I remember as an undergrade studying international relations reading a book called Bombing To Win. The book looks at several wars and air power and tried to figure out why bombing the hell out of your enemy usually DID NOT work to end a war quickly. In particular, WWII terror bombings and Vietnam.
From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than 2.5M tons of ordnance on Laos during 580,000 bombing sorties—equal to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years – making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. — legacy of war.org
Communists in Laos during our own “special military operation,” if you will, did not capitulate to the US, nor did it actively try to stop North Vietnam from sending supplies to South Vietnam to end the war. The Vietnam War, again despite being part of the largest campaign of bombing ever, did not stop the nation from becoming communist.
The reason has to do with a tragic miscalculation regarding human nature. You see, when you kill and blow up a bunch of people and buildings in someone’s neighborhood. For some reason those people don’t just all say “lets quit and overthrow our government.” People who go and bomb things usually think after being shocked and awed this would have to be the case. Instead, however, people usually just GET REALLY MAD at whoever attacked them and want to KILL THEM INSTEAD. Go figure... Bombing civilian targets is worse than useless, it actually strengthens your enemies desire to win.
The only time airpower wins wars according to this study is when airpower is used to defeat the enemy’s military strategy. So going after civilian targets just gets people mad, but taking away the ability for the enemy to win the war by destroying its military and defeating its strategy of attack can win your war. Apparently, the Russians have not learned this lesson yet because they keep using all their fancy missiles to on Ukrainian cities killing mostly woman, children, and the elderly everyone who is NOT on the front line actually killing Russian soldiers. Meanwhile we hear Ukraine using HIMARS to take out a single HQ building and like 600 soldiers at a time. Who’s army do you think will be destroyed first?
Comments welcome.
Edits for grammar which I suck at apologies.