The Humour Behind Historical Illiteracy

You know, if they were capable of it I'd say the war hawks had started being ironic. John Kenneth Galbraith's body isn't even cold yet, and they've started advocating for massive, WWII-style strategic bombing (among other destructive paths.) Galbraith, of course, was one of the men who, after WWII ended in Europe, showed that the bombing campaigns waged by the allies did remarkably little to slow German industry. In fact, the Germans were harmed to a far greater effect by the incompetence of their own leaders.

Arthur C. Clarke (himself only barely this side of the reaper's blade) once said that good ideas go through three phases: 1) "That's impossible!" 2) "Well, it might work, but it'd be a waste of time." 3) "I said it was a great idea all along!" The concept of large-scale strategic bombing should have gone through the opposite process by now.

After WWI, there was a great deal of theorizing that said the next war would be fought almost entirely from the air, and belligerent air forces would destroy the enemy's industry and military power without requiring large armies. (This motive - not requiring the personnel that modern militaries inevitably do - is a common one, especially for democracies.) The experience of WWII showed how difficult this was in practice. Literally hundreds of thousands of planes of every describable form and function battled across the skies of Europe and the Pacific, and in the case of Germany (as Galbraith's work showed) did surprisingly little. In Japan, the results were a bit more favourable (if that's what you want to call the firebombing of Tokyo) for the airpower theorists, but still the Japanese resisted remarkably long - and the weapon that ended the war was not the massed squadrons of the RAF or the 8th Air Force, but the single bomb dropped by the Enola Gay.

Nevertheless, the actual history of the effectiveness of strategic bombing from WWII and on shows a remarkable lack of effectiveness, in terms of actual industrial harm done. This led to the obscenity of the Vietnam-era bombing campaigns, where the actual "effectiveness" excuse was dropped, and the stated aim was simply to cause the civilian population and the North Vietnamese leadership enough death and destruction to "bring them to the table." Hm.. mass destruction used as a negotiating tactic, all to spare the US the embarassment of military defeat. And it failed even at that.

So far: Strategic bombing: 0. Reality: Much, much more.

The advent of precisiong-guided munitions briefly rehabilitated the idea of the solider-less war: witness the euphoria after the first Gulf War, when some said that from now on the US wouldn't need to actually invade anywhere. Kosovo seemed to be the cornerstone to this myth - the idea that war could now be won without risk. But Iraq has shown once again how little airpower actually means when it comes to a ground war. You can't fight an urban war with strategic bombing, if only because you'll be bombing your own troops.

If history had any sense, we'd have finally gotten to the first of Clarke's three points - "that's impossible!" - but instead we keep oscilatting between "that's brilliant" and "it's a waste". Meanwhile, we keep killing innocent people from the air.

Okay, I guess it's not that humorous after all.