Having already examined the slight successes of the strategies employed in the Iraq War, it falls upon us to now begin to look at the strategic failures and to extrapolate what lessons we can to improve our policies and procurement in the future.
The two most significant failures of strategy and procurement in the Iraq campaign are closely intertwined for both historical and logisitcal reasons. Those failures are in the strategic concept of preemptive warfare and in the policy of strategic bombing (I don’t consider the failure of the Pentagon or other government agencies to implement a post-war plan to be a strategic failure, since the lack of any implemented strategy and not a failure of strategy is the issue in that case). In order to aid understanding of why these two policies are related, why both fail, and why despite long-standing evidence they are continued as American policy, I would like to begin by talking about the emergence of these forms of strategic warfare.
Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult.
~Carl von Clausewitz, On War, 1823
The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars which followed ushered in the most significant changes in how war was waged in a thousand years. Professional armies gave way to the concept of mass mobilization, and the concept of "total war" was introduced in earnest. The use of mass armies and total warfare culminated in the First World War, which resulted in the collapse of four empires; the combat deaths of nearly ten million soldiers, the wounding of over twenty-one million soldiers, and nearly another eight million missing soldiers on all sides as well as many millions more in civilian dead and wounded. Tens of thousands died in month-long trench battles where the army lines rarely moved even a few feet. On July 1, 1916, the British Army alone suffered 57,470 casualties and 19,240 dead.
At the end of the First World War, the dominant question on the mind of military thinkers was then how could the impasse created by two mass armies be broken and the use of military force become again a useful means of implementing policy. And one of the most important figures to emerge as having a new idea as to how to break the impasse was an Italian by the name of Gulio Douhet.
Douhet was originally an artillery officer in the Italian army, but became a proponent of the creation of air power and particularly the efficiency of aerial bombardment when he participated in the 1911 war between Italy and Turkey over control of Libya, which was the first conflict where aircraft were used in multiple roles. He began his career as an author of military theory while battalion commander of the Italian air forces in Turin.
Early on, Douhet’s support of air power resulted in his being labeled a ‘radical’, and his letters condemning the strategies of the Italian forces during World War I resulted in his being court-martialed and imprisoned from 1915 to 1917. After the disasterous battle of Caporetto, Douhet was reinstated to the Italian armed forces, and was promoted to the central director of aviation at the General Air Commisariat, only to resign in 1918 out of disgust with his superiors. After the armistice, Douhet’s court-martial was overturned and he was promoted to General, but Douhet chose instead to retire and focus on writing. In 1921, he published his opus, The Command of the Air.
In that volume, Douhet argued that air power had the ability to transform warfare. The ability of air power to bypass ground forces relegated the land war to secondary importance. This was predicated on one factor which has utterly transformed warfare to this day: the destruction of the air forces of the enemy, which Douhet argued was best achieved through preemption. No other military theorist had ever before placed such emphasis on the value of preemptive warfare. By attacking preemptively, Douhet argued, one could bomb the air forces of the enemy into extinction before embarking on the rest of the campaign, which he deemed the most essential step in ensuring victory by bombing. [While preemption was not part of the strategic theory of American Admiral Alfred Mahan, who was in many ways the dominant naval strategist of the pre-WWI period, Douhet here echoes Mahan in that Mahan advocated for control of the seas based in initially devastating the opposing navy and then using the control of the seas to inflict damage on trade and transportation at will. Sadly, while Mahan proved to be quite right in his analysis of the preceeding two centuries, the advent of the railroad made most of his reasoning obsolete.]
Douhet believed that the genius of air commanders would lie in their choice of targets, of which he identified five types: industry, transportation, government, communications, and finally "the will of the people". It is particularly his emphasis on this last category of target, the will of the people, that led to what is referred to as the "Douhet Model" of strategic bombing.
The principles of the Douhet model are as follows: the high costs of aerial bombing can shatter civilian morale. This dissolution of morale would lead to the failure of the social basis of resistance, from both the industrial and political sides. Eventually, this morale collapse would result in pressure from the civilian population on the government to capitulate. This morale collapse, Douhet argued, would result primarily through either deprivation of essential consumer goods or from the risk of direct annihilation of civilian populations.
What sort of air war would achieve those goals, in Douhet’s mind? He described the future air war as an all out attack on an enemy city, involving high explosive bombs, incendiaries, and poison gas.
First would come explosions, then fires, then deadly gases floating on the surface and preventing any approach to the stricken area. As the hours passed and night advanced, the fires would spread while the poison gas paralyzed all life.
~Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, p. 22-23
Douhet was not unaware of the moral implications of what he suggested. He himself described them as "tragic". But particularly when viewed through the lens of his experience in the First World War, when so many millions died for so little actual gains on the battlefield, Douhet’s view was that this might in fact make war more humane by limiting its length and scope. Moreover, as an adherent of Clausewitz and the theory of total war, Douhet was one of the first theorists to opine that with the rise of nationalism and industrial armies, the moral dividing line between civilians and soldiers had been eroded to the point of meaninglessness [This is particularly significant in view of the deep similarities in both strategic thinking and moral views behind suicide bombing, a theory most deeply considered by Robert Pape, which I will return to in the future]. Douhet in fact mocked the distinction, which he called "that peculiar traditional notion which makes people weep to hear of a few women and children killed in an air raid and leaves them unmoved to hear of thousands of soldiers killed in action."
But more than that, Douhet was among the first and the most influential to bring to the analysis of war and strategy the notion that such matters had to be considered dispassionately and without shrinking from the inhumanity of the means. He was of the belief that there was no means to prevent these tactics from being used to their fullest extent, and that only the efficacy and not the morality of the methods would sway nations. Of the international agreements to limit the use of chemical weapons and other means of mass killing, Douhet said that "all the restrictions, all the international agreements made during peacetime are fated to be swept away like dried leaves on the winds of war."
As we know from the virtue of hindsight, that and many other of Douhet’s views proved incorrect. But at the time, untested, they were very influential. Although Douhet’s views were never implemented by his own nation of Italy, they had a great influence on two men in particular, whose views and efforts did much to shape American policy to this day: Hugh Trenchard of the British Royal Flying Corps, and Billy Mitchell of the American Air Service. Through those two men, the policies and philosophies that shaped the head of the Army Air Force during World War II, General "Hap" Arnold, the head of the AAF Pacific campaign and future member of the Joint Chiefs General Curtis LeMay, and through him, Donald Rumsfeld. I hope some of you will be interested in exploring further into that history with me.