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The Persian Gulf War of 1991 appeared to usher in a new age of warfare. Long range, precision-guided weapons quickly and easily decimated the formidable, battle-hardened army of Saddam Hussein. An information age “revolution in military affairs” seemed to offer a powerful new coercive tool for policymakers wary of committing ground forces and sustaining casualties.
Writing in the years immediately following Desert Storm, political scientist Robert Pape warns that drawing too many conclusions from the spectacular success of the Persian Gulf War would be a mistake. In “Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War,” Pape shows that strategic airpower has never been the panacea many theorists and war planners had hoped and believed it would be. And, he argues, the advent of advanced precision-guided technology does little to change that fact.
Pape begins his analysis by providing a helpful overview of a century of airpower theory and the four main ways in which airpower has been employed to achieve strategic objectives: 1) Punishment: inflicting enough pain on enemy civilians to cause either the government to concede or the people to revolt against their government (often associated with early Italian airpower theorist Giulio Douhet); 2) Risk: raising the risk of civilian damage slowly, compelling the opponent to concede to avoid suffering future costs (often associated with game theorist Thomas Schelling); 3) Denial: weakening enemy forces to the point that ground forces can succeed without incurring unacceptable losses, which can involve interdiction at either the strategic (destroy or isolate the enemy’s sources of military production) or operational (attacking combat support functions, such as transportation or supplies) levels; and 4) Decapitation: strikes against key leadership.
In “Bombing to Win,” Pape tests these various forms of airpower to determine which, if any, is best in coercing states to change their behavior. He conducted a quantitative analysis of all 33 strategic air campaigns carried out in the twenty-first century, but here focuses specifically on the American air campaigns against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany in WWII, North Korea and China in the Korean War, North Vietnam in the Vietnam War, and Iraq in 1991.
At first blush, the strategic air campaign against Japan – “the most successful case of modern military coercion” according to Pape – appears to demonstrate the efficacy of punishment and risk as a tool in coercing an adversary to concede to strong demands. By August 1944, 64 of Japan’s 66 largest cities had been bombed in conventional attacks that killed over 800,000 civilians and injured many millions more. It is estimated that over two-thirds of all Japanese civilians experienced air raids. Japan’s unconditional surrender and acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration came just days after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed another 100,000 Japanese civilians. A combination of Douhet and Schelling appeared to have won the war. But Pape strongly disagrees.
He argues that the suffering of the Japanese people didn’t really enter into the decision calculus of the Japanese government, particularly the Army, which maintained the dominant voice till the end. What really mattered to the high command, according to Pape, was the ability to maintain a credible defense of the Japanese home islands. The key vulnerability in Tokyo’s ability to maintain an effective fighting force was its extreme dependence on imported raw materials to sustain the military. By early August 1945, the Japanese government had concluded that the “Getsu-Go plan” for resisting an Allied invasion was implausible because of the exhaustion of vital raw material stockpiles, the destruction of both the navy and merchant marine, and the quick defeat of the crack Kwantung Army in Manchuria by the Soviet Red Army. In other words, “the naval blockade, invasion threat, and Soviet attack ensured that surrender would have occurred at precisely the same time even if there had been no strategic air campaign,” nuclear or conventional. By the time the Japanese surrendered, there wasn’t much left for atomic bombs to threaten when it came to major urban areas as “the hostage was already dead” and further attacks on the industrial infrastructure would have “simply made the rubble of Japan’s war economy bounce.” Thus, Pape concludes that the strategic air campaign against Japan was “not only immoral but futile.” He argues passionately that “once the Japanese leaders became convinced that their strategy for defending the homeland could not succeed, they preferred surrender to the costs of continuing the war … compared to increasing military vulnerability, the escalating costs and risks to the population hardly mattered at all.”
Airpower also played a central role in the Allies’ strategy to defeat Nazi Germany. Beginning in 1940, four distinct air campaigns were conducted. First, the Royal Air Force attempted a strategic interdiction campaign against railroad marshaling yards, oil facilities, and aluminum plants. By May 1942, the Allies had shifted to a Douhet strategy of inflicting maximum damage to population centers, a campaign that rendered 11% of the German population homeless, killed over 300,000 civilians and wounded another 750,000. In early 1943, the focus of the air war shifted again, this time targeting key basic industries of the war economy, such as ball bearings. Finally, in preparation for the continental invasion, the Allies returned to operational interdiction, focusing once more on transportation and oil targets.
Pape claims that all four of these campaigns were categorical failures. The 1940 campaign hardly slowed the Wehrmacht’s defeat of France or preparations to invade the Soviet Union. The strategic bombing of German cities in 1942 produced “no political effects” and also “failed to contribute significantly to Germany’s economic problems.” The strategic interdiction efforts of 1943 failed because “there was no Achilles heel, no small, vulnerable set of factories whose loss would cripple all war production, not even any important category.” Finally, operational interdiction prior to the Normandy invasion resulted in “no immediate shortage of weapons for the German fighting forces,” although Pape concedes that persistent attacks on oil and communication facilities did progressively hamper the German army’s ability to provide combat formations with supplies essential to their operations.
Airpower effectiveness aside, the German example interests the author because it is one of the few case studies that fail to adhere to his model that once a state loses the ability to conduct its military strategy to maintain territorial goals, it will stop pursuing those goals. By late 1944, it was clear that Germany was going to lose the war, yet the political and military leadership remained steadfast in fighting a losing cause. Why? Pape says that Germany chose to continue fighting because the anticipated price of surrender to a vengeful Red Army was greater than that of resistance. Given the eventual price the Germans paid in blood to the Soviets after capitulation (half of the 8 million German soldiers and citizens killed came AFTER the armistice), this behavior was certainly not irrational.
The Korean War demonstrated two notable examples of successful coercion according to Pape. The most important political concession for the United States was achieved in the summer of 1951 when the Communists agreed to an indefinite US military garrison in South Korea and a permanent cease-fire line somewhat north of the 38th parallel. Pape credits conventional denial, not strategic punishment or atomic risk, as the sole reason for this success. He claims that the Communists’ main political objective was the unification of the Korean peninsula under a Marxist regime. Failing that, it would accept control north of the 38th parallel. Failed offensives in January, April, and May 1951, along with shattering casualty rates, convinced the Communists that reunification was no longer militarily possible. Strategic bombing had no impact on the Communists’ will to fight, he says. Rather, it was classic military denial that achieved the coercive effect. If airpower played any role at all, it was close air support to grounds and operational interdiction.
The second critical issue of the Korean armistice – and one largely forgotten today – was over the voluntary repatriation of POWs. Senior officials in the American government were haunted by their WWII experience sending thousands of Russian POWs back to the Soviet Union against their will where they were later tortured and killed. Half of the North Korean POWs did not want to return home and two-thirds of the 20,000 captive Chinese troops wanted to stay in South Korea. The negotiations would drag on for two long years. Half of all US casualties in the war were suffered while this issue was hammered out. In the end, Pape credits nuclear risk in achieving the final breakthrough. “By 1953 the global military balance had fundamentally changed,” he writes. The US atomic arsenal had ballooned from less than 300 to over 1,000. Moreover, the death of Stalin and growing Sino-Soviet friction eroded Russian support for the war. The new Eisenhower administration was able to present a credible threat of nuclear escalation if the Communists remained obstinate on the POW issue. A strategic air campaign that targeted five hydroelectric dams, firebombed Pyongyang and raided nearly 100 villages suspected of harboring supplies had no impact Communist decision-making, according to Pape. In the grand scheme of things, in a conflict that claimed 900,000 Chinese and 520,000 North Korean soldiers lives, these air operations mattered little at all.
Pape sees the American bombing campaigns in Vietnams as a “classic example of conventional coercion.” The Rolling Thunder air campaign from 1965 to 1968 was clearly a failure. However, it was not a failure of execution or imagination on the part of war planners and pilots. Rather, sometimes adversaries are simply not susceptible to coercion by air power. Such was the case during the Johnson years. Hanoi had no military-industrial base to speak of; the country was “primarily a funnel for military-related equipment produced in the USSR and the People’s Republic of China,” according to the author. The logistical network in South Vietnam was primitive, employing thousands of peasant coolies hiking down narrow canopy covered jungle paths and over easily repaired rope bridges. And the Communist government was willing to sustain significant civilian casualties in their pursuit of a unified Vietnam. Indeed, prior to the 1972 Easter Offensive, “North Vietnam was largely immune to conventional coercion.”
In April 1972, 120,000 from 14 divisions of the North Vietnamese Army poured across the 17th parallel. In contrast to the previous guerilla campaigns, the North was now highly vulnerable to conventional air power. “Linebacker I persuaded Hanoi to accept the terms of the Paris Peace Accords. Linebacker II [Christmas Bombing] became necessary when [South Vietnamese] President Thieu delayed signing the agreement and the North began to backslide from its commitments. The second Linebacker campaign restored Hanoi’s commitment to the accords.” (It is worth noting that Pape references Mark Clodfelter’s “The Limits of Air Power” frequently and is largely in agreement with his conclusions.)
Finally, the Persian Gulf War of 1991 appeared to be a consummate victory for airpower coercion. Pape sees things differently, or at least much less revolutionary. From a coercive perspective, he maintains that 1991 was little different than the Allied defeat of Imperial Japan discussed above. Saddam Hussein had a simple strategy to retain Kuwait and its oilfields. The Iraqi force of some 300,000 soldiers, 3,500 tanks, and 2,500 artillery pieces, dug into the desert and arranged in a classic defense-in-depth position, would be sufficient to inflict 10,000 casualties on American ground forces, which is all that would be necessary to pressure Washington to abandon the cause.
The American airpower response to Saddam’s challenge was twofold. First, in an air campaign dubbed Instant Thunder (in deliberate contrast to the graduated pressure of the Rolling Thunder campaign in Vietnam) would seek to decapitate the Iraqi regime leadership, leading to the collapse or overthrow of the Iraqi dictator. Pape views the precepts behind Instant Thunder as misguided and its results nugatory. To begin with, “Saddam’s regime … rested on a political structure that air attack could not alter.” And even if it had, Instant Thunder failed to hit any of the top 46 Iraqi leaders targeted. Second, in a more traditional air campaign, American airpower “thwarted the twin pillars of [Saddam’s] military strategy: the willingness of the frontline units to fight and the ability of the reserve forces to counterconcentrate.” True to Pape’s model, once the military strategy for retaining territory in Kuwait was defeated, Baghdad was coerced into accepted American demands, including the abandonment of nearly all heavy military equipment.
In sum, Pape is highly dubious of conventional airpower’s ability to effectively coerce adversaries and does not expect things to change much over the coming century. In the author’s opinion, strategic air campaigns targeting civilian population centers and industrial infrastructure have all failed to achieve their core objectives. In short, “No strategic bombing campaign has every yielded decisive results, nor were any significant opportunities missed … The lesson of airpower history is that strategic bombing is a very marginal coercive tool.” To the extent that airpower has been critical at all in coercing hostile actors, it has been in support of ground forces through effective operational interdiction and close air support. If the problem of the Cold War was deterrence and the problem of the post-Cold War is coercion, then policymakers should not be looking too hard at strategic airpower as a tool in national security decision-making.
- Series: Cornell Studies in Security Affairs
- Paperback: 408 pages
- Publisher: Cornell University Press; 1 edition (April 18, 1996)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0801483115
- ISBN-13: 978-0801483110
- Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Customer Reviews: 9 customer reviews
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