Strategic-bombing backers are blind to history

here’s a certain irony to the fact that the task of keeping the peace in Lebanon falls to 3,000 Italian soldiers now deploying to that country. An Italian soldier, after all, was largely responsible for the Israeli air campaign against Lebanon in the first place. The bombs that fell on Beirut this summer may have been—as new Hizbullah billboards in bombed-out neighborhoods hasten to point out—“Made in the USA,” but the way in which those bombs were used is of Italian design, sprung from the mind of an early-20th-century Italian general named Giulio Douhet. Indeed, Douhet’s theory of strategic air-power, which attacks civilians in order to bring down their governments, may be undergoing a renaissance in Israeli and American defense circles as those nations gear up for possible confrontation with Iran. There are, unfortunately, two problems with Douhet’s theory: It doesn’t work, and it’s evil.

Giulio Douhet’s theory of strategic bombing emerged against the bleak backdrop of the Italian front in World War I, which was a remarkable exercise in pointless bloodshed even by the standards of a war defined by futility. The Italian army spent more than half a million lives hammering away at Austrian defenses in the Alps, to little effect: Austria’s industrial heartland lay just behind the natural Alpine wall, and the factories operating there sent new artillery pieces into the mountains faster than the Italians could hope to fight through them. Douhet, who had been a fan of the airplane since its invention, reasoned that it would be far better to send bombers high over the Austrians’ Alpine deathtrap to destroy the factories that made that deathtrap possible. He was also an ardent Fascist and considered the industrial working class a volatile force that was a threat to its own government. Once the Austrian factories were destroyed, he argued, the angry and unemployed mob would bring down the Austrian state.

Others have tweaked the details of strategic air-power theory since Douhet conceived it, but its essence remains the same: cause so much pain to the enemy’s civilian economic base that those civilians force their government out of the war. The idea isn’t simply to attack the enemy’s military, but to attack the political support that makes it possible for the enemy to field a military in the first place.

That’s the strategy that Israel pursued when it attacked civilian infrastructure across Lebanon during this summer’s air campaign. Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, a career air force officer and devout air-power theorist, promised to “turn the clock back twenty years in Lebanon” if the Lebanese state failed to rein in Hizbullah. The head of Israel’s Northern Command warned that, “once is inside Lebanon, everything is legitimate.” The Israeli air force made good on those promises when it bombed water pumps in Byblos, glassworks in Zahleh, and grain silos in Beirut. Israeli warplanes even struck the picturesque (and otherwise worthless) lighthouse along Beirut’s Corniche. These targets were struck deliberately and precisely. They had nothing to do with Hizbullah; their destruction certainly did nothing to diminish Hizbullah’s military capacity. They were struck not to defeat Hizbullah on the battlefield, but to “break the will” of a Lebanese population that tolerated Hizbullah’s existence on the battlefield at all.

Yale Herald

Sorry. You'll have to come up with something else.

Torture doesn't work, and it's evil, but that hasn't stopped b*shco...

Back in the 1940's there was a little war in Europe and the far east. Strategic bombing won that war.

In my reading anyway. I can probably dig up links if I become motivated, but I'm not likely to become motivated unless you have something to support the view that strategic bombing wins wars, and in particular WWII.

Nuking Japan does have some merit in that regard, but that is the only example I can think of where it arguably worked.

Who have you read on the subject?

Look into what the 8th air force did during world war two. Look at what the R.A.F. did to Dresden. The bombing campaigns severely restricted the Nazi's war production capabilities.
Without strategic bombing the invasion of Europe would have been near impossible.

I'm not saying that strategic bombing does not blow lots of shit up, I'm saying that it fails to achieve it's objective, to break the enemies will, to obtain a shortcut to submission, to shorten the war, and it wastes a shitload of money. The Nazis were still cranking armaments out at an alarming rate right up to when we occupied them. Dresden killed a lot of people, but it accomplished nothing militarily, it was revenge for London.

How come the Nazi's didn't have enough fuel at the battle of the bulge? Strategic bombing alone did not win the war in Europe, it did facilitate the victory. Herman Goering said he knew the war was lost when he saw Mustangs over Berlin.

They were not invented by bomber command. IIRC the allied forces were prone to run out of gas from time to time too. I'm not saying bombing is entirely useless in war, I'm just saying one should not have inflated expectations, and the notion that you can win a war by bombing the shit out of the other side has been disproven many times, it takes ground forces.

One issue with strategic Bombing is nobody really does it
The article incorrectly identifies the Israeli campaign as a strategic air campaign.

In order to be really effective you need to target the civilian population and reduce their will to fight. Think of fire bombing Japan and Germany. Civilians also contribute to the war effort is something the people don't think about.

Militaries are afraid of public opinion and try to reduce civilian causalities.

Although they did drop quite a load of stuff on Lebanon considering the circumstances. But it was not a strategic campaign. There was an element (stated anyway) of trying to convince the Lebanese to love Hizbullah less by implying that the bombing was Hizbullah's doing, but that largely failed.

The notion that bombing people reduces their will to fight is another matter, as the OP says.

Edit: It does not appear to me that, in both WWII and VietNam, the US felt any particular restraint, other than not using nukes. With regard to nukes, it might be the case that public opinion was some sort of restraint.