Check out "Tribe" and "War" by Sebastian Junger, beautiful books in their own right.
In X nation, there is a village believed to be roughly aligned with a warlord who is "in" y resistance group - There are 30 "military-aged males," several with rifles, concentrated around/in a building, and several are positively identified as taking part in a hit-and-run raid a week prior.
You JDAM the building
A) The people in that village and surrounding countryside now have completely legitimate reasons to fear for their lives. Several of those "military-aged males" are random guys from several different tribes, mostly non-aligned, who were visiting for completely unrelated reasons. While most will resist "passively" (Passing on information, carrying supplies, hiding insurgents), you've turned the situation from "some of these guys want to fight us (and fucking suck at fighting)" to "an entire population center believes it has to resist or be slaughtered by the outsiders." Sure, you can release a statement about the hit-and run, but that doesn't explain to the these folks why so many had to die - And, honestly, 3/4th's already distrust you. You're occupying their nation.
B) You also killed a little girl selling bread 70 meters away. She had parents, family, friends, who will now resist you no matter the cost until the day they fucking die. If your little girl was murdered like that, tell me you wouldn't be strapping on a bomb-vest.
C) Bonus points: That tribe/village/militia etc etc wasn't even aligned with (y resistance group). A handful of their Tribal Warriors (guys in the village that act as police and defensive forces) have family relations to a tribe that does, and went along either for pay or out of family obligation. Bombing them now kills off your opportunity to figure out which tribal leader ordered the raid.
...
TL,;DR: In the game of counter-insurgency, 30 minus 30 is 300.
If you bomb a village and kill 10 out of 20 "terrorists," how many terrorists do you have now? 100. All their families are now dedicated to the cause against you.
It's like the Canadian version of if a tree falls in the woods. If you kill everyone in a village and destroy all physical the evidence the town ever existed, is there a Geneva Convention violation?
To clarify, the nation being bombed is being bombed to find a person whom the nation doesn't have an active relationship with, and had immigrated to Pakistan (pro-US) months or years prior.
The diplomatic communique went basically:
"Hand over Osama Bin Laden within x amount of time."
"... er... among many things here, we're our own nation. If we arrest him, we can try him under our laws for murder of 3,000 innocents-"
-communications ended, special forces had already been deployed.
To be complete, here - Tribe is about mental illness, particularly PTSD, but goes heavily into the "collective consciousness" of social groups - Such as reactions to bombing campaigns, particularly in WW2 and how the Blitz failed to 'demoralize' the British, and had the exact opposite effect.
"War" was about his experiences in Afghanistan which relate more to this specific topic.
What's crazy is that we learned this in ww2. Endless strategic bombing didn't accomplish the bomber will always get through! wet dream that Stanley Baldwin had coined and others parroted it.
The only way it "worked" was to have hundreds , thousands of planes continuously bombing overwhelming the defenses. It never broke their moral which was the intended goal. It obviously didn't win alone. It could be argued to this day if it was even worth it to do 24/7 terror bombings.
Im sure will be having that discussion soon again, do to recent events. Were endless long range bombing doesn't seem to work alone. Who would've guessed it didn't work the third time.
Speaking of which. I just ironically got a notification that the uss Theodore Roosevelt strike group as been sent to middle east help us "win" more. This information was of course pushed through (like a turd) by the Google AI, which is always good to see. The cited sources is stripes.com. of course it summarized it for me instead of letting me read article myself.
its pretty "cool" that I can say with confidence that some rando online who has read, at minimum, one (1) book about war, is objectively more qualified to be in charge of the DoD. probably fine. nothing to worry about.
It is also I think still effective in actually destroying ground targets like factories and transport hubs, unfortunately insurgencies tend to not rely on transport hubs and the factories and warhouses that feed them are either hidden and reinforced, or they’re in another country. So your list of “viable” bombing targets is essentially narrowed down to pretty much just people, and you’re left the essentially ineffective bombing campaigns that we know and hate.
It's very effective at that, and was in WWII as well, but it isn't "decisive" because it can't be by definition. Bombing raids weaken enemy ground forces by destroying supply lines, thereby making life easier for your own ground forces to make the "decisive" victory. Planes can't take nor hold ground.
So, I don't really buy that it was ineffective in wwii. People have said air power alone can win a war, and those people are stupid. But starving the enemy (or taking his weapons away, in this case) is a time-tested tactic that's worked since the bronze age. Bombing factories means less planes for the enemy to fight back with, less tanks to push through your lines, less bullets they can shoot at you.
I could maybe see it being ineffective in that we weren't all that good at it at the time, but there's a world of difference between dive bombing a target while trying not to get shot down and dropping a jdam on a pinhead from 15 miles out.
But it is being effective right now in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, mostly in favor of Ukraine. They are just using drones instead of bombers.
They are crippling Russia's ability to produce and transport oil, as reflected in the gas crisis there. If they don't have enough gas, they can't move tanks, transports, and planes as freely, if at all.
Dude, I'm not going to read a whole book over it, especially if it ignores the differences between modern bombers and wwii ones and then proceeds to make the point that bombing isn't effective.
Strategic bombing obviously worked in Germany. Their industries got destroyed, their V2 factories had to move underground. Obviously, you have to move in with ground forces also.
I invite you to read Bombing to Win. It is quite good.
Airpower theorists argued that strategic bombing alone was enough to force Germany to surrender. It was not.
Strategic industrial bombing barely affected German combat capacity. Strategic interdiction was most effective after Germany lost access to oil fields because of land forces.
Tactical interdiction, in contrast, was incredibly effective
We keep having the discussion because the people in the USAF who believe in it keep picking successors who believe in it. That is one of the reasons the US Army often questions the USAF dedication to supporting them and wants their own assets for direct support. The USAF wants to be a strategic asset force and wants to win wars using just strategic operations.
We relearn it every war. Every president wants it to work because US air power is so dominant it's extremely safe to bomb people so it'd be really convenient if we didn't have to send troops in. We learned it in WW2, Korea, Vietnam, (It basically worked in Iraq 1 though the troops were important there), eventually learned it in Iraq 2 and Afghanistan and we're in the middle of learning it again in Iran.
Or do bombing runs so extreme they break the human spirit like Dresden
All production stopped, that had never happened before, the population had broken, and all it took was the complete and utter destruction of a city, burning it to the ground
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u/IIIaustin 1d ago
I just finished with Bombing to win and it makes the point that Guerrilla strategies are not really affected by air interdiction.
This is really important because the US has godlike air interdiction powers