The Dangerous Persistence of the Airpower Myth
One of the more controversial and disappointing aspects of Israel’s war against Hamas is its heavy use of air power. The leftist +972 Magazine, which can be counted upon to emphasize anything negative that can be said about Israel, recently published online a report that describes Israel’s allegedly Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven bombardments as a “mass assassination factory.” 972 claims, citing an Israeli report, that the IDF includes in its target list so-called “power targets” thought to create a “shock” that would debilitate Hamas. Far more sympathetic yet critical analysts such as France’s Michel Goya, perhaps France’s most respected and influential analyst, likewise have voiced concern with what appears to be Israel’s loose targeting policies and disregard for the principle of proportionality, chiefly in regards to aerial bombardments.
Setting aside the debate about proportionality, what is of interest to me is that Israel continues to fall victim to the myth of airpower notwithstanding hard-earned lessons from previous engagements, chief among them the 2006 Lebanon War. Associated with this is an overreliance on technology. Israel is not alone: The United States military since the days of Billy Mitchell (1879-1936) has been wed to a cult of airpower and its corollary, technology, that remains unabated today. This brings us to several important questions. What is the value of airpower, and why do militaries like Israel’s and America’s exalt in it in the face of overwhelming evidence that airpower is and always has been greatly oversold?
The Ur-Myth
As is well known, airpower theory’s founding father was the Italian General Giulio Douhet (1869-1930), the author of The Command of the Air (1921). Less well known is the fact that it was the Italian military that pioneered the military use of airplanes in 1911 in its campaign against the Ottomans in Libya. Though the real value of those efforts—which Douhet analyzed and wrote about—was questionable, Douhet saw in the experience the harbinger of things to come. He became convinced that mastery of the air was the key to future warfare. In particular, he argued that strategic bombing not just of military targets but also of cities would prove militarily decisive. Bombing cities promised to “annihilate the physical and moral resistance of the enemy.” Even if bombing cities did not attain that objective, he continued, “it remained necessary to weaken, as much as possible, the resistance of the enemy, because that facilitates, more than any other means, the operations of the army and the navy.”
Giulio Douhet
Douhet was soon joined by the American Billy Mitchell and the Brit Sir Hugh Trenchard (1873-1956), often referred to as the Father of the Royal Air Force. According to Herve Coutau-Bégarie, France’s leading scholar of military strategy, the three contemporaries argued for a general strategy dominated by the air arm or otherwise built around it. The vision they espoused was achieving a decisive victory by the sole means of airpower without having to give battle on the ground or on the sea.
The cult of airpower took on a form of modernism, one that suited the tastes of Fascist Italy and 20th-century America alike. It wed futurist technology with a belief in brute force and industrial might. The paroxysm of all this was the giant bomber fleets of Britain and the United States in World War Two, the devastation of cities across Europe and Japan, and, finally, America’s development of atomic weapons, delivered of course by that extraordinary flower of America’s aviation industry, the Boeing B-29. Two years later, in 1947, the United States Air Force was born out of the belief in the decisive value of strategic bombing. Coutau-Bégarie wrote of a post-war wave of “neo-Douhetism,” with theorists in multiple countries arguing for the pre-eminence of strategic bombing over all other forms of war.
In the later years of the Cold War, Coutau-Bégarie noted a relative decline in the cult of strategic bombing in the later years of the Cold War owing, among other things, to the reality that nuclear arms did not prevent limited wars, and aircraft conceived for strategic bombing were of little use for those wars. Nonetheless, the obsession with technology continued, often at the price of weak or non-existent reflection over doctrine or strategy. The 1980s saw the work of John Boyd and then John Warden, who conceived of the enemy as a “system composed of numerous sub-systems.” The idea now was to attack key nodes that would have the effect of paralyzing the enemy. This is the origin of the concept of “Shock and Awe,” which the United States would apply in dramatic fashion in both wars against Iraq. Arguably Desert Shield would have the most profound consequences on American strategic thinking, as airpower enthusiasts would see in that war—arguably the most one-sided and over-determined victory in modern history—an unequivocal validation of the marriage of airpower with high technology. Out of that emerged in the United States the American concept of a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which envisioned airpower boosted by sensor and information networks. This would enable militaries with unprecedented speed to identify and strike targets and thereby overwhelm the adversary’s ability to think and react.
The U.S. military, it should be noted, remains wed to airpower notwithstanding countless studies questioning or downright rejecting the inefficacy of strategic bombing and the overselling of airpower in general. This was true of the targeting of German and Japanese cities in World War 2, and also of NATO operations in Kosovo and against Serbia. One can also point to how little bombing contributed to the outcomes of wars in Vietnam, Iraq post-2003, and Afghanistan. The sheer tonnage dropped on Laos, which the U.S. has bombed more than any other country, beggars belief. Yet it accomplished little if anything beyond leaving a lasting legacy of unexploded ordinance that is still taking lives. The U.S. Air Force nonetheless insists on strategic bombing’s value and ability to be decisive.
Israel and the Airpower Cult
Nowhere outside of the U.S. Air Force did the cult of air power and the fantasy of its potency when married to high technology find more fertile ground than in Israel. Israel already had become enamored with airpower, which was critical to its victories in the wars of 1956, 1967, and 1973. In the early 2000s, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) embraced RMA. The “overall belief in the Israeli defense establishment,” wrote RAND’s David Johnson in his incisive study of the 2006 Lebanon war, was that “standoff fires” primarily delivered by aircraft “were an effective means of affecting the will of the adversary and determining conflict outcomes.” This also promised to reduce IDF casualties, cause less collateral damage, and save money, at least compared to the employment of non-precision fires and large-scale ground operations. Johnson also saw a subtle difference between Israeli and American approaches. The Israeli approach, he wrote, is more “quantitative and target-centric, and it focuses on the efficient identification and destruction of specific targets, assuming that these actions will yield success.” One can hear echoes of this in the 972 article. In comparison, U.S. Air Force doctrine is “more qualitative and focused on ‘desired effects.’” Be that as it may, the Israelis came to undervalue ground operations required to take and hold territory. Against irregular forces in the West Bank and Gaza, they also got good at “mowing the grass,” which meant using the full panoply of intelligence assets to identify and strike precisely at targets, with the belief that this might cripple Palestinians’ ability to act.
Airstrike in Fallujah
A major consequence of particular concern to Johnson was that the IDF had lost the art of combined arms fire and maneuver, or of operating on a larger scale than the small unit work typical of raids in the Occupied Territories. Of greater significance, though, was Johnson’s larger conclusion: The IDF’s airpower and tech-centered way of war did not work. One reason was that targets got smaller and smaller. They never could end the threat posed by buried rockets or individuals wielding anti-tank guided missiles because they were small and hard to find. Ramping up the intensity of bombing did little. What was necessary was ground maneuver, paired with airpower. Johnson saw in 2006 validation of old army-centric contention that at the end of the day, one needs to take and hold territory on the ground.
Johnson, who published his study in 2011, was convinced that Israel had learned its lessons in Lebanon. Indeed, the IDF after 2006 dusted off its ground maneuver skills and revived the art of combined arms and joint warfare. Israel reversed budget cuts to its armored units. Israel’s conduct of the current war in Gaza, however, suggests that perhaps IDF ground forces are operating better than they had in 2006. More significantly, the Israeli government this time around is not holding back and has committed its ground forces to the attack, indicating that it understands that only troops on the ground can succeed. Nonetheless, the IDF remains wed to tech-empowered airpower. The 972 Magazine article, with its talk of AI-driven targeting, underscores the point.
The persistence of the airpower myth owes something to the seductiveness of the idea first articulated by Douhet. Bombing things from the air and from a distance is, to put it bluntly, a lot safer than attacking them on the ground, especially when there is little threat to aircraft. Thus, even though there is remarkably little evidence that strategic bombing or the bombing of civilian targets yields the promised results, militaries have a hard time resisting the temptation to try. For the IDF, the imperative of minimizing casualties is especially critical given the country’s small size and the close ties between the conscript army and the public. Both the U.S. and Israel, moreover, have strategic cultures that place a high value on technology; this makes sense given their demonstrable technological superiority relative to most if not all of their adversaries. Why not leverage their technological edge to defeat the enemy while reducing their own casualties? Close combat, after all, can significantly minimize any qualitative superiority one might have over the adversary, so it is reasonable to avoid getting close and make the most of whatever advantage one has.
Bombing North Korea
No one disputes the value of airpower when it comes to providing battlefield fires, interdicting enemy assets, or targeting key infrastructure (e.g. bridges, airfields, and depots). The real problem is the old Douhet-esque assumption that hitting civilian targets as a useful effect on the adversary. For Israel, over-reliance on airpower also tramples over what French strategist Raoul Castex (1878-1968) would describe as a critical political servitude of protecting the perceived legitimacy of what otherwise is a legitimate war. This servitude must be balanced against any real military value. Bombing things, notwithstanding the extraordinary of today’s weaponry, invariably causes significant “collateral damage.” Breaking the habit, however, requires resisting one’s own strategic culture, while also doing something no modern Western military accepts willingly: assuming fully the risk of taking and holding territory on the ground. Young men and women will get killed in shocking numbers.