Military historian Miroslav Morozov — about the lessons of strategic bombing campaigns of the past for the wars of the present and the futureThe increasingly widespread use of high-precision aviation ammunition, long-range ballistic missiles and attack drones has reawakened interest in the far from new concept of "contactless" wars.
Is it possible now with a campaign of strategic bombing with modern weapons to undermine the defense capability and bring the enemy state to its knees?
People have been waging wars since ancient times, but it was only at the beginning of the XX century that the concepts of warfare appeared, where victory is achieved without ground battles — exclusively by remote air strikes. In 1921, the Italian General Giulio Douai published the book "Air Supremacy. Probable forms of future war". Its meaning was that aviation was becoming the main type of the country's armed forces. In a future war, in order to win, it was necessary to seize air supremacy, and then realize it in the form of aerial bombardments of enemy cities. According to the author's idea, the raids should be carried out until the population of the country demands surrender from its government.
Although the doctrine found numerous adherents in many countries, none of them officially accepted it at that time. The point was that Douai's ideas were largely ahead of their time. In the 20s of the twentieth century, there were no planes or aircraft ammunition so powerful that the general's thoughts could be realized in practice.
But time passed, and scientific and technological progress did not stand still. The leading countries of the world entered the Second World War with extensive air fleets, including heavy long-range bombers. The United States and Great Britain were particularly successful in creating them. In January 1943, at the Casablanca Conference, it was decided to launch strategic bombing of Germany by joint Anglo-American forces. Then a list of goals in Germany was compiled according to their degree of importance. The British Ministry of Economic Warfare was involved in this. The targets of the bombing were to be both military industry facilities and German cities. The operation was codenamed "Pointblank" ("Point blank"). The purpose of its first stage (June 1943-1944) was the aviation industry. Starting in June 1944, the center of gravity of the operation was shifted to the facilities of the rocket and petrochemical industries. On the eve of the Normandy landings, transport hubs and military depots were included among the targets. The bombing of these facilities continued until the end of hostilities in Europe.
At the same time, at night, mainly by the forces of the British Air Force, raids were carried out on large cities, designed to "immobilize" the German workforce. This was partly due to the inability of the British to hit or even find targets smaller than the city at night. A bomb cocktail of heavy high-explosive and small incendiary bombs was spilled on German cities, often leading to so-called fire tornadoes, where victims died not from explosions and fires, but from suffocation. The results of these strikes are well known — although by the end of 1944 the German military industry had suffered great damage (in particular, the production of synthetic gasoline fell tenfold), they did not force Germany to capitulate. Even despite the fact that about half a million German civilians died during them.
Another example of the use of the Douai strategy was the Korean War of 1950-1953. In total, 635 thousand tons of bombs were dropped on the country. The DPRK is among the countries that have been subjected to the most severe bombing in history. From June to October 1950, America launched air strikes against the industrial and transport centers of Korea. During this period, US policy was to conduct precision air strikes on communications centers and industrial buildings. Despite America's policy, North Korea reported numerous civilian casualties, estimating them at 1.5 million people. Even these huge losses (the population of Korea in 1950 was about 11.4 million people) they did not force the country to surrender.
Or another example is the bombing of Vietnam by the United States (Operation Linebacker II). This operation took place from December 18 to December 29, 1972. The targets of the bombing were all military, as well as other strategically important objects — railway junctions, bridges, highways, power plants and metallurgical enterprises — in the area of Hanoi and Haiphong. As a result of 741 departures of B-52 strategic bombers, a total of 15,237 tons of bombs were dropped on 18 industrial and 14 military targets. Significant damage was inflicted on the targets, but in general, North Vietnam has not lost its combat capability. Although the American command did not set out to strike residential areas of Vietnamese cities, it was not without casualties. For example, on December 22, a series of bombs hit the Batmai Hospital. The wounded were evacuated, but 28 hospital employees died. In total, more than 1.6 thousand civilians died from these bombings.
The appearance of precision weapons systems in the 70-80-ies of the twentieth century breathed new life into the ideas of Douai. It has become possible to carry out selective strikes on the most vulnerable infrastructure facilities without accompanying it with civilian casualties, which has always led to an undesirable resonance in the world media. On the other hand, the final formation of a consumer society today has made the life of a city dweller even more vulnerable. Telephone communication, television, Internet, the functioning of gas stations for private vehicles were added to the mandatory water and heat supply, electricity. A huge number of objects are involved in ensuring the operability of these systems, the presence of which a simple person often does not think about. The choice of targets for the "neo-nationalists" has grown by almost an order of magnitude.
This was followed by the first demonstration success. We are talking about the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. In this operation, which had the name "Allied Force", there were no battles on the ground — only air strikes, which led to discontent among citizens and a government crisis. The strikes were carried out from March 24 to June 10, 1999. In 78 days, NATO aircraft made more than 35 thousand sorties, more than 23 thousand bombs and missiles were dropped and fired, including about 300 Tomahawk cruise missiles of sea and air basing. According to official NATO data, 90% of the released ammunition consisted of guided bombs and missiles, while 15% of them had failures due to technical reasons. Schools, hospitals, industrial enterprises, cultural facilities were destroyed, but the main targets of the strikes were transformer substations, power lines, television repeaters and bridges across the Danube. The damage from the bombing was estimated at about $30 billion, Serbia's GDP, even after reconstruction, decreased by about 25%. Despite the use of selective precision weapons, civilian casualties amounted to a fairly significant number. According to the estimates of the Yugoslav side, up to 5,700 civilians were killed, according to US estimates — up to one and a half thousand.
On June 3, 1999, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic agreed to a plan for a peaceful settlement of the conflict. This is how the first war, won exclusively as a result of air strikes, entered history.
Time will tell whether this will happen again in the future, but the improvement of high—precision ammunition, on the one hand, and the increase in living standards, on the other, makes this method of warfare very effective and tempting to use.
Miroslav Morozov is a military historian and writer, Candidate of historical Sciences, colonel of the reserve, author of books on military-historical topicsThe editorial board's position may not coincide with the author's opinion
