It was in 1909 that Clement Ader, the French aviation pioneer, warned that "the great bombing planes will become veritable terrors!" He saw this as a good thing.
"I am convinced," Ader went on, "that their awesome power and fear of seeing them appear will provoke salutary reflections among the statesmen and diplomats who are the real dispensers of peace and war."
From the beginning, people saw both promise and peril in airplanes. Orville Wright once stated that he and his brother thought the flying machine would make war so inadvisable that no government would start one.
The theory was that air warfare would be highly destructive, and leaders, knowing this, would prevent war from breaking out. The corollary was that, if war did occur, airpower would ensure it was over quickly with relatively little loss of life.
This belief was much in vogue after World War I, a conflict in which many millions of soldiers and civilians had died.
After war broke out again in Europe in 1939, the use of airpower was indeed awful. Tens of thousands died in Germany and Japan, as well as in Allied cities. What happened? National leaders certainly knew that the airplane could wreak devastation. So, why was war neither deterred nor limited?
The answer is that some individuals—Adolf Hitler, for instance—are simply undeterrable. Suffering of German citizens counted for little in his lunge for power and national grandeur. His mind was made up.
So the threat of airpower did not deter Hitler. Neither did land power or sea power, for that matter.
Airpower did take far fewer lives, however. Of some 60 million persons who died in World War II, perhaps four million—military and civilian—died from air attacks. How did the other 93 percent perish? The old-fashioned way; they were shot, shelled, starved, executed, and so forth.
Airpower also shortened the war in the Pacific. Strategic bombing, culminating in two atomic strikes on Japan, brought the war to an end without American forces having to undertake what would surely have been a bloody invasion of Japan.
In a sense, the coming of the nuclear weapon finally fulfilled the dark paradox of the airplane. The threat of an air attack—a nuclear air attack—was too horrible to accept, and it puts steel in today’s deterrence posture.
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A military search team retrieves a MiG-25 that had been buried beneath the sands of the Iraqi desert. (USAF photo by MSgt. T. Collins) |