CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

It is often said that generals are ready to fight the last war. In other words, after every war, the military evaluates the results in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes, but the next war always presents different conditions and problems, making many of these lessons less relevant. Germany and Japan were not North Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh and Saddam Hussein were not Hitler and Stalin. Wars fought with tanks, battleships, airplanes and missiles had limited relevance when fighting against IEDs and drones.

Nevertheless, there is one lesson that modern wars should teach both the civilian leaders who initiate them and the military who bear the brunt of the fighting. No matter how powerful a nation’s military, it cannot bomb an enemy into submission. As J.D Vance told Israel (without a hint of irony), “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every national security problem.”

The ineffectiveness of such bombing, despite its destructive power, has been known for many years. At the end of WW II, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith led a large staff in a government report on the effectiveness of the Allies strategic bombing. In 2004, he summarized his conclusions from nearly 60 years before. Attacks on German arms factories “were sadly useless” as “fighter aircraft production actually increased in early 1944 after major bombing” due to factory and machinery relocation and determined management. The resulting death and destruction in German cities “had no appreciable........

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