Airpower and Restraint in Small Wars Marine Corps Aviation in the Second Nicaraguan Campaign, 1927-33

Aerospace Power Journal, Fall, 2001 by Dr. Wray R. Johnson

Editorial Abstract: Air control, as exhibited by the Royal Air Force during the British occupation of Iraq, is often cited as the consummate example of the successful and effective use of airpower. However, the US military need look no further than its own Marine Corps for an equally compelling example. As Dr. Johnson argues, unlike their European counterparts, Marine air leaders understood the need for restraint in using airpower for air control in Nicaragua during the first half of the twentieth century.

IT IS ONE of the peculiarities of airpower history that proponents have often claimed airpower to be a more humane instrument of war, whereas many critics have claimed that bombs dropped from the air are somehow more immoral than an artillery barrage or economic sanctions-even if the latter results in a greater number of civilian deaths." Yet, it is rare to find historical examples of airmen accused of war crimes, much less tried for the same. This has created a paradox of sorts. For example, following revelations that US troops deliberately fired upon civilian refugees at No Gun Ri during the Korean War, James Webb, a Marine Corps combat veteran and former secretary of the Navy, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "Perhaps the greatest anomaly of recent times is that death delivered by a bomb earns one an air medal, while when it comes at the end of a gun it earns one a trip to jail." [2] If we were to take this line of reasoning to its logical extreme, the tragedy at My Lai would have been regarded different ly in history had a pair of F-4 fighter-bombers napalmed the village. Of course, the distinction appears to be that Lt William Galley and his soldiers killed Vietnamese women and children face-to-face whereas the F-4 pilots would have been, to use popular jargon, simply "servicing a target.

According to Col Phil Meilinger, former dean of the School of Advanced Airpower Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base (AFB), Alabama, "Whether women and children are blown to bits by artillery, starved to death as a result of blockade, or killed in a bombing attack is a distinction the victims would not trouble themselves to make." [3] But airpower theorists and airmen themselves have over the years invariably pointed to the distinct psychological impact of airpower as being potentially far greater than the actual physical destruction wrought. If that is true, then civilians do in fact make a distinction between death by artillery fire and death by bombs. Giulio Douhet certainly believed in the efficacy of aerial terror to weaken, if not wholly undermine, the will of civilian populations, and as recently as 1997 the director of Defence Studies at the Royal Air Force Staff College averred that "airpower when used properly can be a devastatingly effective psychological weapon." [4]

A basic premise of classical airpower theory, then, has always been that people targeted from the air--whether combatants or noncombatants--react with much greater fear to aerial bombardment than to surface attack. [5] Apparently, this is equally true among guerrillas and other irregulars. In his book Viet Cong Memoir, Truong Nhu Tang described B-52 strikes as "undiluted psychological terror." Despite having been hunted by South Vietnamese and American ground forces and having endured all of the privations and hardships associated with the life of a guerrilla, Truong Tang noted that "nothing the guerrillas had to endure compared with the stark terrorization of the B-52 bombardments." [6] Thus, since the advent of the airplane, airpower enthusiasts have noted the psychological dimension of airpower and sought to exploit it. In that light, the use of the airplane by Great Britain to police its empire in the early part of the twentieth century serves as a case in point.

As Dr. Jim Corum has noted in his article "The Myth of Air Control," the British long relied upon terror in the form of punitive expeditions to bring rebellious native populations to heel. [7] Indeed, Col C. E. Callwell, in his seminal work Small Wars, first published in 1896, considered what we today would think of as wanton acts of destruction perpetrated against civilians to be a sound military principle:

It is so often the case that the power which undertakes a small war desires to acquire the friendship of the people which its armies are chastising, that the system of what is called "military execution" is ill-adapted to the end in view. The most satisfactory way of bringing such foes to reason is by the rifle and the sword, for they understand this mode of warfare and respect it. Sometimes, however, the circumstances do not admit of it, and then their villages must be demolished and granaries destroyed. [8]

Although Colonel Callwell acknowledged "a limit to the amount of license in destruction" in small wars, he nevertheless acceded to a certain expediency in such "havoc" and noted that, despite the fact that burning crops and killing civilians was something "the laws of regular warfare do not sanction," it was oftentimes a necessary, albeit unfortunate, characteristic of small wars. [9]