{"id":547764,"date":"2026-03-27T04:29:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T04:29:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/547764\/"},"modified":"2026-03-27T04:29:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T04:29:09","slug":"the-delusion-of-easy-victory-from-the-air-may-have-seduced-the-us-into-another-war-us-israel-war-on-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/547764\/","title":{"rendered":"The delusion of easy victory from the air may have seduced the US into another war | US-Israel war on Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"

To explore the roots of Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s Iran military strategy and the pugnacious rhetoric of his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth<\/a>, means looking back 105 years. In 1921, a year before Benito Mussolini<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201c[It] is much more important to destroy a railroad station, a bakery, a war plant, or to machine-gun a supply column, moving trains, or any other behind-the-lines objective, than to strafe or bomb a trench.<\/p>\n

\u201c[It] is not enough to shoot down all birds in flight if you want to wipe out the species,\u201d he wrote, with a grim metaphor. \u201cThe most effective method would be to destroy the eggs and the nests systematically.\u201d<\/p>\n

Douhet\u2019s theories, which emphasized \u201cblows to the morale of civilian populations\u201d, inspired Hitler\u2019s deployment of airpower \u2013 and attacks such as that seen in Guernica and the sustained bombing of London. But likewise it attracted technologically bent American air strategists such as Gen Curtis LeMay, who oversaw the firebombing of dozens of Japanese cities, the aerial mining of Japan\u2019s waterways called Operation Starvation, and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and who later ran the US Air Force Strategic Air Command.<\/p>\n

It is unclear if Pete Hegseth has ever heard of the book Douhet wrote, but the threads of the long-dead Italian officer\u2019s thinking appear woven through the secretary\u2019s bombastic<\/a> briefings about Epic Fury, the air war Trump is waging against Iran.<\/p>\n

Despite Hegseth\u2019s claims of a new type of American strategy, and his slap-down of the \u201cfoolish political leaders and foolish military leaders of the past\u201d, his promise of \u201cthe most lethal and precise air power campaign in history\u201d appears to be less an innovative approach to warfare than a recycled version of the same old thing.<\/p>\n

In the 1991 Desert Storm attacks on Iraq, the 1999 air war against Serbia and the 2003 launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, there\u2019s a clear pattern where military leaders seem convinced that the increasing might and airpower and breakthroughs in technology have finally allowed them to revolutionize warfare, again and again.<\/p>\n

Douhet was obsessed with promoting a sheer volume of bombs from the sky, \u201cto inflict the greatest damage in the shortest possible time\u201d. Hegseth\u2019s briefings are resonant with that theme of more and more and more. \u201cQuantity has a quality all its own,\u201d he said. \u201cIn fact, today will be yet again the highest volume of strikes that America has put over the skies \u2026 The number of sorties and number of bomber pulses, the highest yet, ramping up and only up.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then there was Douhet\u2019s focus on bombing civilian infrastructure \u2013 a practice he thought would cause the population to revolt against their leaders. \u201cThe 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,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Hegseth, too, dwells on that destruction of civilian morale, though he has not pushed for striking civilians themselves. \u201cWe are warriors, trained to kill the enemy and break their will \u2026 Speaking of people, we hope the Iranian people take advantage of this incredible opportunity. President Trump has been clear: now is your time.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s style more than substance, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat they don\u2019t appreciate,\u201d Wheeler said, \u201cis that human nature is unchanging. The technology gets more and more sophisticated and they find that we\u2019re capable of more and more precision but that doesn\u2019t change human nature.\u201d In other words, said Wheeler, people on the ground react in unpredictable ways. Bombing them often builds resistance and solidarity. \u201cThink of the German attacks on the British, did that weaken the British resolve? No. It caused the population to unite,\u201d he said. \u201cSurrender was unthinkable.\u201d<\/p>\n

North Vietnamese urine to outwit technology<\/p>\n

Delusions of total control from the skies were a feature of the air war during Vietnam. In Kill Chain, the Rise of the High-Tech Assassins, Andrew Cockburn describes how air power and technology advocates of that day thought they could shut down the Ho Chi Minh trail, the jungle supply line used to arm and equip the North Vietnamese army. The American plan: use arrays of remote ground sensors to detect trucks and soldiers. Once the detectors went off, bombers could wipe out the soldiers below. (One type of sensor \u201c\u2019sniffed\u2019\u201d the air for telltale traces of ammonia, denoting urine and therefore people.) The North Vietnamese caught on quickly with low-tech solutions \u2013 they even tricked the ammonia-sniffing sensors with bottles of animal urine. The Ho Chi Minh trail was never shut<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The US war that introduced the now commonplace black-and-white videos of targets exploding, the same type of videos released now in Epic Fury, was Desert Storm in 1991, the effort to liberate Kuwait after Saddam Hussein invaded his small oil-rich neighbor.<\/p>\n

As Cockburn wrote, \u201cFor the first time, the public at home could watch and thrill at the air force\u2019s \u2018precision and lethality\u2019 administered with cool professional efficiency.\u201d<\/p>\n

The early US press accounts in the opening days of war were enthusiastic. \u201cWith a lethal air strike of historic accuracy and potency, the United States and allies rained death and devastation on Iraq Wednesday,\u201d wrote USA Today.<\/p>\n

The technological hero of the show was the previously secret F-117A stealth attack aircraft, which dropped the very first bomb of the war, and the Pentagon shared the videos gladly. But the boasts at the air war turned out to be just shades of truth. In 1996 a GAO study found that the claimed success rate of 80% on bombing runs by the stealth F-117A was exaggerated: the true rate was between 41% and 60%. And claims about targeting were inflated too. \u201cThe claim by [the Department of Defense] and contractors,\u201d wrote the GAO, \u201cof a one-target, one-bomb capability for laser-guided munitions was not demonstrated in the air campaign where, on average, 11 tons of guided and 44 tons of unguided munitions were delivered on each successfully destroyed target.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, after 43 days, Hussein withdrew from Kuwait, leaving tanks and soldiers and wreckage behind. But it also left Hussein firmly in charge, back in Iraq, his regime intact.<\/p>\n

In March 1999, the next big air war was under way: Operation Allied Force to end the Serb war crimes in Kosovo. This war had its own set of weapons system celebrities. The hi-tech B2 bomber was deployed, with two of the planes flying thousands of miles from the US and back to drop precision bombs. A report in the Los Angeles Times said: \u201cWithin the Air Force, there was nothing but elation.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in the end, as the Guardian<\/a> reported the next year, \u201cNato\u2019s bombing campaign, with thousands of sorties and the dropping of tens of thousands of bombs, including sophisticated precision weapons, succeeded in damaging just 13 of the Serbs\u2019 300 battle tanks in Kosovo.\u201d<\/p>\n

The most well-known exaggeration of US air power may well be the \u201cshock and awe\u201d campaign of 2003 under George W Bush and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. In many ways the language used as the war started could have been used by Hegseth.<\/p>\n

Rumsfeld boasted that the airstrikes \u201cwill be of a force and scope and scale \u2026 beyond what has been seen before\u201d. The Pentagon told reporters<\/a> that it had planned a 48-hour campaign with 3,000 precision-guided bombs to devastate Iraqi command and control and military infrastructure and sap morale.<\/p>\n

When the airstrikes failed to topple Hussein without ground troops, Rumsfeld denied he personally had promised the regime would fall quickly, though he allowed that some planners might have given that impression. As he put it, \u201cis it possible that someone might have said something that led some person to believe that? I suppose so.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cThe most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes,\u201d Hegseth said less than a week into the war, \u201cintelligence more refined and better than ever.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

The newest boasts about the latest whiz-bang ingredient in the US arsenal is the claim that AI is helping defeat Iran. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a lot of autonomous systems,\u201d Hegseth said, \u201cincorporated with smart AI aspects to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 that same alluring 100-year-old theory of warfare \u2013 has sucked the US into its latest violent muddle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To explore the roots of Donald Trump\u2019s Iran military strategy and the pugnacious rhetoric of his defense secretary,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":547765,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-547764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/547765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}