Inevitable failure
Niccolo Machiavelli, the famed author of "The Prince" and "The Art of War" was once given the opportunity to put his martial theories into practice by Giovanni de' Medici, the captain of the Black Bands, an elite mercenary company. As Bandello relates the story, things did not exactly go according to plan, in fact, it required the de' Medici's intervention to unsnarl the tangle of hopelessly confused troops.
As this example suggests, (to say nothing of 15 centuries of post-Roman military history), it is more than a little dangerous to look to Italy for advice on military matters. So, it is disheartening to see the way in which the Bush administration looks as if it is increasingly interested in the long-discredited air power theories of Giulio Douhet.
For 86 years, air power advocates have been overpromising and underdelivering. While no one could possibly deny that air power is a vital tactical element necessary for military victory in most situations, it is no more a decisive strategic weapon than armored cavalry, indeed, it is demonstrably less capable of delivering strategic victory than sea power alone. Ironically, this important tactical aspect of air power in support of land and sea forces, which is its only reliably successful application, has been disavowed by air power advocates from the start.
And yet, since no one would seriously argue that strategic victories can be won by using nothing but tanks and self-propelled artillery, it is very strange that armchair strategists and politicians still cling to the myth that they can be won with air power alone. For the history of air power is a long and ignoble history of failure piled upon utter failure.
The air raid on Pearl Harbor not only did not knock the United States out of World War II, but the historical ignorance of overwrought columnists notwithstanding, it barely damaged the U.S. Navy at all, either in terms of ship numbers or overall tonnage. The AWPD-1 and AWPD-2 plans to destroy German industrial capacity were such a complete failure that Germany actually managed to increase its arms production despite the incessant Allied bombing; while the fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo managed to kill massive numbers of civilians, neither attack did significant damage to the ability of Germany or Japan to continue to wage their hopeless wars.
Strategic bombing did not conquer London or North Vietnam. In fact, without nuclear weapons, it is hard to think of a single example where strategic bombing served as a reasonable substitute for force on the ground augmented by tactical air superiority.
And while Desert Storm is often cited as one of air power's few smashing successes, that success turns out to be a mirage according to the detailed post-facto evaluation of the air campaign. For example, the Air Force's F-117 Nighthawks completely missed 40 percent of their targets on the first night, and 72 percent of the targets they were assigned to knock out were deemed to require repeated additional strikes over the next five days.
It is easy to forget that President Bush is a former fighter pilot himself. And while it is true that he saw no combat during his time in the Texas Air Reserve, there is no reason to believe that he is not subject to the same misguided belief in the strategic capacity of air power that is shared by so many past and present Air Force officers.
As WND reported this weekend, the Pentagon has announced that its wargaming predicts the unfeasibility of a ground assault on Iran. While this could be simple misinformation, it corresponds with the assessment of many other military experts who are cognizant of the limitations of the military force available to the U.S. commanders in the Middle East. The U.S. could surely stage an invasion that would smash through the conscript-heavy, unprofessional Iranian ground forces, but it would fare poorly against the inevitable insurgent campaign that has proved so difficult to quell in Iraq.
This leaves air strikes, always popular with politicians who itch to take bold and drastic action without risking a large number of American casualties. But the idea that air strikes are risk-free is based on the assumption that the Iranian strategists who are causing such havoc in Iraq and Lebanon are incapable of thinking asymmetrically, that they can't possibly envision any way of effectively striking back against a nation full of disarmed urban centers with open borders to the north and south. Of course, it's remotely possible that none of the estimated 12 million illegal aliens currently resident in America are Iranian agents, but that strikes me as a very low probability indeed.
Douhet's strategy of victory through attacking industry, transport, communications, government and civilian morale from the air has not been successful since it was first envisioned in "The Command of the Air." The improvements in air strike technology notwithstanding, this strategy is no more likely to be successful in 2007 than it was in 1942, 1965 or 1991.