The myth of control from the air

Aerial bombing kills civilians on a huge scale, but is not strategically decisive. Yet it persists.

Israel and the US claim to be pursuing two aims in their bombing campaign against Iran: destroying Tehran’s nuclear programme and bringing about regime change. But history shows that this strategy has practical and ethical limits. Opting for aerial warfare is usually the result of a practical concern – not exposing one’s own troops – rather than measured consideration about the best way to achieve a military aim. This reasoning is not new: in the 1910s the British and French armies suffered heavy losses in their colonies, and aerial bombardment emerged as a means of ‘pacification’ to limit troop losses.

This calculation ignores a crucial fact: bombing campaigns claim more innocent lives than ground operations. Historian David E Omissi recounts the moral dilemma faced by British officer Lionel Charlton in Iraq before the second world war: his ‘disenchantment with air policing began when he travelled to Diwaniya, visited the local hospital, and saw victims of British bombers recovering from their injuries … Tormented by conflicting desires to repudiate the methods of air policing and to continue a successful air force career, Charlton was in the end overcome by his conscience and he asked to be relieved of his post’.

If the goal is to discourage support for an enemy group or regime – or even to incite people to rise up against it – the ‘risk transfer’ to civilians comes with a strategic as well as an ethical problem. Observing reactions to Italian-German raids on Barcelona in March 1938, psychologist Eric Benjamin Strauss noticed that ‘the bombed become automatically united in a common hatred and terror of the invisible and intangible enemy from the skies’. This proved to be true of German attacks during the Battle of Britain in 1940.

But it didn’t stop the UK and the US from waging war on Germany from the air. Their campaign would prove to be over ten times harsher than the Germans’ in terms of the tonnage of bombs dropped and the number of civilian (…)

Full article: 1 116 words.

Mathias Delori

Matthias Delori is a researcher at the Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po, Paris, and the author of La Guerre contre le terrorisme comme rivalité mimétique (The war on terror as mimetic rivalry), Peter Lang, Paris, 2025.

(1) David E Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: the Royal Air Force 1919-1939, Saint Martin’s, New York, 1990.

(2) Martin Shaw, The New Western Way of War: Risk-Transfer War and its Crisis in Iraq, Polity, Cambridge, 2005.

(3) Eric Benjamin Strauss, ‘The Psychological Effects of Bombing’, RUSI Journal, vol 84, 1939.

(4) Ian Burney, ‘War on Fear: Solly Zuckerman and civilian nerve in the second world war’, History of the Human Sciences, vol 25, no 5, 2012.

(5) Gian P Gentile, How Effective is Strategic Bombing? Lessons Learned from World War II to Kosovo, New York University Press, 2001.

(6) Overall Economic Effects Division, The United States Strategic Bombing Survey: The Effects of Strategic Bombing on the German War Economy, Washington DC, 1945.

(7) Thomas Hippler, Governing from the Skies: a Global History of Aerial Bombing, Verso, London, 2017.

(8) Martin Shaw op cit.