having the ability to
enforce an outcome by itself. It took over half a century to figure it out.