May, 2022.
Russian tanks roll across eastern Europe on their way to clash with NATO forces.
In the Pacific, China launches a brutal invasion of Taiwan, while saturating American military
forces in Japan and Guam with hundreds of long-range ballistic missiles.
World War 3 has begun, and the US military is ready to respond with the most powerful
military to ever exist.
A few hundred tanks and two or so dozen ships make up its army and navy, but in the skies
above the Pacific and Europe, ten thousand American strategic bombers rain GPS guided
death down on massive enemy formations below them.
This isn't the American military you know today, this is the American military as envisioned
by the Bomber Mafia.
In the years following World War I, one thing was clear: there had to be a better way to
fight war.
Nobody truly believed that the War to End All Wars would actually put a stop to human
conflict, but some men in the United States Army Air Corps thought that perhaps, they
could find a way to make war more humane... by paradoxically making it much more violent
and brutal.
The Air Corps Tactical School hosted America's aviator officers, and was ground zero for
the development of new ways to use the fighter and bomber, two brand new tools of war birthed
from the first world war.
Up until the late 1920s, aircraft were seen as supplementary weapons of war, and good
for little else but directly supporting ground troops.
However, one group of officers took serious issue with that viewpoint, and argued that
the future of war was in the skies.
Fighters and bombers wouldn't support ground troops- they'd make them almost obsolete.
Rather than support ground forces directly, this group of upstart officers- which included
the likes of the legendary Major General Curtis LeMay and Brigadier General Haywood Hansell-
argued that a sufficiently large bomber force could shut down a nation's ability to wage
war.
Bombers could reach targets that artillery couldn't hope to, and by flying high and fast
could avoid much of the ground fire that would threaten them.
If a sufficiently large bomber could be developed, hundreds of tons of explosives could be delivered
exactly to the places that would hurt the enemy most.
The group quickly got the nickname of the 'bomber mafia', for the bitter and furious
debates they would launch into with fellow Army and Navy leadership.
The bomber mafia called for a paradigm shift in air strategy, and introduced a doctrine
of strategic bombing.
Rather than use air power to strike at the enemy's rear or soften up enemy formations
prior to an attack, strategic bombing would focus on the use of precision air power to
strike deep inside enemy territory and destroy infrastructure needed to support a war effort.
If an enemy's factories were all destroyed, it mattered little how many tanks they currently
had in their inventory, since losses would never be replaced.
The bomber mafia also argued for a separation from the United States Army of all air forces,
and the creation of a separate and independent branch of the US military dedicated to air
power.
With military budgets extremely tight during the interwar years, neither the Navy or Army
was willing to part with any of its budget in order to accommodate the creation of a
brand new branch, and thus American air forces remained as simply another arm of the United
States Army.
This, the bomber mafia argued, severely hindered the development of new strategic doctrine
for the use of air power, as Army leadership predictably saw fighters and bombers as nothing
more than another tool to support Army operations.
But the bomber mafia was actively trying to make Army operations all but obsolete.
Despite being largely ignored by senior Army leadership, the bomber mafia began to grow
in influence as the Air Service Tactical School moved to Maxwell Field in Alabama.
Here, Army aviators could converse and theorize on the use of air power free of overwatch
by their more traditionalist supervisors, and the doctrine of strategic bombing began
to take even more solid form.
War was cruel, the bomber mafia reasoned, and thus any steps one could take to shorten
it were morally justified.
Even if those steps were incredibly brutal themselves.
Better to fight a short, bloody war, the one that dragged on for years and created exponentially
more casualties.
Air power, with its ability to deliver hundreds of tons of bombs with whole formations of
planes, was very well suited for the task.
As World War II broke out, the bomber mafia was partially redeemed in the eyes of military
leadership thanks to the shock and devastation of the Pearl Harbor attack, carried out almost
exclusively by aircraft.
The date that would live on infamy in US history would turn out to be a boon to the bomber
mafia, who finally had the ear of both government and the public.
Yet the bomber mafia's aim was always to use overwhelming power to shorten the length,
and thus brutality, of a war, and early in the war they publicly condemned the massive
civilian bombing of the British Royal Air Force as inhumane and cruel.
Just years later, one of the bomber mafia's own would be responsible for the greatest
loss of human life in a six hour time span- almost all of them civilian.
The doctrine of strategic bombing slowly gained traction with the US Army Air Corps, but it
wasn't until the introduction of the B-29 Superfortress that the bomber mafia's doctrine
of strategic bombing was truly redeemed.
For a decade, the US's heavy bomber of choice was the B-17 Flying Fortress, a dependable
bomber with a range of 2,000 miles (3219 km).
The B-29 extended that range to a whopping 3,250 miles (5,230 km), truly making it possible
for the first time to hit targets deep in the enemy's heartland.
For comparison, a B-29 taking off from New York City would only be 200 miles short of
dropping bombs in London.
It was the difference in payload however that truly made strategic bombing a viable war-winning
doctrine, at least in the eyes of the bomber mafia.
While the B-17 could carry 4,500 lbs (2041 kg) of bombs, the B-29 could carry 20,000
lbs (9071 kg) of nazi-busting explosives.
This nearly quintupled the destructive power of a flight of American bombers.
There was just one problem with the bomber's mafia vision of victory by strategic bombing-
American planes couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.
To be fair, no planes really could.
In World War II there simply didn't exist the mechanical help needed to accurately measure
velocity, wind speed, height, and distance to target in the dynamic environment of a
plane making a bomb run.
A survey of attack run footage recorded by American bombers found that less than 20%
of bombs were actually hitting their targets.
With such abysmal hit rates, strategic bombing would simply never work.
Steps were taken to increase the accuracy of US bomber attacks.
Major attacks were planned during daylight hours, which deprived bombers the cover of
darkness but allowed them to more accurately sight in on ground targets.
Then it was discovered that US bombers were further decreasing their accuracy because
the pilots would perform evasive maneuvers up until the last few seconds before lining
up on their targets.
General Curtis LeMay famously ordered his men to cease all evasive maneuvers, explaining
with the help of basic arithmetic that the odds of an enemy anti-aircraft shell and their
airplane sharing the same point in space were approximately 1 in 386.
When his pilots became skeptical, LeMay simply said, “I'll fly the lead plane myself.”.
He did, and in the subsequent attack on German forces, not a single US bomber was lost.
However, all measures taken so far barely helped improve bomber accuracy.
This now split the bomber mafia into two factions, one led by General LeMay, and the other by
General Haywood Hansell.
Hansell stuck to the bomber mafia's original view that indiscriminate bombing of the civilian
population was immoral, and that victory could only be achieved by striking strictly strategic
targets and limiting civilian casualties.
LeMay vocally disagreed, believing that given the lack of an ability to precisely strike
targets, the enemy must instead be made to suffer as much as possible so the war could
end as quickly as possible, thus limiting further suffering.
Hansell placed his faith in the Norden bombsight, one of the most secretive weapons development
programs of the second world war.
The sight dramatically increased the accuracy of American bombers, promising to make strategic
bombing truly viable for US forces.
There was just one problem: the sight only worked in perfect weather and ideal conditions.
Still, Hansell would get a chance to prove his doctrine of striking at only strategic
targets, as he was given command of bomber forces operating over Japan.
Unfortunately, the raids under Hansell's command largely failed to cause more than minimal
damage to Japan's wartime industries, largely due to the abysmal accuracy.
The US wanted an end to the war, and so Hansell was replaced with LeMay.
Immediately, LeMay ordered his bombers be fitted with a brand new invention by a Harvard
chemistry lab: napalm.
Careful study of Asian cities had revealed to American planners that unlike with European
cities, incendiary weapons, rather than traditional explosives, were the weapon of choice for
maximum destruction.
This is because Asian cities were largely made of wood, with buildings tightly packed
together and narrow streets.
They lacked the firebreaks, wide roads, and open parks of European cities.
In effect, they were the perfect tinderbox, ready for a match to be lit.
LeMay began his firebombing campaign against Japan in 1944, to absolutely devastating effect.
During the March 9th and 10th attack on Tokyo, an estimated 100,000 people died, leading
the United States Strategic Bombing Survey to estimate that more civilians lost their
lives in a 6-hour period during this attack than at any other six hour time period in
the history of humanity
LeMay burned down Japan's 10 largest cities almost completely to the ground, and yet the
Japanese refused to surrender.
He then turned to Japan's 50 largest cities, and still Japan refused to surrender.
In all, he'd end up turning to ash 66 Japanese cities, with Japan no closer to surrender.
Ultimately it would be a combination of fear of Soviet invasion and occupation, and internal
politics, that would lead Japan to surrender, not the US's strategic bombing efforts.
By the end of the second world war, the bomber mafia's belief that the bomber could win a
war was objectively false, but the US would be hard-pressed to truly learn this lesson.
LeMay got his wish after World War II, and the United States Air Force was officially
established as an independent branch.
Just in time for the Korean War.
With the US Air Force firmly under the influence of the bomber mafia, it was believed that
strategic bombing could truly achieve victory.
Yet as the Korean War dragged on, the Air Force ran out of targets to bomb- everything
worth spending tax payer money on bombing had already been bombed, and still the communist
North Korean forces fought on.
This should have been a wake-up call to the US military, yet the bomber mafia's influence
continued to heavily affect US wartime planning.
As the Cold War dragged on, US ground forces became absolutely dwarfed by Soviet forces,
though American air power dramatically outclassed that of the Soviets.
At one point the US Air Force operated an incredible 2,500 heavy bombers, while the
Soviet Union only fielded a few hundred capable aircraft.
It'd be in Vietnam however that the US would start to see the folly of the bomber mafia's
long time focus on air power.
While concerns with escalating the conflict into a war with the Soviet Union limited approved
targets for American bombers, Operations Linebacker and Linebacker II did little to actually seriously
impair North Vietnam's ability to fight.
After each massive bombing campaign North Vietnam would feign at a willingness to negotiate,
but was in truth simply buying time for its ground forces to reorganize.
Ultimately, all the firepower in the US bomber arsenal could do little to stop North Vietnam's
victory over South Vietnam.
With the failure of strategic bombing in Vietnam, the bomber mafia's influence began to wane
in the US Air Force.
Today, strategic bombing is a critical component of America's wartime strategy, but the US
military no longer holds the illusion that wars can be won from the air- despite ironically
the US Air Force being today at a point technologically that it might theoretically be possible for
strategic bombing to win a war against a major industrialized power.
The bomber mafia's biggest problem was simply being 75 years ahead of the times.
The technology available to them made their doctrine of achieving victory through strategic
bombing impossible, as they lacked aircraft with the range, payloads, and more importantly
the accuracy needed.
Still, their contributions to American military planning are today indispensable, and it's
largely thanks to them that the US military leads the world in the development and employment
of smart weapons.
Most of the US weapon inventory is either precision guided, or can be readily converted
into a smart bomb, while peer competitors such as Russia and China still field low numbers
of precision munitions.
This gives the United States military an incredible advantage, and helps make the bomber mafia's
doctrine of victory through strategic bombing more possible than ever before.
Now go watch MOAB- Mother of all Bombs, or click this other video instead!
The Bomber Mafia, by Malcom Gladwell