A short history of precision bombing
How we employ the weapons of war says a lot about who we are
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These columns always begin with a question. Maybe we hear something in the news and want to know more about it. Maybe we want to explain why we made certain fictional choices in one of our novels. Or maybe, we read a bit of history and suddenly make a connection with current events in a meaningful way.
This column falls into the last category and the bit of history comes from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Bomber Mafia. The book title refers to a group of Army Air Force pilots during the period between World Wars One and Two. At this time, the Air Force was part of the Army, a supporting element to ground forces, not a separate fighting force.
In the 1930s, the Army Air Corps Tactical School was tucked away in Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama, a former cotton plantation in the middle of nowhere. According to Gladwell, the location far from Washington DC and the Army powers-that-be was “a feature, not a bug.”
Similar to the Naval War College, the Tactical School was a learning institution, but there was a problem. Combat flight was a brand-new subject and mostly centered on light, maneuverable fighter planes.
The nascent Bomber Mafia, Gladwell notes, flourished in this remote, intellectual hothouse far from the eyes of their Army overseers. They saw the emerging commercial airline industry and dreamed of a new kind of airpower: heavy bombers. And with their new tools of the trade came a new combat strategy.
High-altitude, daylight, precision bombing.
The strategy was not designed as an adjunct to ground-based combat. In the minds of the Bomber Mafia, their strategy made the Army obsolete. Heavy bombers could fly over enemy lines and drop bombs on carefully selected targets with extreme accuracy (“drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from thirty thousand feet”) that would make the opposing war machine grind to a shuddering halt.
The strategy was designed to shorten the war. The brutal trench warfare of the First World War was a thing of the past. Such was the theory when the US entered WWII.
Gladwell goes into great detail about the colorful figures behind the Bomber Mafia and the key events in the maturation of their strategy, including the development of the Norden bomb sight. (The audiobook is highly recommended as it contains interviews with some of the key figures.)
The acid test for the US Army Air Force’s bombing strategy came after the 1943 Casablanca Conference between Churchill and FDR. The British relied on what they called “morale bombing,” essentially flattening anything inside a certain radius, civilian, military or otherwise. They thought the idea of daylight bombing was ridiculously dangerous and ineffective. In their view, the point of a bombing campaign was to reduce the enemy to a state of despair and ruin.
In the run-up to this strategic scuffle, the Luftwaffe was not exactly sitting on their hands. The German air force had been conducting extensive, indiscriminate bombing of London for the past two years, a campaign known as the London Blitz.
And what was the result? Were the British cowed into submission? NO! As Gladwell writes:
Once they tallied up the damage, the British determined that more than 43,000 people had been killed and tens of thousands injured. More than a million buildings were damaged or destroyed. And it didn't work! Not on London or Londoners. It did not crack their morale. And despite that lesson, just two years later, the Royal Air Force was proposing to do the exact same thing to the Germans.
One of the most famous manifestations of the American daylight, precision bombing strategy was the attack on the German ball bearing industry based in Schweinfurt, Germany, made famous in the movie, Twelve O’Clock High starring Gregory Peck as the leader of the bomber force. [Great movie, perhaps, but one with a Hollywood ending. The actual bombing raids on the strategic target were high on losses and short on results.]
Nevertheless, from those humble beginnings, precision bombing has gone on to become a given of modern warfare. Everyone with a TV has seen the grainy black-and-white video of a bomb homing in on a target until the screen saturates with the resulting explosion.
What caught our attention in this bit of history was the difference in the strategic aims between the US Army Air Force and RAF bomber commands. The RAF wanted to broaden the war through “morale bombing” while the US sought to shorten the war by taking out specific targets with specific military value and minimize collateral damage.
That’s what is happening in Ukraine right now in Mr. Putin’s Unnecessary War.
The Russians are bombing civilian targets. In this AP article, A look at Russian missile attacks on Ukrainian targets since the war began in February 2022, you can go into the details. It’s pretty ugly stuff: apartments, civilian trains, grain depots, the list goes on. The goal of their bombing is to “break the Ukrainian’s spirit.”
Is it working? About as much as the London Blitz had on Londoners.
On the other side of the conflict, the Ukrainian military has employed a different strategy: going after military targets. Probably the best example is Ukraine’s success on the Black Sea. At the start of Mr. Putin’s Unnecessary War,
Russian mastery of the Black Sea seemed all but assured. Ukraine was even more hopelessly outgunned at sea than on land, and appeared no match for the might of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Putin was so confident that he began the blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports under the guise of naval exercises almost two weeks before the start of the land invasion.
Today? Using a combination of homemade cruise missiles, Western supplied arms, and not a small measure of creative moxie, Ukraine has taken out 20% of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and forced a general retreat.1 In fact, this week, the Ukrainian military sunk another Russia Navy missile corvette—and of course, they captured the whole thing on video.
This month, we’re seeing a new vector in the Ukrainian strategy: the Russian energy industry. Since the start of the new year, Ukraine has focused drone strikes and special forces operations on energy facilities inside Russia. This has the double effect of disrupting the Russian military supply chain and targeting Mr. Putin’s revenue stream needed to continue his Unnecessary War.2
The Russian economy is heavily reliant on the energy sector, making it an obvious and attractive target for Ukrainian military planners. Russia’s oil and gas industry has so far proven remarkably resistant to Western sanctions, with clients from the Global South stepping in to replace exiting European customers. Ukrainians hope their far more direct approach will now succeed where sanctions have failed and impose crippling costs on the Kremlin.
In a way, the Western slowdown of aid (a massive mistake, in our view) has forced this change in strategy. The weapons used in these strikes are reportedly domestically produced drones, necessary in part because weapons from the West come with “don’t attack inside Russia” strings attached. By taking the fight to Mr. Putin’s home turf, they force the Russians to react to a new internal threat which might offer some breathing room on the front lines in Ukraine.
Most importantly, it hits the Russians where it hurts. “The oil and gas industry has long fueled Russia’s resurgence on the international stage; Ukrainians are now hoping it will become Putin’s Achilles Heel.”
As we end the second year of Mr. Putin’s Unnecessary War, it’s not clear which bombing strategy will win or if either will be a deciding factor in the ultimate outcome. Bombing—precision or otherwise—is still a tool of destruction. Full stop.3
But if we go back to the heart of the Bomber Mafia strategy, the question still remains: can you limit the scope of war (i.e. civilian casualties) by employing accuracy?
Yes, of course. However, as Mr. Putin is demonstrating every day, you can also use that same accuracy to maximize civilian pain and suffering.
Be happy. Stay healthy. Read (or listen to) a book.
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To be clear, the US has employed “area bombing” in many, many conflicts, including in WWII. As Gladwell makes clear, for much of the war, the “precision” part of precision bombing was more theory than practice.