War and Society by Centeno Miguel A.; Enriquez Elaine; & Elaine Enriquez

Author:Centeno, Miguel A.; Enriquez, Elaine; & Elaine Enriquez [Centeno, Miguel A. & Enriquez, Elaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2016-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Strategic Bombing

Few outside of the rarefied community of military historians have heard of the twentieth-century Italian general Giulio Douhet, yet in many ways he may be the most symbolically important figure in modern warfare. His book, The Command of the Air ([1921] 1983), serves as the intellectual origin of the concept of strategic bombing. Douhet predicted that the wars of the future would be decided by air-power alone. Massive fleets of bombers would destroy an enemy’s cities before the more traditional forces of army and navy could even be mobilized. The destruction would be total: he advocated the targeting of both the productive capacity of the enemy and the terrorizing of the population. The futility of defense was central to Douhet’s thesis. British politician Stanley Baldwin, in a famous Parliamentary debate in 1932, stated, “there is no power on earth that can protect [the man on the street] from bombing … The bomber will always get through” (widely quoted, but see, for example, Kiras 2006, 42). While many of the particulars of Douhet’s thesis were wrong, the central premise of unimaginable destruction defined warfare in the twentieth century. Baldwin well understood these implications: “The only defence is in offence, which means you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.”8

With the advent of strategic bombing – meaning mass civilian bombing – the means of war have become cause for their own use. We have seen the mass killing of conquest as a byproduct of the process of appropriation, and the killings of genocide being their own purpose, and now turn to the destruction caused by strategic bombing as both consequence and objective. The killings that are a result of bombing are not because the enemy is despised, nor because she stands in the way of some resource, but because military logic declares it the only possible strategy (F. M. Kaplan 1991; Sherry 1987).

The early use of strategic bombing carried many of the characteristics that would dominate its use for a century. First, it was most often used against those whose essential human kinship was in doubt. While used sparingly in World War I, Italians, French, Spanish, and British used terror bombing against colonial subjects, as did the Japanese in China (Lindqvist 2001). Second, the motivation was not purely to destroy infrastructure or even armed forces, but to destroy the will of a society to wage war. Third, the development of the strategy was closely tied to the organizational ambitions of the new military arm: the air force. Finally, it was conceived as an improvement on the efficiency of killing: it spared one’s own armies and delivered a great deal of destruction for a relatively small amount of money. Of all the paradoxes presented by war, that of strategic bombing may be the greatest: an impeccably rational and instrumental logic produced incredible devastation on the world.

The apocalyptic fears of the interwar years (Patterson 2007) were realized in the 1940s. While the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.