Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit Can Air Power Alone Topple Governments? About this episode With the Iran war still unfolding, we ask the question: Can air power alone topple a government?
From the First World War onward, military strategists have argued that bombing from the air could break a nation’s will and force political change without costly ground invasions. Today, we test that claim through a century of conflict - from WWI to NATO's intervention in Kosovo in the 1990s.
Joining us is Mike Pavelec, a military historian at McGill University, to provide some insight into the efficacy of air power.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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2:09 Dan Snow? Human beings being what we are, as soon as we first took to the skies in flight, we started thinking about how to use that new skill to kill someone.
2:23 Dan Snow? I'm sure it's the case that when we managed to float for the first time, to take to a boat, when we managed to dig underground for the first time, I'm pretty confident that before long we were raiding a store of grain across a river or burrowing under a defensive wall. We first entered space to strike at our enemies. The cyber dimension, well that was pretty much created by military money and technology. And thus it was that just eight years after Wilbur Wright flew the world's first heavy-than-air machine on its epic 100-feet flight in 1903, an Italian, Giulio Gavotti, was dropping hand grenades out of the cockpit of his plane, flying over Libya.
3:06 Dan Snow? When we humans enter a new dimension, we fight in it. It's almost admirable how quickly some people came to regard the aerial dimension, flight, as potentially decisive. By the First World War, strategists were arguing that planes weren't just useful as tactical weapons, so they weren't just useful for dropping those grenades on people on the ground, killing and maiming people on the ground, or spotting where the enemy was, or correcting the fall of artillery fire. They weren't just useful getting that battlefield advantage, they might actually negate the whole battlefield itself. They might bypass it entirely. They might be strategic weapons, they might win wars by themselves, these aircraft.
3:47 Dan Snow? No more lice-ridden, hollow-cheeked young men in dugouts. No more wading through mud and blood, advancing across a shattered landscape, across a carpet of corpses. No more colossal expense of keeping vast armies fed and clothed and armed. And importantly, no more coffins hauled through the streets of towns and cities. No more guards of honour, eyes down, arms reversed. No more weeping families, bad headlines, or furious, bereaved voters.
4:24 Dan Snow? Air power could be a breakthrough technology, a decisive weapon. Fewer casualties, quicker, cheaper wars. A tempting prospect. Winston Churchill himself put it just after the First World War. It may be possible to affect economies during the course of the present year, as he put it by holding territory through the agency of the air force rather than by a military force. Winston Churchill was launching himself into a furious debate that was raging at the time and has never actually been resolved. And this is a debate that is fought in classrooms and conferences by theorists, but unlike many such disputes, it has the most dramatic and massive real-world consequences.
5:06 Dan Snow? Tens of millions of people have been killed, maimed, dehoused and traumatised in the last 100 years or so by strategists who believe that military and political decisions, results can be delivered by using aerial weapons alone. Now, it's one of the strangest, I think, one of the quirkiest of historical facts, that the first attempt to use air power as a strategic weapon, so, like I say, not to help things long on the ground, but to attempt to force an enemy government to radically change its direction. Well, that first attempt ended up with bombs dropping on provincial British towns and villages that had known little fighting since the Vikings.
5:49 Dan Snow? The sleepy Norfolk towns of King's Lynn, Great Yarmouth and a few others. It was the evening of the 19th of July 1915, and it was a deeply incongruous place for the birth of a way of war, of a doctrine that endures in strikes that are almost certainly taking place, as you listen to this, in Tehran, in Kiev, perhaps in Dubai and other cities. On that occasion in 1915, German Zeppelin bombers flying to Britain were, I quote, "attempting to diminish the enemy's determination to prosecute the war." That night, they were headed for the industrial Humber Estuary.
6:31 Dan Snow? They got waylaid because of strong winds and dropped all their bombs in the wrong place. Four people were killed that night, among them the 26-year-old Alice Graisley, a young woman already widowed by the horrific fighting on the Western Front. She and those other three victims were the first of so many.
6:53 Dan Snow? In this episode of Dan Snow's History, we're going to try and work out when, and indeed if, air power alone has ever been truly decisive. Can you bomb a place, a building, some people, a palace, a country to control what happens there? Have airstrikes alone ever, in the last 120 years, brought about a change on the ground, roughly speaking in line with the intentions of the power that drops the bombs? Has, for example, aerial bombardment ever once removed an authoritarian regime and replaced it with something even a little bit more democratic? Here to answer that question is an old friend, a veteran of this podcast, Mike Pavlik. He was a professor at the US Air Command and Staff College. He's now at McGill University, he's written many wonderful books.
7:37 Dan Snow? He's got a really big survey of US air power from start to finish, coming out very soon. So folks, strap in, join us as we throttle back as we attempt to answer this essential question: what are the strengths, what is the potential of, but also what are the limits of air power? Can you win a war by air alone?
8:19 Dan Snow? Mike, good to see you again, bud. Thanks for coming on the pod.
8:21 Speaker 03 You too. Absolutely, anytime.
8:24 Dan Snow? You think I only get in touch with you when there's a big emergency, but you know, I think about you all the time, dude, I promise.
8:29 Speaker 03 But that's okay, because there's lots of emergencies, right?
8:31 Dan Snow? That's right, that's damn true. Let's talk about strategic air power in this episode. First of all, can you just give me the quick 101? What is the difference between strategic air power and tactical air power? Like, air assets that try and influence a battlefield, but don't try and have a strategic effect by themselves?
8:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, so, and this is a great debate within air power theory. The idea is, air power in the 1920s, after the First World War, the theorists come along and they say, Listen, air power is more than just the tip of the spear and the ground battles that will determine whether or not an army wins or loses, a Clausewitzian kind of concept. To, we can use air power to fly over rivers and English channels and mountains and international borders, avoiding the front lines and avoiding the militaries and actually have a strategic impact on, fully aware of that pun, the impact on civilian populations, financial centers,
9:29 Speaker 03 government installations, and sway the course of wars by attacking the brain trust rather than just the militaries at the front. The militaries at the front, of course, protect the frontiers. If you look at the First World War and anything prior to air power. And to get to the capital, if you think of the Napoleonic period, for example, Napoleon has to get through the Austrian army to get to Vienna. By the time you have air power, especially after the First World War, where they actually try this, the Germans are the first to do it, when they attack London, 1915 through 1918. The idea is go straight to the heart of the matter, financial institutions, the government centers, civilian population centers, and bomb them into submission.
10:14 Speaker 03 And so the idea is not just to destroy the armies at the front, but to basically avoid them and go straight at where the decisions are actually made.
10:23 Dan Snow? And it's an intoxicating idea, right, Mike? So you go look up, we've just spent four years chewing barbed wire on the Western Front in the hellish mountains of northern Italy and the hideous Balkans on the east of a nightmare, East Africa. Imagine if we'd have to do all that, you don't have to kill a lot of 18-year-olds, you just go straight, you get your little old plane, you fly straight over the Kaiser's Palace and drop a bomb on him.
10:43 Speaker 03 Indeed.
10:44 Dan Snow? And you can see why this kind of infects people, right? And has ever since. In fact, that's kind of what the Israelis and Americans are saying today. We can have a strategic effect without going to all this trouble and heartbreak and bloodshed of guys in the mud on the ground.
10:58 Speaker 03 Indeed, and that's been the prophecy or the prediction of air power since the very beginning. So it's really Hugh Trentford in Britain, who comes out of the war after he's in charge of the independent bombing force, bombing the Ruhr, because the airplanes can only, they can't reach Berlin. They can reach the Ruhr, and so he tries to destroy German industry and capabilities of making weapons in the Ruhr. But he comes out after the First World War and he's going to be the first one in charge of the new air force, the Royal Air Force. And he says, "The destruction of the material is important, but the destruction of enemy psychology is 20 to 1 to what it is to destroying the material." And he makes it up. He has no basis for the math. But because he's in charge, everybody's like, "Oh, you're brilliant, and this is fantastic, and we love it."
11:42 Speaker 03 And it's all a psychological battle at that point, to destroy the enemy's willingness to continue fighting. And so there's this will versus means argument throughout the entire 1920s and 1930s, where the Americans will focus on things they can measure and destroying enemy means. The factories, the oil production, airplane production, things like that. And that's what they'll take into the Second World War, and that's Billy Mitchell's argument. But the British will continue to say, "No, no, no, we're going to destroy the enemy will." And you get people like Bomber Harris, that's like, "We can only find cities at night." And there's a whole nother story in there, "But we will destroy the German willingness to be able to fight, so that they'll rise up against their government and they'll quit the war." And part of this, the concept of this, is if you look at the end of the First World War,
12:26 Speaker 03 there is social revolution. There's no argument that there isn't. There is social revolution in Germany. There is social revolution in the Soviet Union, which creates the Soviet Union. But the revolutions are what the air power theorists want to create with air power. So they want to bomb civilians, they want to bomb government cities, the centers of power. St. Petersburg in the case of the Russians, Berlin in the case of the Germans, and get the people to rise up against the governments like they did at the end of 1917, 1918. And the mechanism or the logical argument is that bombing from the air with relative impunity can force these social revolutions. So the logic is sound. It doesn't always work that way, obviously.
13:08 Speaker 03 But the logic is that using air power, the country with better air power and more air power can create social revolution in their enemy's camps. The British will carry that theory into the Second World War, that we can disrupt enemy psychology enough to get them to quit fighting. The Americans in the interwar period will focus on destroying the enemy's capability to be able to fight. Tanks, airplanes, oil. Et cetera, because it can be measured. The Americans, as you know, love to be able to measure things. And the metrics are a whole lot easier to judge than the emotional status or the psychology of your enemy. And so that's the Americans during the day, the combined bomber offensive, you and I have done a lot on this. The combined bomber offensive is the Americans
13:52 Speaker 03 during the day trying to destroy German planes and German industry and German oil and transportation. And the British at night are burning German cities trying to disrupt the German psychology and willingness to continue fighting.
14:05 Dan Snow? I want to get away from the theory now, and let's look at some of the historical examples. Let's start with really the first concerted strategic air campaign in history. It's the First World War. It's the Germans trying to change the British trajectory in the First World War. It did not work out.
14:21 Speaker 03 No, it didn't. The influence of strategic bombing by the Germans was overestimated and overpromised and simply didn't have the effects that they wanted. The Germans will attempt to do it in 1915 with the Zeppelins, and then by 1917 with the heavier than air bombers. But there isn't a concentration. There isn't enough destruction. This is what the theorists say after the war. There isn't enough destruction.
14:45 Dan Snow? So they can excuse that failure. They didn't go hard enough.
14:48 Speaker 03 Indeed. And the idea of the populations themselves and the resiliency of the civilian populations is underestimated. And so you look at the British population, and there's an interesting and important psychological component here with the idea of hopelessness. And so in the psychology literature, you have this concept where if the society can defend itself, or if the society can find a way through the pressure and the pain of the bombing, then it's not going to affect them the way that is predicted by air power theorists. So if you follow me on this thread, the British are still protected by the Royal Navy. The British are still protected a little bit by the Royal Air Force, who they reassign squadrons
15:30 Speaker 03 back from the Western Front back to Britain to defend against the airplanes. And it's tough without any radar or anything to see them coming. Once the airplanes are overhead, they're way up there and the British can't really intercept them very well. They can shoot down some on their way out as they're going back to Germany. But the idea is the British are not helpless. They think that they can defend it. They think they can stiff upper lip this whole thing. And they can survive, they can prevail. And so the German efforts at strategic bombing in the First World War, the concept in practice with bombing London, the financial center, the government center, the civilian population, which is seen as the soft underbelly, the British are much more stoic and they can survive it. And so they're going to say, well, what we'll do is we'll just kill more Germans
16:14 Speaker 03 on the, on the Western Front. Creating the psychological damage relies on forcing a hopeless position on a population where they have no other choice except to surrender. And that's the cost benefit analysis of modern war is whether or not it's valuable enough to keep fighting or to surrender or come to some sort of stalemate or some sort of negotiation to end the war because it costs too much, blood, treasure, whatever, than just sort of capitulating. So in the case of the British in the First World War and the Second World War, with the Battle of Britain, that hopelessness was never created. The British are stoic and the British are able to overcome
16:58 Speaker 03 the dangers or the threat of complete annihilation and stand up against the Germans and stay in the war. The Germans attempt to knock the British out of the war in the First World War and the Second World War with air power alone. There's really no threat of invasion. So the British are able to say, no, no, we can still defend against this. We're not going to give up. So there is a psychological component. It's just that it's really, really hard to measure. And you never really know when you, as the aggressor, are going to force that situation on an enemy population or an enemy leadership.
17:35 Dan Snow? Okay, so the First World War, that German attempt to knock Britain out from the air did not work. There is an interesting little mini example that has an outsized impact, doesn't it? Which is in the 1920s in Iraq, which has its historical echoes. And the British, the cash-strapped British, they cannot anymore after First World War, send vast columns of British or British Indian troops around the empires they once did or around anywhere like they once did. And suddenly this looks like a cheap way of doing it. Like they can send these aircraft, they can cover vast distances, they can strike at the enemy. In this case, tribal leaders, the kind of concentrations of tribal fighters. Is it fair to say it is quite effective? So this looks like this is air power only. So this is air power for a strategic effect, and it looks like it's working.
18:20 Dan Snow? It's pacifying these tribes across this, this big sway of the territory. The British find itself controlling after the First World War.
18:27 Speaker 03 It is absolutely. The British call it air policing and they send the RAF, the brand new RAF. Cause they need partly, they need a reason to, to keep funding it and keep building airplanes. But the idea of independent Royal Air Force in the Middle East is a relatively cheaper option. It's not cheap, but it's cheaper than divisions of soldiers. It's cheaper than capital ships and things like that. But you also have to realize that this is a time when the majority of humans on the planet have never seen aviation, have never seen airplanes. And so it's a psychological effect as much as anything in that all of a sudden these machines in the air are shooting at us and killing us. And so there is a psychological component for people who've never seen airplanes before.
19:11 Speaker 03 Now, in the modern era, when people have seen airplanes and they know what airplanes could do, it's a little bit less psychologically effective. But you have this concept of maintaining the empire in very, very tribal regions and very primitive regions, if you will, the developing world, where using aircraft to drop bombs or resupply or shoot from the air, you can control the areas more effectively because of the way that they're used. And so the British will put biplanes and machine guns and cars with Rolls Royces with machine guns on them to for mobility and for speed and maneuver.
19:54 Speaker 03 And like you said, to fly over different sort of geographical features and using air power are able to subdue some of the insurgencies in the Middle East. During the time that the British have this enormous massive colonial empire and are able to assert control through force using the new medium of air power. The Iraqis, these mobile forces, these insurgents, realize that they do not have any defense against RAF air power. They're still shooting single-shot rifles and muskets and riding around on on horseback and camels and they are in no way able to defend themselves against the Royal Air Force and even these very incredibly, to us, primitive biplanes.
20:39 Speaker 03 And so the RAF is able to use air power for success. There's a British battalion that's trapped inside of a city, a town, and the insurgents are trying to kill all of them and and RAF is able to bring in bags of grain and ammunition and and things like that, strapped, literally strapped under the wings of these biplanes and resupply the group of soldiers inside this little town. And the insurgents realize that they're not going to ever beat the British because they have resupply, because they have ways in and out, because they have air power. And so it creates in the insurgents, the Iraqis, the idea that, okay, the British have a technology, have a capability that we don't have, we can't
21:24 Speaker 03 defend against, and they're going to take advantage of this asymmetric advantage of our non-technological forces to the point where we can no longer fight against them effectively. And it's able to subdue, plus a lot of political stuff and buying off the right warlords, et cetera, et cetera. But the idea of not being able to defend against it and it will work at a tactical level, maybe not a strategic level.
21:51 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Stone's History. We're talking about strategic bombing. More coming up.
21:55 Speaker 03 That's true.
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25:22 Dan Snow? Okay, so lots of interesting things going on in the desert there. But it's, as you say, lots of other related activities and very small scale as well against a very particular type of enemy as well. Spanish Civil War, there's a huge ground component. People have heard of Guernica. That was a successful bombing campaign. But it was a bombing campaign that was then followed up by ground forces that were pushing north into the Basque Country. So it's not kind of what we're talking about right here, which is, we're trying to talk about times when people have attempted to win wars through air power only. You've mentioned the Battle of Britain. There is the Allied bombing of Germany, the Americans by day, the British by night. That, I'm afraid to say, did not deliver the results that the British in particular were hoping. It might have brought the end of the war closer, but that's because of the...
26:06 Dan Snow? The damage that's being done to Germany, the physical damage, the railroads, the tank production, all that kind of stuff, the German population do not rise up and throw off the Nazis, in case people are wondering, that's the great tragedy. So it doesn't work there. Japan, in combination with gigantic Soviet armies rampaging towards the Japanese home islands, massive fleets amassing to conquer Japanese home islands, air power does have a very important effect after the delivery of those atomic weapons.
26:34 Speaker 03 Absolutely. So at the end of the war in the Pacific, somewhere between August 9th and September 15th, the surrender documents are signed on September 15th. You have to realise, and this is for the listeners, there's still a million and a half Japanese soldiers in mainland China. Their military is not defeated. The emperor makes the decision that they're going to stop fighting simply because of this hopelessness that's created by American air power, plus all those other variables. The American submarine campaign has sunk 85% of Japanese merchant shipping. They have no stuff coming in and out of the Japanese home island. The Americans have threatened an invasion by November if the Japanese don't quit. And some of the statistics and some of the predictions are that Americans
27:19 Speaker 03 are going to lose another half a million to two million killed if they have to invade the Japanese home islands. Because the kamikazes have proven that the Japanese are going to fight to the death. It's a different mindset. It's a different kind of war in 1945. But the Americans have burned Japanese cities, 64 of the largest 66 Japanese cities are more than 50% destroyed. The two atomic bombs, and the Japanese by the summer of 1945 have no air defences left. They don't have any airplanes. Their anti-aircraft can't hit the B-29s, because the B-29s are coming in at night, society's in complete chaos. And so the Japanese emperor is like, okay, we're going to quit. But the idea of the defeat
28:02 Speaker 03 of the Japanese military, whereas the Red Army rolls the German military, and the German military is completely just destroyed by the end of the war in Europe. The Japanese military is not necessarily destroyed. The home islands are in disarray, but the Japanese military is still in China and Vietnam, which is another story. They have to be dealt with after the war. But the United States of America has created a situation where the emperor is like, we can no longer continue with the war without completely losing our entire society. And the United States signaled that they're going to let the emperor stay in his, in his office, that they're not going to kill the emperor, they're not going to remove the emperor, the emperor is going to be allowed to stay.
28:43 Speaker 03 And so by the Americans giving concessions, but also making bigger threats with the atomic bombs, with all the other things that are happening, the emperor has the ability to, if you'll allow that, to declare that they are in a hopeless situation and are going to not necessarily surrender. He never actually uses the word surrender, but they're not going to continue the war against the Americans and the Soviets, the Allies. And so it has created a situation where seemingly air power has an enormous influence on the end of the Pacific War, but all the other pieces are equally as important, if even not more important. The atomic bomb is, some would argue, the signal to the Soviets that, hey, we now have this capacity, so don't overextend your welcome.
29:26 Speaker 03 But what you get in Asia, of course, is that everything is divided up and you have North Korea and South Korea after the war. You have the Soviet sphere of influence. You have all kinds of craziness that continues in China with their civil war continuing immediately after the Japanese are disarmed. You have problems that are going to happen in Southeast Asia with French Indochina, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, these things all lead into each other. But the bombing of Japan seems to vindicate, and then the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, volumes and volumes of analysis, of metrics of economists and actuaries that go in and study these things, they will insist that it was the bombing that won the war. And so there's this mythology that's created at the end of the war that air power does
30:10 Speaker 03 win the war and kind of everything else is ignored. But then you get the independence of the United States Air Force in 1947, based on this concept that air power can win wars.
30:19 Dan Snow? Okay, so we are not going to notch up. The surrender of Japan, the defeat of Japan in the Pacific as a victory for strategic air power alone in 1945. There were too many other factors at play there as well.
30:30 Speaker 03 Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, it is a factor and it might even be the most important factor, but it's not the only factor.
30:36 Dan Snow? Okay, so this list is looking a bit thin of successful wars won by using air power. Let's, let's keep going. Where do you want to go next, bud? Because obviously, you know, Korea, a lot of air going on in Korea, but there's a huge amount of fighting on the ground and on the coast around Korea. I mean, is it Laos? Is it in Southeast Asia and during the Cold War, what we call Vietnam War? I mean, where's the best other example of an attempt made pretty much only in the air to bring about a big strategic effect on the ground? Or is it in North Korea?
31:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, so.
31:05 Dan Snow? We're entering a whole world of pain here, bud. So I appreciate that you're making this simple for us.
31:09 Speaker 03 No, it's fine. This is what I do. Let's just go chronologically. The best example is 1999, Kosovo. I'll get there. Korea, the United States Air Force tries to wage the war like they did in the Second World War by destroying Korean industry and the soldiers on the ground, et cetera, using strategic bombing. It doesn't work because Korea is less industrialized than either Germany or Japan were. And the American forces are not allowed to go into China, where the Koreans put a lot of staging areas and industry, et cetera, et cetera. And because the Chinese border is sacrosanct, they can't bomb in China. And so the North Koreans have a sanctuary. In Vietnam, the United States is only willing
31:51 Speaker 03 to use air power in North Vietnam to try to convince the North Vietnamese to stop supplying the insurgency in the South. And by that point, you get to 64, when the United States really gets involved. The idea is, well, we're going to have troops on the ground in South Vietnam to try to stabilize that democratic, democratic in air quotes, because you don't have visual of this, but democratic regime, but only air power against the North. There's no incursion on the ground into the North. Although the Americans do try to isolate the North Vietnamese by putting troops in Laos and Cambodia, later on, they'll be pulled out of there. But again, North Vietnam has sanctuary in China, and China's giving them a lot of supplies.
32:34 Speaker 03 The Soviets are giving them a lot of supplies. And the president, Johnson, at the time, says, you can't bomb Hanoi and Haiphong because we don't want this to get out of control. And there'd be a Soviet response in West Berlin, for example. And so air power is used to interdict and to destroy anti-aircraft facilities and try to keep the trucks from rolling south on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and try to disrupt supply lines of oil and things like that. But the insurgents in the South need literally thirty bullets and a bag of rice a day, kind of thing. So the requirements, the logistics requirements for the Southern insurgency is relatively small. If you look at the Ho
33:16 Speaker 03 Chi Minh Offensive, nineteen sixty-eight, and then again in nineteen seventy-two, the two offensives that the North Vietnamese do launch across the border, the American air power is able to deal with it very well because the North Vietnamese tried to transition to conventional war, meaning tanks and trucks and
33:33 Dan Snow? Yeah, they're driving tanks on roads.
33:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, and American air power chews it up. And so they're like, oh, well, we're not going to fight against American air power. So by nineteen seventy-two, when Nixon's in the office and he's like, well, peace with honor, we're going to get out by changing the political objectives of just, we want to get out. The North Vietnamese are like, yeah, no problem. See you later, especially after the Christmas bombings where the B-52s are unleashed against this capital city, Hanoi, and the port city of Haiphong. And the air power thinkers after that are going to go, oh, see, if we could have bombed the North Vietnamese capital earlier, we would have won. And it's like, okay, but what do you mean by winning? Are you going to convince the North to not support either unification or the insurgency in the South? Are you going to stabilize a very unpopular quote-unquote
34:17 Speaker 03 democratic government in the South with air power? And Vietnam is just a fascinating case study, but it's doomed from the start. And the United States keeps trying to do this and keeps trying to, and a lot of air power is employed against North Vietnam. The United States ends up dropping more bombs on South Vietnam and Cambodian layoffs than they do on the North. And so it's just such a bizarre story of the application of air power, which is absolutely inappropriate and completely disorganized. And, you know, sorry for my Vietnam veterans, but I think they realize that the political considerations took precedence over the military considerations. But I don't really think that air power could have changed the outcomes of that one very much.
34:59 Speaker 03 It forestalls the North taking the South for 15 years, let's say. But eventually, of course, the North Vietnamese invade the South again in 1975, and we simply don't go back. And so, South Vietnam ceases to exist, simply because, not because of air power, but because of political considerations and decisions that are made.
35:19 Dan Snow? So, Mike, we're coming to the mid 90s and the late 90s. Let's go to the Balkans, unless there's any good examples in the 70s you want to talk about. Lots of air power being used, Israelis are trashing the, it's Arab neighbors, air forces in 67, for example, a lot of air power in 73, but these are, they're not air power only battles. The air theorists, the air proponents get very excited about the Balkans, right? Tell us why.
35:42 Speaker 03 Indeed. So, I mean, the Balkans is in crisis, and it's super confusing because you have all kinds of different parties. And anyway, the short version is, let's go straight to 1999. And this is after the collapse of the Dayton Accords and all this, and Slobodan Ljusovic is in Serbia, and he hates the Kosovars. Let's just put the cards on the table. He's conducting genocide against Kosovar Albanian. Kosovo wants independence, it's part of Serbia, he doesn't want them to have independence, et cetera, et cetera. And so, he's killing Kosovars. And NATO will say, hey, knock it off. We don't like that. Because you have new media, you have international opinion, public opinion, and you have pictures coming out, and you, it's pretty grim.
36:23 Speaker 03 And so NATO decides that NATO is going to go in with air power alone. And Bill Clinton is the president at this point, and he's like, we're not going to put troops on the ground. And he says this openly, which creates in and of itself its own talking point. But he says, we're going to go in with air power, and we're going to coerce Slobodan Ljusovic to stop killing Kosovars. That's the whole point. Not a lot about independence, not a lot about anything else, other than, you know, stop the genocide. And so NATO gets together and they fly out of Italy across the Adriatic there. And air power will be used to convince Slobodan Milosevic to stop killing people. Okay. Initially planned as a three day campaign, you know, here's a little bit of pressure,
37:07 Speaker 03 here's a little bit of pain, we want you to not do this. So the political objectives are relatively small. It's not even about replacing a government or anything like that. It's just stop killing people. Three day campaign turns into an 11 day campaign, turns into a 78 day air campaign. It's problematic, even though there have been some really interesting technological developments, which are part of the conversation. So the Americans have developed stealth by this point, and they've also developed precision guided munitions. And precision guided munitions with GPS, where the GPS signal from the satellites tells the bombs where to fall, incredibly precise on the order of meters, rather than carpet bombing Hamburg in the Second World War with thousands upon thousands of bombers.
37:51 Speaker 03 You can send one airplane with between two and 16 bombs, and you can hit two to 16 targets, depending on your bomb load. And the Americans will bomb military stuff first. Tanks, anti aircraft, SAM sites, search to air missile sites, et cetera. But the Serbs were really, really good at camouflage and moving stuff around. And they were all using pretty decent Soviet, ex Soviet equipment by that point. And so it was tough. And the weather in Serbia can be really, really rough with lots of rain and the terrain, if you've ever been there, is like very hilly and mountainous and et cetera, and not really developed. And so they would go off road and couldn't find the stuff. And they would move it on a regular basis.
38:32 Speaker 03 Then you get the problem with the NATO coalition, which was any one country could veto any one target. They'd fix that afterwards, but the idea was, for example, and I'm not pointing fingers here, but the French would say, oh, no, you can't bomb that because it's culturally important. Or the Germans would say, oh, no, you can't bomb that because, for whatever reason, anybody could veto it. Finally, the Americans will say, okay, the American airplanes will bomb the things that we want to bomb. You can do whatever you want. So there's a command issue. I won't say failure, but issue. But it takes time and the Americans can't find NATO can't find the lever to get Slobodan Milosevic to stop doing what he's doing. And so they'll expand the target portfolio.
39:15 Speaker 03 And at one point in the 40th or 50th days, the Americans bomb a cigarette factory. That's the cigarette factory of one of Slobodan Milosevic's buddies. And they try to attack the leadership oligarchy to get them to put pressure on Slobodan Milosevic because he's not listening to his own population. And they'll start bombing like yachts of the his friends. And they start bombing different targets that would have financial pressure of his friends. And then the CIA finds out about, and this is all open source now because it's hilarious story. Finds out the landline number of his wife and they call her every hour on the hour for a couple of days and say, hey, tell your husband to stop killing Kosovars. And then they stop calling,
39:59 Speaker 03 which is even more disruptive. And then they call at random times. And so there's the psychological operations, there's electromagnetic spectrum operations, there's radio, there's television, there's the bombing and all of these things working together to try to get Slobodan Milosevic. And he finally, the Americans and NATO are able to put enough pressure on Slobodan Milosevic's friends and the oligarchy to get him to stop killing Kosovars. Or did he just kill enough that he was satisfied? He stops. He finally says after 78 days, okay, fine, I'll stop killing Kosovars. But the mechanism is important because nobody really knows why he stopped and he agreed to the terms. But why does he quit doing what he, how does it work?
40:40 Speaker 03 What are the coercion mechanisms? When the Americans and NATO are asking for so little, stop killing people, for the leverage of air power to work against Slobodan Milosevic. But it's still held up as this air power case. That air power alone had a strategic effect. Now, there was all kinds of other things going on. The Russians finally said to Slobodan Milosevic, "Stop doing what you're doing." And that probably had a big part to do with it. The Americans and Clinton finally said, "If you don't knock it off, we're going to put American forces, especially into Kosovo, to help the KLA, Kosovo Liberation Army, to fight against the Serb forces on the ground."
41:19 Dan Snow? Yeah, there was the threat of ground troops as well, right?
41:22 Speaker 03 Yeah. And so there are other things. But 1999 is held up as the ideal case for air power winning, quote unquote, "winning a war" in the sense of it is used to coerce political objectives with air power alone. But there are, of course, other mechanisms and variables involved.
41:42 Dan Snow? Hey, folks. More strategic bombing coming up after this.
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43:21 Dan Snow? Okay, so even that one, we're notching up as a success with an asterisk for sure. Is there anywhere else that's provide subsequent evidence that has been used by air power, well proponents of strategic air power?
43:33 Speaker 03 So you look at Russia and Ukraine right now, great air power story, interesting air power story. The air power of the Russians is completely mismanaged and they're getting airplanes shot out of the sky and helicopters shot out of the sky on a regular basis. The Ukrainians are using amazing technology with drones, UAVs, uncrewed aerial vehicles, RPVs, remotely piloted vehicles, autonomy, AI, robots, et cetera. And the spider web attack that they did, where they trucked hundreds of drones across the border towards the Russian airbase and they opened up the back of the truck and all these little tiny UAVs took off and basically destroyed this entire airbase. Fascinating stuff with new technology.
44:16 Speaker 03 And that air power story is still waiting to be written, but it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out in the sense of Russia's completely just, I don't know if they don't know what they're doing, but they're completely mismanaging that whole situation and completely underestimated the Ukrainians' willingness to fight literally to the death. And this is a fascinating part of how coercion works in the sense of whoever seemingly has the power has to be able to convince the other to do what they want. And the Ukrainians are unwilling to bend to what Russians want. And now they have the backing of Europe, basically, and most of NATO. And so that story is going to be ongoing until literally Russia gives up and says this isn't worth it anymore.
45:00 Dan Snow? And so that's why in the history of strategic air power, it has bombed things, it has killed people, it has conducted raids of both astonishing sophistication and precision, but also of enormous mortality. But it has never created a liberal democracy, for example, because that's not what air power does. It can coerce, it can destroy. There is still has to be an agent, a human on the ground making decisions, right, about the the future course of that country?
45:31 Speaker 03 You're absolutely correct. I won't even mince words. You can't create a liberal democracy with the application of air power. There has to be some sort of mechanism. It's a great story of the difference between force and Actually, winning the hearts and minds, and I hate that phrase, but you have to have people that are willing to accept a new form of government. But is it, for example, the Americans' job, or the Chinese' job, or the Russians' job to force those governmental changes on other countries? And so you look at what Russia's doing in Ukraine right now, you look at what Russia's doing in Chechnya right now, you look at what Russia tried to do in Afghanistan in
46:15 Speaker 03 the 80s, 70s and 80s. You look at what the United States is doing in the Middle East. You look at what China is thinking about regarding Taiwan and Hong Kong, for that matter. I mean, they're not even using air power, they're just beating people up. But the idea of applying force to have a political outcome that favors your democratic purposes or governmental purposes is super awkward, and I think it's a really interesting conversation piece.
46:42 Dan Snow? Thanks, Mike. I guess we can just finish up by saying, in your survey of air power now stretching just over 100 years, has air power alone ever brought about regime change, and not just regime change, but regime change, which in the eyes of historians, you know, consensus is that it was a good thing, an improvement, something that was progressive?
47:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, Dan, I've been studying this for a long time. There are events in history that we point to that are better, applications of air power, better is a loaded term, are more clear applications of air power that are good examples. But air power doesn't exist in a vacuum. And so, no, there isn't any one case of air power where air power alone has been applied to create liberal democracy, period. There's not even really a good example of where air power alone has been applied to create better conditions for the populations that are affected.
47:45 Speaker 03 It can be incredibly, it has in the past been very counterproductive. And I think we can point to a number of cases where that's obvious. But it still will be a tool of governments who have that power.
48:01 Speaker 03 Who want to use force to try to coerce. And at the end of the day, and this is an argument that I make, and it ruffles a lot of feathers. But air power in general, and this goes back to the 1920s with the RAF, is less expensive than other options. Cyber might change that equation a little bit going into the future. Airplanes are still super expensive. And you look at how much Americans pay for their air force. It's still very, very expensive, but less in money than say, a division of boots on the ground or a capital ship, an aircraft carrier, for example, that kind of thing. Less than a navy, less than an army.
48:43 Speaker 03 And air power, because it offers the promise that your pilots can fly, or even an uncrewed vehicle can fly over enemy territory, drop some bombs, come back and everybody's safe on your side, means that the politicians like it a whole lot more because you're putting fewer, in the case of what we're talking about, Americans in harm's way, while you're still trying to have your tactical, operational and strategic effects. And so it becomes an easy way for politicians or leaders, the White House in this case, to use air power in lieu of naval power or army, boots on the ground power, Marines, special forces, et cetera, et cetera.
49:27 Speaker 03 And so even though you're going to have casualties, you can potentially have strategic effects. So we go back to 1999 really quick. No Americans die in combat operations over Kosovo. There are two helicopter pilots that get killed in a training accident that's close, but not there. There's a couple of airplanes that are shot down, sure. There's lots and lots of UAVs, drones that are shot down by the Serbs. No Americans died. And yet we have that strategic influence and coercion on Slobodan Milosevic. Eventually, after 78 days.
50:01 Speaker 03 And so air power becomes an easy way to apply force without much cost, either in blood or treasure. I mean, it is expensive. Don't get me wrong, but it's less. It costs less and it's easier. And so in my argument, I say air power will continue to be used and may be used when it shouldn't be. And it becomes very, very dangerous, especially for people that really don't understand global dynamics, international relations and geopolitics and what that effect will have. This bombing of Iran is going to have enormous primary, secondary and tertiary effects that I don't think the United States has thought through.
50:45 Dan Snow? Well, Mike, that was brilliant as always. What is the next book? Just give me the title.
50:48 Speaker 03 It's called American Air Power: The History, Theory and Art of Air Warfare.
50:55 Dan Snow? Thanks so much, Mike. Thanks for coming on the podcast.
50:57 Speaker 03 My pleasure. Anytime. You know that.
50:59 Dan Snow? Well, folks, thank you very much for listening to this. Just as this podcast went to print, the Iranians named a new supreme leader, Mosh Tabar Hameni, the son of the previous supreme leader. So we've got a father-son transition there. So that suggests we can say now that massive overwhelming air power has not yet succeeded in changing the character of the regime. Donald Trump, for example, is said to be unhappy with the choice of leaders. So clear indication that air power alone is not organizing the situation on the ground in a manner desired by those wielding that air power. It may, given enough time, it may change that strategic orientation. It may change personnel. It may change the Iranian system. Let us see what the coming weeks bring. As ever, history will be your
51:43 Dan Snow? constant historic companion, bringing you all the context and insight you need from historians. Make sure you follow or subscribe or whatever the heck you have to do on your player to get the latest episodes into your feed effortlessly. See you next time.
52:07 Speaker 05 This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless Goldflake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.
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