Air Power’s climb to the position of America’s first line of defense has not simplified our quest for security, hut rather has made the search more complicated and more costly. And, paradoxically, as the United States has chosen to rely more and more on Air Power to buttress its position in the world, the conduct of American foreign policy has grown more difficult. The world is growing acutely aware of the potency of the air weapon, but do we all grasp Air Power’s diplomatic limitations? If American Air Power is to serve us best in today’s world, the political implications of the various plans for its employment must be spelled out.
The structure of American security for years to come is being established now. Real security begins with the realization that overall military and political strategy are inseparable. It is a sign of America’s growing maturity that this truth, won in two costly wars, is gaining ground in Washington. This does not imply that America’s soldiers, sailors, and airmen make policy, but simply that military strategy must always support the world-wide political objectives which the President and Congress seek.
The fundamental aim of American policy is to preserve our way of life—our right as a people to continue to develop in freedom. The constant search for this goal requires political wisdom and, as long as force plays so heavy a role in the world, military power. Political wisdom dictates that we try to preserve our freedom in the company of like- minded peoples in other lands, for freedom cannot survive if driven back to the borders of the U.S.A. Most Americans likewise see the futility of attempting to gain security by attempting to impose the American way of life on diverse peoples by military force. In today’s world all of us realize that our freedom may have to be protected by military force from those who would destroy it. Consequently, American military power has become the bulwark of free peoples everywhere.
Aggression against freedom can be stopped or deterred only if we have the means to attack as well as to defend. In the warfare of today and tomorrow, military protection cannot be passive. For this reason the ability to launch a retaliatory air offensive has become the cornerstone of America’s military policy. Beyond this role of retaliation our central military problem is to merge the advantages of the air weapon with all other means of applying power.
The New Look in Air Power
The political meaning of proposals for the use of Air Power as an instrument of policy needs careful study, especially plans for the invariable use of the atomic bomb.
The current thinking of airmen is that Air Power and Atomic Power have become almost synonymous. As Britain’s Air Marshal Tedder has expressed it, “Atomic power has made Air Power all important.” Members of our own Air Force hold that the restriction of Air Power to non-atomic weapons would reduce the air weapon’s capacity to World War II level. Not satisfied with this level, many Air Power proponents insist that the decision to wage any future war is the decision to wage atomic war. Some airmen, believing that atomic war is inevitable, exhort us to use our present advantage in atomic weapons to guarantee our place in the world tomorrow. Taken at its face, this proposal suggests a simple physical solution for the immensely complicated crisis now convulsing the world.
Those who are unwilling to restrict the use of atomic Air Power believe that a nation’s freedom depends solely on the force it commands. The greater the power, the greater the freedom and the more imperative is the need to use power while we seem to hold the whip hand. This concept, nursed by the ever-present danger that confronts our people, has its attractions. Not so long ago a similar concept dominated once powerful nations now destroyed by war. History teaches that exclusive reliance on power has invariably resulted in the downfall of the state addicted to its use.
The public has been flooded with articles advocating the liberal use of atomic Air Power. Some writers suggest that the President’s constitutional power be broadened to permit him to order a surprise atomic attack on a potential aggressor. Others assert that a super air blitz will force an unqualified decision within a month—in our favor, of course. And to make a reverse Pearl Harbor palatable to the American people, atomic air power proponents argue that a superblitz will not only give us the greatest chance of success but will also entail only a small drain on our national resources.
Is this true, or are we being misled? The arrival of the atom bomb has been a mixed blessing to Air Power. The atom bomb has made more acceptable the claim, first advanced by Douhet, the Italian General, that Air Power by itself could bring victory in war. But it has inspired Air Power enthusiasts to direct most of their attention to the' material base of international relations. It has forced them to accept, almost without qualification, the belief that bald power alone ensures national survival.
The airman’s concept of atomic air war accepts without reservation the assumption that future wars will inevitably be fought bypassing the fighting man and concentrating a shower of death on the civilian population.
There are sound practical objections to the total atomic war concept which obsesses so many both in and out of uniform. First, the decision to wage war, fortunately, does not rest with the military. It is unlikely that our civil leadership will ignore that old fashioned American inhibition against initiating war. But since our monopoly on atomic power has expired, the alleged advantages of atomic Air Power may disappear.
Suppose a war is forced upon us by some aggressive state after it has mastered the production of atomic bombs? No matter which side drops the first atomic bomb, retaliation by the other is certain to ensue, Incalculable destruction will be inflicted on the cities of both sides without any guarantee that a decision will be reached or that the decision will have any meaning to the dazed survivors.
The truth that atomic warfare will likely involve two broken nations wrecked by two contending atomic air forces is a truth generally slighted in the predictions of future atomic war offered the American people.
Allied with the optimistic belief that our side will come through the atomic war unscratched is the opportune attitude that the only military obligation we are under to our present or potential allies is to help deliver them from occupying armies. This deliverance is to be accomplished after our atomic air blitz has reduced the aggressor’s homeland to rubble.
Since our post World War II demobilization, American foreign policy has been based, primarily, on our possession of the A-Bomb. More dangerously, continued advocacy of atomic warfare may spawn a similar urge in other nations and thus bring closer the time when the atomic weapon will have no value at all at the world’s council tables. The current doctrine for employment of atomic Air Power cuts the heart out of America’s professed goal to eliminate atomic warfare. Can we, in all honesty, be the first to employ a weapon whose complete abolition we have so strenuously advocated? Such an action will corrode America’s moral position—a force as powerful in the struggle going on throughout the world as the bomb itself.
While accepting wholeheartedly the principle of retaliation against an atomic attack, no valid prediction can be made as to just how a future war might begin. To insist, as many do, that a potential aggressor is bound to begin his war by dropping atomic bombs on our large cities is to make fact out of possibility. The purpose behind the effort of other nations to produce atomic bombs could well be the neutralization of America’s use of them.
A war in which both sides employ atomic Air Power would be politically sterile. As the chance of either side coming out of an atomic war with a victory worthy of the name is remote, our emphasis should be centered on its avoidance rather than its promotion. But continuous, open advocacy of indiscriminate atomic air war other than as a means of retaliation can only intensify the friction between East and West and accelerate the march toward disaster. It is well to understand that American Air Power does not automatically spread oil on the troubled political waters of the world. The manner in which we intend to employ Air Power is as important as its possession, and any plans to employ Air Power are politically faulty if they ignore the truth that peace is the surest defense of all against atomic destruction. Military policy is bankrupt unless it is dominated by the desire to prevent war.
The Aftermath of War
The political implications involved in any announced plans to employ Air Power are equally evident with regard to the aftermath of a pure air war. The ultimate goal of independent air warfare is to conquer the enemy by the destruction of bis resources, production plants, transportation system, and, incidentally, a sizable portion of his civilian population. Most students of Air Power agree that the effective employment of Air Power will result in, if not require, mass destruction. This was true when Air Power was limited to old fashioned glub bombs and block-busters. It became even more true after Hiroshima. For it is difficult to see how atomic weapons can ever be used without creating widespread destruction. It should be noted, however, that not all airmen believe in the efficacy of mass destruction. General Arnold, for one, freely admitted that the indiscriminate flattening of an enemy’s industry is simply a waste of effort. Yet, many influential airmen today are falling in line with Douhet’s original assertion that the effectiveness of air war depends on the creation of maximum destruction in the shortest possible time.
Before embarking full scale on such a war we must ask ourselves this political question: In what sort of condition do we want the enemy country to be after victory? Do we want total chaos, half chaos, or a country able to exist? In adopting any military strategy we must consider the possible effect its adoption will have on the world once the war is over.
There are many ways to fight a war. Some consider the 1940 German campaign against France as a model of strategy. The German victory, won without the use of independent, destructive Air Power, left a France capable of supporting German political objectives. Contrast this campaign to the Allied campaign in the West in 1944-45. After the American break-through at St. Lo and the sweep across France, the victory had already been won in a strategic sense. Subsequent operations, despite the Battle of the Bulge, were essentially “mop up” operations. Yet the full fury of the Allied air war against Germany did not begin until after July 1, 1944. From this date until VE Day more than 80 per cent of the total Allied bomb load was dropped on the collapsing structure of Hitler’s Third Reich. In World War II the destruction caused primarily by Air Power, throughout Europe, almost stopped the clock of European civilization. It will take generations for Europe to recover from these blows—even with vast American aid.
Despite the ferocity of our air attacks on Germany, they did not succeed in critically undermining the enemy’s morale. Once members of every family are killed (an almost inevitable consequence of mass air war), the desire for life is often subordinated to the desire for personal revenge. The air war against Germany points up the fact that mass air attacks on a nation’s industrial heart tend to identify everyone in the nation with the tragedy of military defeat—and not just the leaders of the government and the armed forces. Consequently, the chance of permanently burying the hatchet between nations decreases in proportion to the force employed against the home front. Are we to continue breeding wars of ever growing intensity?
The second political lesson to be learned concerning the employment of Air Power, then, is that the unnecessary destruction of cities in hostile and allied lands may boomerang on the United States. The philosophy “Let them stew in their own juice,” popular among some who advocate the unrestricted use of atomic air power, may harm the United States, in the long run, as much as military defeat.
The Military Conduct of War
The open advocacy of unyielding atomic Air Power, as well as the unrestricted use of Air Power once a conflict begins, may be politically unwise. But equally serious political limitations of Air Power derive from the fact that an air force cannot do certain military jobs as well as an army or navy.
Air Power can be used either in an independent strategic role or in support of surface forces. Most, but not all, of Air Power’s political limitations come from its independent use, the role which has been sold to the public as the security “cure all.” Whether or not Air Power can by itself bring about the capitulation of a large continental power lies hidden in the crystal ball of tomorrow. However, a nation that banks heavily on the proposition that only Air Power is needed and neglects its conventional forces has blue but lacks red and white chips at the cold war poker table. Lacking the latter, our diplomats will inevitably be hamstrung, as they have been, in negotiating with a country possessing both an effective army and a large air force. By way of example, the costly air lift to Berlin, remarkable achievement that it has been, might have been avoided if the Western Powers had possessed sufficient ground forces to suggest that a land route to Berlin be kept open.
The lesson to heed is that offensive Air Power employed in mass lacks the subtlety to achieve long range political aims; while employed in driblets, it is ineffective. Yet not every operation in war requires maximum force, and certainly few diplomatic maneuvers in peace require the support of Air Power’s knockout drops.
The long history of the use of naval demonstrations, such as visits of the units of the U.S. Fleet to the Eastern Mediterranean during recent periods of international tension, reveals a tangible means for the support of policy which Air Power cannot duplicate. The presence of Fleet units suggests unprovocative power in being: Fleet units can remain in an unsettled area indefinitely. An equivalent show of Air Power would tend to be provocative and would entail a tremendous logistical expenditure even if adequate bases were available from which the demonstrating planes could operate.
Another significant political limitation of Air Power, and one often overlooked, is that by itself Air Power cannot gain or hold ground. Armies can seize ground, while Air Forces can only sterilize. Nor can Air Power by itself stem the land advance of a reckless aggressor who is willing to absorb losses. On the other hand, Air Power, concentrated against an aggressor transportation and communications system, can render powerful support to an army seeking to defend a line. The indispensable diplomatic support which a proper sea-air-ground team can give the nations of Western Europe in their struggle to stay free has been all but forgotten in our concentration on the independent use of Air Power.
The Gaining and Molding of Allies
The United States has abandoned isolationism as the mainspring of its foreign policy. We have realized that we alone cannot undertake the job of making the world safe for freedom. But almost at the moment of discarding political isolationism, American advocates of independent Air Power are unconsciously plugging for dead-end military isolationism. No genuine alliance, such as the one uniting the free world must be, can be founded solely on the grounds of military necessity. Yet some champions of “Air Power alone” desire allies only because they provide suitable air bases. They accept the need of allies today because of the limited ranges of our bombers. In the meantime, they exhort us to accelerate our efforts to build bombers that can cover the globe from air bases located within the United States. When these planes arrive, our own necessary allies can be discarded, and the splendid military isolation of the American Air Age can begin.
A barren military policy of this sort, if adopted, would violate the Truman Doctrine that the United States is bound “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation.” If the Truman Doctrine and our growing association with Western Europe are to have meaning, a fundamental of our military policy must be readiness to defend nations politically associated with the United States and not just to defend ground operationally essential to the Air Force.
Never in the past have we needed allies as much as today. We need them in the Americas and in the margins of Eurasia. In a political as well as a military sense, Western Europe is the key to the struggle now going on throughout the world. Any strategy which would voluntarily hand over this pivotal area to an aggressor for any length of time would be disastrous to the United States.
Apprehensive of totalitarian aggression France, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, and Luxemburg have formed a defensive alliance of great significance to the world. We are morally and strategically committed to keep these nations free. Since, among them, these countries control the bulk of the dependent colonial people of the world, their conquest would reverberate in every continent. Their combined population of over 100,000,000 is packed into an area about one- tenth as large as the United States. This simple comparison reveals why this area is the most vulnerable of any part in the world to atomic attack. It is not hard to visualize what an atomic war might mean to the Brussels Pact nations. Concerning Britain, a British military writer has said that had atomic bombs been dropped on England during the last war only one in four who lived near any British city would be alive today. The fact that these nations are so vulnerable lo atomic attack should throw a damper on plans to rely exclusively on atomic Air Power to protect them.
Our dilemma is that we are inescapably identified with the nations of western Europe who, by virtue of their geographical location, would absorb the most severe blows of a two-way atomic war. Our strategy must simultaneously block the territory of our allies from invasion, yet avoid invoking a type of air war which will bring about their physical destruction. How can any social order harmonious with our own rise from the ruins of a Europe devastated for the third time by war? Can the American civilization, essentially European, survive the destruction of its spiritual base?
As an answer to this dilemma, Air Power advocates argue in favor of a superblitz on the aggressor’s homeland which will eventually permit the liberation of any allies whose lands may be overrun. This reasoning ignores the telling damage that might be done to the fiber of Western Europe after only a few weeks of a new occupation. Atomic Air Power thinking also refuses to contemplate an aggressor’s indoctrinated army surviving intact in Western Europe after its home base had been reduced to rubble. Yet it is worth considering that the men who lead the Communist armies which spread over China from the North were driven out of their homes in South China almost a generation ago.
We cannot afford to subject our allies in Western Europe to either an atomic war or to a new invasion. They live in dread of being bombed or overrun. While powerless against the bomb, they are not fatalistic about invasion for they have come to believe that with our help the line in Western Europe can be held. They believe that a real military barrier can be created to any rapid advance from the East, provided of course the barrier is manned by a reasonable number of divisions and adequate tactical air support. Yet their hope depends ultimately on the type of military policy adopted by the United States.
We have a hard decision to make. If we invest all of our military expenditure in a striking air force and neglect surface power we, in effect, abandon our allies for a short or long period of time to the mercies of military conquest. Consequently, plans to meet aggression solely by Air Power may have the effect of terrorizing our potential allies and, perhaps, may drive them into the opposite camp.
Beyond our moral obligation to defend our allies, we have a similar obligation to support our occupation forces and safeguard the German and Japanese people they govern. The police role of our occupation troops is no longer primary. Instead, our occupation soldiers have become the men holding the front line of American security. Sound political strategy cannot abandon those frontiers nor permit these politically potent men on the ground to be driven out of Europe. We have a moral obligation to these conquered peoples not to hand them over to a new tyranny after we were instrumental in destroying the regimes that brought them into war against us.
No nation can ride two horses galloping in different directions. American security cannot be based simultaneously on the need for allies and on the atomic Air Power concept. Politically we have recognized that the defense of the free world begins outside of the United States. Our military program must fall in step with this recognition.
Setting the Sights
In a short span of ten years Air Power has become a powerhouse in international relations. Like every other explosive force, it must be handled with caution. Since Air Power is not and never can be a substitute for all forms of power, we must not let our dazzling air weapon blind us to its political limitations. Especially, must we be chary of regarding atomic power and Air Power as a single inseparable force. The political power of the atomic bomb as well as its psychological effect decreased the moment the first one exploded over Hiroshima.
These truths are clear:
We cannot risk a military policy which might drive potential allies into neutrality or hostility.
We cannot employ any and all kinds of weapons without regard to the post-war consequences of their employment.
We cannot permit the public utterances of American atomic Air Power advocates to provide a logical excuse for totalitarian aggression.
If we do any of these, our foreign and military policies will be at cross purposes.
Abroad, we have often overlooked the political implications of military power; at home, our military machine has been shaped frequently by political considerations. The size and make-up of our armed forces have been settled by political pressures rather than on cool bedrock appraisal of how this nation’s security can best be assured. An important element in the debates that have created our military establishment since VJ Day was the seductive promise that atomic Air Power can bring a cheap victory, with little loss of men and little risk to the user.
Although the theme that the atomic bomb will always favor America has been oversold, no one can ignore the possibility of atomic warfare.
The cold truth is that we must, if driven to it, be prepared today to wage an atomic war as well as wage war on pre-Hiroshima lines.
Finally our military plans must recognize that the only sound objective a free people should have in war is to win a victory that will expand, not contract, the map of freedom.