Huffing And Puffing And Blowing Houses Down

Applying air power has some utility but the real work of fighting them is not going to be so distant… or clean. The illusion of action is not a substitute for effective action

Canada Free Press

By John Thompson 

The RCAF is back in action again, dropping bombs on the slave-taking, throat-cutting rapists of ISIS.  The morality of the situation is unequivocal, the effect of our contribution to the war on the new Caliphate is – alas – doubtful.

In the minds of Western politicians, using airpower is an inexpensive alternative to the hard work of really getting involved in warfare.  It lets us get involved – often in affairs we should stay clear from—and provides a relatively risk-free intervention because we are not getting our soldiers killed in combat or making uncomfortable decisions This lets political leaders believe they are accomplishing something without getting their own hands dirty.We are fighting an ideology, an idea that keeps attracting new adherents and captures their hearts and seduces their minds.  This means dropping bombs on their partisans in a far off place might be a salutary idea but we are far from engaging them in a decisive arena.

Airpower can work and can be awesomely destructive… if the enemy has something to destroy.  As an alternative to getting troops on the ground shooting and bayonetting somebody who deserves it (as the members of ISIS certainly do), sending airpower to do a man’s work is a spectacular failure.

The world’s first air raid occurred in Libya when the Italians wrestled it away from the Turks in 1911.  A stuttering Taube biplane tossed out some improvised bombs over the Turks and a new age of airpower was born.  Since then, policy makers have consistently misused it.

World War I and II

After its troubled childhood over the mud, blood and trenches of the Western Front in World War One, the military airplane was embraced as a means of imposing destruction on enemies without actually committing more men to the hardships of war on the ground.  The British tried to police Iraq in the early 1920s by sending biplanes instead of soldiers… it proved more expensive and yielded less results.

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Reposted with permission