The Coercive Air Strategies in Bombing to Win

Airpower Studies

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“‘Bombing to Win’ at 25” (2021) by Heather Venable and Sebastian Lukasik

The Air Force sometimes has a bad reputation due to its preference for independent, strategic bombardment operations. Before joining the faculty of Air Command and Staff College as historians of the Marine Corps and the Army, respectively, we both believed it deserved this reputation. The curriculum, we assumed, would be fixated on its preferred mode of operations. We anticipated that we would need to add discussions of close air support to the classroom.

In fact, the opposite was true. Colleagues and students at the college were not, as we assumed, married to the doctrine of strategic bombardment, and were instead exceptionally well-versed in other types of air operations. And this should not be entirely surprising. The last chief of staff of the Air Force, Gen. David Goldfein, in particular worked hard to insist the Air Force realizes it must act jointly, noting that he himself had “never been in a fight in my entire career and done it with airpower only.” In fact, in the era of the “Global War on Terror,” Air Force culture has undergone a fundamental shift away from strategic attack and toward supporting surface forces during the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. The joint mission has become so important that it has assumed a central place in many an airman’s sense of identity and purpose.

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Nevertheless, this misconception of inflexible Air Force thinking persists. Indeed, numerous scholars still argue that these pathologies remain the defining element  of the Air Force’s doctrinal DNA. This is especially the case with what is, arguably, the most explicit and prominent articulation of this view, the primary book on airpower often assigned to graduate students. First published in 1996, Robert Pape’s Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War drew on approximately 80 years of airpower history to argue for an optimal way of harnessing kinetic airpower to broader strategic outcomes. The quarter of a century that has elapsed since its publication has witnessed the appearance of important scholarly interpretations of the airpower case studies that underpin Pape’s arguments. In addition, the same period has furnished new empirical evidence of airpower’s capabilities and limitations. Importantly, the book’s most significant legacy may be that it advanced a problematic narrative about strategic attack forceful enough to potentially mislead policymakers and some scholars alike about the full range of what airpower can and should do in a peer conflict.

Air Force strategists should ensure adequate consideration of the potential of strategic attack, in addition to more familiar battlefield support, in waging joint operations. This emphasis is in keeping with the Defense Department’s increasing focus on great-power competition as the overarching framework for thinking about the use of military force as an instrument of national policy. Recent scholarship on historical uses of airpower in World War II highlights the utility of strategic airpower not as a war-winning instrument in its own right, but as a highly effective enabler of other services in joint operations.

Reaction and Counterreaction: The Publication of ‘Bombing to Win’

Scholars produced the most trenchant and compelling critiques of Pape within less than a decade of the book’s 1996 publication. They often found fault with his four categories of strategic attack — punishment, risk, denial, and decapitation — for being too mechanistic. Punishment targets civilians to convince their government to stop fighting. Risk is similar, except that it advocates ratcheting up attacks to give the opposition time to respond rather than initially overwhelming the enemy. By contrast, decapitation focuses on leadership and communication to paralyze decision making, as epitomized by retired Col. John Warden’s arguments. Finally, denial — which Pape claims is the most effective use of airpower — concentrates on fielded forces (the tactical level of war), the means to re-equip and reinforce materiel and people (the tactical or operational level of war), or the sources that equip fielded forces such as factories (some consider this to be the strategic level of war). In 1997, Warden took Pape to task for shortchanging decapitation and for his excessive focus on defeating the enemy’s fielded forces, pointing out that many conflicts stem from more than just a desire for controlling territory.

Other critics have argued for applying more nuance beyond the four categories or for updating his argument in light of more recent history. Barry Watts, for example, faulted Pape for grounding his arguments in an overly linear understanding of war, one that discounted the Clausewitzian emphasis on the impact of chance, uncertainty, and friction on military operations. Adding the case study of Operation Allied Force in 1999, three years after Bombing to Win’s publication, Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman suggested that Pape failed to give strategic bombardment credit for reinforcing other defeat mechanisms.

Since then, most scholarship has focused on applying Pape to various operations rather than challenging his argument. Simultaneously, the United States has employed