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

Joint Force Quarterly, April, 2008 by Mark Clodfelter

Airpower, applied against the designated "web" of North Korea, thus could not deliver the quick victory that its progressive proponents proclaimed. As a result, in August 1952, American aircraft bombed military targets in Pyongyang, which had not been attacked in almost a year, and caused more than 7,000 civilian casualties. (22) In May 1953, with a new Commander in Chief in Washington firmly committed to ending the war rapidly, American aircraft bombed North Korea's irrigation dam system, threatening its civilian populace with starvation. Whether those raids spurred the war's end remains a matter of conjecture. President Dwight Eisenhower claimed that he also threatened the Chinese with a nuclear assault on Manchuria, but his success in conveying that threat, and its impact if he did so, also remains subject to speculation. (23) In all probability, the key reason for the July 1953 armistice was the death of Stalin 4 months earlier, which removed the Soviet Union's impetus to continue the conflict.

As in World War II, airpower contributed brute force in an effort to end the conflict quickly, but Korea differed in many ways from the preceding war. For the United States, the war aim and the type of war fought did not vacillate from 1941 to 1945. America's war aim in Korea shifted three times during the first year, and the fast-paced conventional war of movement that typified the opening year then disappeared into a 2-year stalemate along the 38th parallel. Korea also differed from World War II in presenting a powerful but silently active enemy--the Soviet Union--and an unexpectedly overt belligerent--China. The uncertain behavior of the two communist powers produced friction that stymied an immediate air effort against North Korea's hydroelectric power and irrigation dam systems. Americans viewed the Korean conflict through the prism of the Cold War, and indeed the war played out with all belligerents aware that other nations watched and their views counted in the ideological struggle between communism and capitalism. Given those circumstances, the notions of progressive airpower proved tenuous at best. They would prove even more so in the next limited conflict.

Southeast Asian Dilemma

Much like the Korean War, the frictional element of uncertainty affected how America applied military force in Vietnam. The threat of an expanded conflict haunted President Lyndon Johnson and shaped much of his wartime decisionmaking. So too did his concern for his Great Society programs. Though he preferred to focus on domestic issues, Johnson was not about to permit a communist takeover of South Vietnam. "I knew from the start that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved," he later reflected. "If I left the woman I really loved--the Great Society--in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home.... But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe." (24) His dilemma was finding a way to fight that would prevent South Vietnam's collapse while causing minimum disruption to his Great Society--and minimum concern to North Vietnam's two powerful benefactors, China and the Soviet Union.