A strategy based on faith: the enduring appeal of progressive American airpower

Joint Force Quarterly, April, 2008 by Mark Clodfelter

Through carefully applied doses of airpower, they intended to produce victory more quickly and more cheaply than by relying on ground forces. They planned to achieve rapid success by wrecking the key elements of an enemy's warmaking potential--components that originally consisted of industry and infrastructure but that later expanded to include leadership and its decisionmaking apparatus. The battlefield use of airpower received short shrift. With fresh memories of slaughter on the Western Front, matched by a tremendous desire for Service independence, they focused on strategic bombing to destroy the vital elements of an enemy's warmaking capability and to obviate the need for extensive Army operations. Many even argued that bombing alone would win wars. Moreover, bombing would make war's impact less severe for all sides; its rapid results would produce fewer deaths and less destruction than surface combat. The logic of their argument resembled that of the muckraker writers who believed that excising commercial corruption would produce ethical and efficient business practices. Comparing a future conflict to the horror of trench warfare, the progressive-minded Mitchell wrote in 1924 that bombing would "result in a diminished loss of life and treasure and will thus be a distinct benefit to civilization." (5)

Mitchell's vision of war was a total, all-consuming effort by a nation-state, waged to vanquish the opposition. That vision sought to avoid the widespread butchery that had typified World War I battlefields and relied on aviation, "a progressive element," to transform war. (6) By quickly and efficiently destroying an enemy's economic vital centers--the perceived essence of a state's ability to fight "modern" war--aircraft would preclude the need to fight wasteful ground battles. These views reflected the perspectives of British Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard and Italian General Giulio Douhet. Mitchell had met Trenchard, the "father" of the Royal Air Force, during World War I, and had taken his calls for an independent air force, capable of attacking strategic targets, to heart. Douhet, whose seminal 1921 book The Command of the Air also stressed the merits of an independent striking force, impressed Mitchell during a 1922 European tour in which the two met. Trenchard and Douhet were progressives in their own right, and their notions helped to shape Mitchell's thinking. Mitchell agreed with both that civilians were now vital to waging modern war, and, as such, they had become legitimate targets in it. He further accepted their social Darwinist view that civilian will was fragile and that bombs could wreck it, but, unlike Trenchard and Douhet, he did not think that attacking civilians directly was the ideal way to produce victory. Instead, Mitchell called for the rapid destruction of an enemy's warmaking capability: "Air forces will attack centers of production of all kinds, means of transportation, agricultural areas, ports and shipping; not so much the people themselves." (7) Without the means to fight, surrender would result, eliminating the possibility of future slaughter such as that at Verdun or the Somme.