The sacred calf of the American Empire is its cherished global dominance in all things technical, from its sprawling navy to incipient expansion into low earth orbit. From its perceived supremacy, all things function in unison— globalized economy to the pervasion of liberalized human rights in the far reaches of the world. At the heart of this supremacy are the three strategic arms of the US Military; nuclear delivery by land, air and sea. Whatever is leftover from the defense budget flows into the non-nuclear forces and projects force across a myriad of tiny conflicts in hotspots throughout the globe in the obese expanse of the many departments and sub-departments of the DOD. The crux of this American doctrine in both the nuclear and non-nuclear force projection is perceived to be in its standing air arm, the United States Air Force, in the form of its massive strategic capability. Dwarfing the three closest competitors in both size and quality, the USAF has not only become the emblem of American force projection across the globe, it has become so powerful in name and reputation it replaced the traditional King of Battle, tube artillery, as the primary source of heavy support to American maneuver units. The Air-Land Battle concept has become the gold standard of military organization in this regard, as only elite units of the Russian and Chinese armies can be supported as aggressively as the average line company of the US Army in battle. The purpose of the USAF, however, is not merely to be a tactical arm of the US Army, but rather to project force on its own in the form of its massive strategic capability. Going beyond Air-Land Battle, the many iterations of strategic force projection in the US Air Force (from SAC to ACM) justify its existence as its own service branch and have formed a key element to the US military behemoth that is the single global empire the rest of the world relies on to integrate into the global economy.
There is only one problem.
Strategic Bombing as a doctrine has never been successfully demonstrated.
As a concept, the purpose of Strategic Bombing is twofold— to deny the enemy its ability to project force through the destruction of logistical hubs (factories, rail yards, port facilities, oil depots) and to break enemy morale through the sheer terror. The first iterations in the first World War were tiny and ineffective, serving to bolster fading morale in both Germany and Great Britain. In the second war, the Germans shocked the rest of Europe by crippling Poland in a few short weeks, promptly occupying the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark before swiftly outmaneuvering a lethargic Anglo-French army and forcing the French surrender. The Luftwaffe was critical to the German doctrine and had a lasting impression on both Britain and France, who claimed it was the Luftwaffe that paralyzed their efforts to stop the pincers of German tanks. In the chaos that followed the fall of France, Germany began to employ the Luftwaffe in a combined effort at strangling the British home islands with the infamous U-Boat blockade that became known as the Battle of Britain. Owing to the lack of submarines and crippled by the fear of drawing the United States into the conflict, the naval blockade failed and the air effort suffered losses that were never truly replenished. The propaganda victory that followed proved extremely useful at masking the utterly devastating number of casualties that had been inflicted on the British Empire at the hand of German aces and quickly served as a means to create the perception of participation while Allied forces built up in Great Britain for the eventual invasion of the occupied continent. The Royal Air Force had not only performed inadequately in the crucial opening months of the war, it had been absolutely thrashed by the Germans over Belgium, France and even the skies over London— 1200 English fighters were brought down during the Battle of Britain compared to the 800 German fighter losses— despite the Luftwaffe being essentially a paramilitary organization until 1937, barely 2 years before the war began. Even before American entry into the war, the myth of strategic bombing was created as a propaganda tool to mask the stench of defeat and inflate a battered ego at the critical moment.
This should have been clear as the war dragged to a close and Allied intelligence officers got their hands on hard numbers of Axis war production. In every aspect, the USAAF had failed, despite losing more men over Germany than the US had lost Marines in the Pacific. Given the massive increase in American strategic capability between 1942 and 1944, there was no legitimate reason for Albert Speer to have produced more tons of German war material in 1944 than 1943 and 1942, nor was there legitimate reason for the Axis fuel shortage to only be truly felt by the severing of supply lines at the hands of the Red Army after the disastrous losses exacted on the 9th Air Force in its effort against the Ploesti oil fields. German cities lay in smoking ruins, its population truly scarred by the ferocity of the bombing, however its occupants resisted until the very basement of the Reichstag had been seized by force from fanatical defenders. Its factories and rail yards had been worked over by thousand bomber Allied raids dozens of times, yet the rolling stock continued to deliver tanks to the front until the closing days of the war. German ports continued to receive refugees from the East and its U-boat facilities were operational until they were captured by Allied troops. Though Allied Tactical Air support had proven critical at paralyzing German supply lines in the critical moments of Allied breakthrough and limited the logistical ability of the Wehrmacht to support its desperate gambit in December of 1944 that became known as the Battle of the Bulge, Strategic Air on its own had little effect on the German ability to wage war, though its pervasiveness did have long term impacts on the psyche of all the European nations.
This was doubly true in the Pacific, where precision daylight bombing was abandoned in favor of indiscriminate incendiary raids on Japanese urban areas, yet no meaningful effect could be singly attributed to the constant B-29 attacks. The bold carrier raids of the Japanese home islands in 1944 and 1945 ravaged the largely pre-industrial interior of Japan for days at a time with little in the way of meaningful resistance or effect. Postwar analysis would reveal that it was the submarine campaign waged by the US Navy that truly crippled the Japanese industrial sector and brought the islands to the brink of starvation, accounting for over 50% of all Axis shipping tonnage sank by Allied forces in the entire Second World War. It was only when major hubs such as Rabaul and Truk were strangled by naval supremacy that Japanese supply lines withered. Despite weeks of preparation, Allied bombing raids never meaningfully inhibited Japanese fortifications on the many island chains that would become infamous battlegrounds, nor did they replace the need to commit US Marines and Soldiers into ugly amphibious assaults to seize them. Inversely, the Japanese air campaigns were also ineffective unless coordinated with naval or infantry assault. The novelty of air bombardment, combined with the whirlwind of mass media, created a faux juggernaut that would yield little in the way of results over the proceeding decades.
Built on the image of Allied supremacy against the bitter memories of short-lived German ascendency, the US Air Force was signed into existence in 1947. At the onset of the Cold War, the USAF was primarily a nuclear deterrent and relegated conventional bombing to a secondary task. With the commitment of Allied troops to Korea in 1950, however, General Curtis LeMay set about at once to cripple the Communist war effort in massive strategic raids far behind NPRK lines. In the same vein as the massive Allied effort against Germany and Japan, also led by Curtis LeMay, swarms of heavy bombers cloaked the Korean Peninsula in a sea of high explosive. The already pre-industrial society was quickly returned to the stone age and what little factories, rail yards and oil depots the North Koreans had to support their fledgling war effort went up in smoke. The war, however, continued unabated. The rail lines from China were attacked across the length and breadth of the peninsula, however it was not until American Marines and Soldiers stormed the beaches of Incheon that the tide was reversed. When the Chinese entered the war, surging across the frozen Yalu river in the winter of 1950, the logistical footprint tripled and rail traffic increased to support the offensive. The prospect of nuclear conflict with the Communist Chinese prevented the expansion of the UN mission into a greater regional war on Chinese soil and so the American led effort was reduced to targeting theater logistics inside the Korean border. Operation Strangle and Operation Saturate were aimed specifically at bringing the communists to the negotiating table and culminated in two major dam attacks on the Yalu river that crippled the Korean electrical grid. The fact that Korea was a pre-industrial nation seemed to be lost on the big thinkers in Washington, perplexed that the Korean and Chinese delegation continued to obstinately haggle over ceasefire tenets. When peace finally did come, the Air Force totaled the tonnage of bombs dropped on the peninsula, tallied the number of communist fighters shot down, patted themselves on the back and called the campaign a success.
This recipe was repeated again in Vietnam, where American heavy bombers scorched the Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese jungles, desperately searching to interdict the Ho Chi Minh trail by vaporizing the terrain with high explosive. American tactical aircraft bombarded strategic facilities across the DMZ into North Vietnam, battering bridges, dams, electrical substations and what rudimentary arms factories the Vietnamese could put into action in a vein attempt to stem the tide of arms south. Brave American pilots penetrated again and again into powerful air defense sectors to strike deep at the heart of the communist regime, many of them dying or suffering years of torture at the hands of vengeful captors after being shot down. Over the course of almost a decade, the US dropped several times the tonnage of bombs expended on Germany into triple canopy rainforests and rice paddies, yet the communists refused to budge. When the Nixon Administration became fixated on ending the war on good terms, Operation Linebacker and Linebacker II unleashed the full weight of Strategic Air Command on the Hanoi in massive sorties, almost masking the naval blockade imposed on the port of Haiphong that did very nearly cripple the flow of Soviet and Chinese supplies to the NVA. The unceremonious withdrawal led to a complete collapse of the South Vietnamese junta within two years, ending the conflict. Unlike Korea, there was no escaping the stench of failure stemming from the fiasco in Vietnam and the ego of the American war machine was severely bruised. Bitter veterans concocted myth after myth about being inches from victory, if not for those traitor journalists and fair-weather politicians! The truth, however, would be confirmed only two decades later, in the euphoric aftermath of the Cold War.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the communist bloc fell into chaos. Dozens of ethnic conflicts sprang up overnight across the fallen empire, from the Baltics to Mongolian frontier. In the Balkans, the corpse of Yugoslavia disintegrated into a vicious civil war along fragmented ethnic lines that escalated over the course of the 1990’s to a point at which the Clinton Administration led a NATO peacekeeping force into the region, spearheaded by a strategic air campaign against Serbian forces as a prelude to KFOR ground invasion. Between March and June of 1999, American led airpower bombarded Yugoslav/Serbian army positions, depots, railways and then economic targets as well to force Milosevic to concede. The effort, shrouded in a mask of NATO propaganda, was a resounding failure. Despite bold proclamations, the two month bombardment resulted in less than a thousand Yugoslav troops killed in action (300 of them being police officers), hardly one-fifth the original toll claimed by NATO analysts at the conclusion of hostilities, though their “5,000 dead and crippled logistics” was drastically reduced later as well. Despite an aggressive Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) operation, the Serbs continued to target NATO aircraft until the cessation of hostilities with surface to air missiles and successfully brought down one of the USAF’s coveted stealth fighters, supposedly untouchable, with an aged SA-3, damaging at least one more. The economic damage, while seemingly catastrophic, had no meaningful effect on Milosevic’s grip on power and it was only when the Russian government publicly announced it would not support the Yugoslav junta that they agreed to negotiate. Furthermore, the Yugoslav refusal to negotiate prior to the air campaign had revolved around a particularly aggressive NATO policy that allowed NATO troops free reign of Serbia. This was subsequently removed during negotiations and the Komanavo Agreement in its final form was essentially what Milosevic had been willing to accept before the start of NATO hostilities. Both General Wesley Clark and British Lieutenant-General Mike Jackson agreed the air campaign was essentially peripheral to the effort and that the Yugoslav leadership conceded because it expected a ground invasion which they could not hope to win. Thus, the proof “airpower alone could win a war” (John Keegan, famous British historian and fanatical proponent of the Anglo-centric mythos of the world wars) was actually proof of the opposite— airpower alone is ineffective even against fragile regimes that have already been bled white by a decade of fratricidal civil wars and domestic upheaval. Even when every possible aspect of the operation was stacked in NATO’s favor, the overwhelming air power of the combined multi-national force failed to produce results that did not come from the prospect of conventional ground operation alone.
The historical impotency of strategic bombing as a doctrine, even and especially when the force disparity is radically disproportionate, thus disproves the concept on a theoretical level as well as a practical level. Conclusively, from the Blitz to Operation Allied Force, there has never been a successful practical application of the concept, no matter how overwhelming the air power wielded against a battered enemy appeared or how much ordnance was expended. The dual invasions of Iraq, occupation of Afghanistan, Russian special military operation against Ukraine and, most recently, the Israeli bombing of Palestine, only further disprove the narrative, as at no point did the aggressor nation yield its expected results without victory on the ground, if at all. The prevalence of this myth, originally to protect an outright disgraceful, atrocious performance of the aristocratic cadre in the RAF against a nominally inferior enemy and subsequently raise morale at the same time, continued into the modern age by the sheer momentum generated by the immense bureaucracy in Washington DC, the spiritual descendant of the failed strategic policy of Winston Churchill. Despite more than 70 years of failure, the doctrine continues to be proliferated in the modern age due to the incredible amount of money generated by defense juggernauts such as Lockheed Martin, a chief proponent of the F-35 JSF, the most expensive defense project in history.
The reason Strategic bombing fails is rather simple; air power is a fleeting weapon. It is only present on the battlefield or behind it for a few moments and it is unable to stay for long. Even when sustained operations are possible, there is no physical barrier imposed by bombing, regardless of its precision. The naval blockade against the Japanese home island chain was successful because submarines would and did loiter for months in the shipping lanes, representing a physical barrier to be neutralized or bypassed. The same is true of ground invasion, as the physical presence of troops is the reason enemy movement is truly stopped. No matter the armored or artillery supremacy, there is no stopping the enemy without infantry to physically prevent their access. As a tactical weapon, air power functions in the same way that armored forces and artillery batteries function— as a component of the force projection vaulted forward by the infantry or naval fleet. To this end, even submarines are limited, as no submarine is capable of exerting an overt presence in a given area without rendering itself completely vulnerable to attack, nor is that its purpose. The problem with Strategic Bombing as a doctrine is that, similar to the submarine used as a means to project naval force, it is merely a supporting element to the overt surface fleet or overt infantry force. Furthermore, the physical damage done by the bombardment, whether artillery, naval or strategic air, is generally fairly simple to fix. Without killing the engineers or facility staff, it rarely takes longer than a few hours to work around seemingly catastrophic damage unless there are no more engineers or technicians able to conduct repairs.
At its root, strategic bombing and subsequent technical supremacy represents an artificial barrier preventing the necessity of engaging in geopolitical struggle on an interpersonal level that requires indoctrinating young men with both the knowledge and the drive to project force at the cost of their own bodies. It represents a willingness to separate humanity from the horrors of war, at least on one side, and sterilize its modern spectacle so that war may be conducted with less exposure than traditionally experienced and with less collective impact. Beyond its logical inconsistencies, it fails because it rejects the nature of human interaction and disregards war as a fundamentally human experience. There is no future, no matter what weapons are developed in all of their monstrosity, where war can ever be successfully waged without civilization itself being willing to sacrifice its own youth on the battlefield to exert its will on the rest of nature.