The delusion of easy victory from the air may have seduced the US into another war | Air superiority is supposed to deliver a quick triumph. But history has shown that promise to be written on the wind

History proves that air superiority can win battles, but it can’t win a nation. Without a clear ground strategy and exit plan, it’s just expensive hovering.

Some key reminders from this analysis: >To explore the roots of Donald Trump’s Iran military strategy and the pugnacious rhetoric of his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, means looking back 105 years. In 1921, a year before Benito Mussolini and his blackshirts marched on Rome to launch the Fascist era, an Italian general named Giulio Douhet published The Command of the Air, proposing a revolution in warfare. > >Victory in the future, he said, would no longer come from the grinding trench combat of the great war. Instead it meant large-scale aerial bombardments, targeting not just combatants but civilians and civilian infrastructure and logistics. > >... > >It is unclear if Pete Hegseth has ever heard of the book Douhet wrote, but the threads of the long-dead Italian officer’s thinking appear woven through the secretary’s bombastic briefings about Epic Fury, the air war Trump is waging against Iran. > >Despite Hegseth’s claims of a new type of American strategy, and his slap-down of the “foolish political leaders and foolish military leaders of the past”, his promise of “the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history” appears to be less an innovative approach to warfare than a recycled version of the same old thing. > >... > >Douhet was obsessed with promoting a sheer volume of bombs from the sky, “to inflict the greatest damage in the shortest possible time”. Hegseth’s briefings are resonant with that theme of more and more and more. “Quantity has a quality all its own,” he said. “In fact, today will be yet again the highest volume of strikes that America has put over the skies … The number of sorties and number of bomber pulses, the highest yet, ramping up and only up.” > >And then there was Douhet’s focus on bombing civilian infrastructure – a practice he thought would cause the population to revolt against their leaders. “The time would soon come when, to put an end to horror and suffering, the people themselves, driven by the instinct of self-preservation, would rise up and demand an end to the war,” he wrote. > >Hegseth, too, dwells on that destruction of civilian morale, though he has not pushed for striking civilians themselves. “We are warriors, trained to kill the enemy and break their will … Speaking of people, we hope the Iranian people take advantage of this incredible opportunity. President Trump has been clear: now is your time.” > >One of the differences between the boasts of Hegseth and his predecessors was that they were more polite about it, said Winslow Wheeler, a former Government Accountability Office (GAO) official who later ran the Center for Defense Information. It’s style more than substance, he said. > >“What they don’t appreciate,” Wheeler said, “is that human nature is unchanging. The technology gets more and more sophisticated and they find that we’re capable of more and more precision but that doesn’t change human nature.” In other words, said Wheeler, people on the ground react in unpredictable ways. Bombing them often builds resistance and solidarity. > >... > >All the claims in Vietnam, Iraq and Kosovo of omniscient technology, precision bombing and air domination never actually won a war, the critics say. Hegseth and the other proponents of the current conflict are just the most recent to brag about US weaponry and all-knowing technology. “The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes,” Hegseth said less than a week into the war, “intelligence more refined and better than ever.” > >The newest boasts about the latest whiz-bang ingredient in the US arsenal is the claim that AI is helping defeat Iran. “We’ve got a lot of autonomous systems,” Hegseth said, “incorporated with smart AI aspects to them.” > >But does that mean Hegseth has finally solved the very same problem in air superiority that the US has faced for decades? It may be that the delusion of easy victory – that same alluring 100-year-old theory of warfare – has sucked the US into its latest violent muddle. These were some useful looks at the series of quagmires that the nation has been embroiled in since the end of the second world war. It certainly looks through this piece that Hegseth and other planners for this current war have a sophomoric understanding of both history as well as human nature. Sadly this is to everyone's detriment.

Vietnam.

Nothing seduced us into another war. An administration filled with incompetent idiots took us there by choice. We weren't lured or lulled. We didn't get here by circumstance. This was a decision made by really stupid people. Trump saw exactly one move ahead and still stepped directly on the rake.

The last war will provide the winning strategy for this war -- some ancient Pentagon guy probably

There is a reason Bush invaded Iraq, not Iran. He wanted to go into Iran but was given the good advice that any land operations into Iran would be costly in terms of manpower and materiel. Iran has been preparing for a long war against a much stronger opponent for a very long time. This would end up making Vietnam look a picnic. There’s a reason air assets are called force MULTIPLIERS, they’re not the force itself

Air superiority makes ground advances easier... But you need the ground war to be planned, too. It's like these people just watched Wolf Blitzer reruns and decided that they're experts.

Only boots on the ground can take or hold territory.

As a former Air Force officer, it is repeatedly discussed/studied what air power CAN and CANNOT do. Per Clausewitz, you win wars by: 1. Destroying your opponent’s ability to wage war. 2. Occupying their territory. 3. Breaking their will to continue the fight. Air Power can really only do number one.