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That the NATO bombings of Serbia would fail in their goal -- getting Slobodan Milosevic to cease persecuting his own citizens -- was pretty obvious from the outset. Bombs might alter the terrain, but they've never changed hearts and minds.
Military analysts usually define two kinds of air power: tactical and strategic.
Tactical addresses the immediate situation -- the enemy has a bunch of tanks pointed your way, and you call in some air support to neutralize the tanks. Tactical bombing thus works pretty much like another form of artillery, and it fits with military doctrines that are as old as the catapult.
The doctrines of strategic bombing were developed between World War I and World War II. In theory, if you bomb the enemy's manufacturing and transport facilities, then he will run out of munitions and other supplies, as well as the ability to deliver them to the soldiers at the front. Over time, you'll be able to prevail there.
Along the way, strategic bombing also gained a psychological aspect, probably because the bombs weren't all that accurate and no matter how hard they tried to confine the devastation to facilities of some military relevance, the bombs still hit civilian populations.
Military theorists found a way to justify this -- the errant bombs weren't really strays. They were, instead, a way of destroying enemy morale, so that the enemy population would lose its will to fight. After all, if their leaders couldn't protect them from airborne devastation, why support the government? Why make your way to work every day, through the rubble, to build proximity fuses or bullet primers?
All this may sound good on paper, but it hasn't worked that way on the ground.
After World War II, the United States commissioned the Strategic Bombing Survey to examine the effects of Allied bombing on Germany.
The survey's conclusion was that all the strategic bombing had no meaningful effect on German war production, and that if anything, it improved German morale.
Japan also was also hammered hard by Allied bombers,
including two atomic bombs toward the end. But even then,
it did not capitulate until the Allies' official
Unconditional Surrender
demand was informally
amended to Japan can keep its emperor.
Otherwise,
the war in the Pacific might have ground on for several
more years.
In more recent times, the tiny country of North Vietnam got hit with more bombs than were used in all of World War II.
Did this destroy the enemy's ability to make war? Did it remove the population's will to fight? Or did North Vietnam persist until the United States had lost its will to continue expending blood and treasure in a conflict that, after all, had nothing to do with U.S. vital interests?
Strategic bombing just doesn't have a very good track record, as either a military or a political tool. Consider our own reactions.
When a bomb goes off somewhere in America -- the World Trade Center, a federal office building in Oklahoma City, on the desk of a Unabomber addressee -- do we decide that continued resistance is futile? Do we even give a fair hearing to the doctrines espoused by the bombers?
Or do we want to round up the bombers as we rally around the authorities?
To ask that question is to answer it, and yet we persist in believing that Iraqis or Serbs are fundamentally different than we are, that when they get bombed, they'll respond in some way that we would never respond, in some way that no nation has ever responded to bombing.
Tracking the roots of this illusion is difficult. Part of it is American politics -- the Air Force had to justify its existence as a separate service 50 years ago, and so its theorists labored to come up with something plausible.
We could go clear back to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's famous 1864-65 march through Georgia and the Carolinas, which had the same goals as strategic bombing -- destroying enemy morale and production.
Enemy morale was so destroyed that in those places, to this day they still proudly fly their flag of treason and racism while they continue to esteem Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest as minor deities.
Not that I have any idea what the United States and NATO should have done, or should do, about Milosevic's atrocities against his own people.
It's something that decent people cannot ignore. But it's also something that can't be fixed with bombs. And how many NATO countries have the stomach for putting and keeping ground troupe in Kosovo?
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