The Coercive Air Strategies in Bombing to Win

Airpower Studies
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“‘Bombing to Win’ at 25” (2021) by Heather Venable and Sebastian Lukasik
The Air Force sometimes has a bad reputation due to its preference for independent, strategic bombardment operations. Before joining the faculty of Air Command and Staff College as historians of the Marine Corps and the Army, respectively, we both believed it deserved this reputation. The curriculum, we assumed, would be fixated on its preferred mode of operations. We anticipated that we would need to add discussions of close air support to the classroom.
In fact, the opposite was true. Colleagues and students at the college were not, as we assumed, married to the doctrine of strategic bombardment, and were instead exceptionally well-versed in other types of air operations. And this should not be entirely surprising. The last chief of staff of the Air Force, Gen. David Goldfein, in particular worked hard to insist the Air Force realizes it must act jointly, noting that he himself had “never been in a fight in my entire career and done it with airpower only.” In fact, in the era of the “Global War on Terror,” Air Force culture has undergone a fundamental shift away from strategic attack and toward supporting surface forces during the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. The joint mission has become so important that it has assumed a central place in many an airman’s sense of identity and purpose.
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Nevertheless, this misconception of inflexible Air Force thinking persists. Indeed, numerous scholars still argue that these pathologies remain the defining element  of the Air Force’s doctrinal DNA. This is especially the case with what is, arguably, the most explicit and prominent articulation of this view, the primary book on airpower often assigned to graduate students. First published in 1996, Robert Pape’s Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War drew on approximately 80 years of airpower history to argue for an optimal way of harnessing kinetic airpower to broader strategic outcomes. The quarter of a century that has elapsed since its publication has witnessed the appearance of important scholarly interpretations of the airpower case studies that underpin Pape’s arguments. In addition, the same period has furnished new empirical evidence of airpower’s capabilities and limitations. Importantly, the book’s most significant legacy may be that it advanced a problematic narrative about strategic attack forceful enough to potentially mislead policymakers and some scholars alike about the full range of what airpower can and should do in a peer conflict.
Air Force strategists should ensure adequate consideration of the potential of strategic attack, in addition to more familiar battlefield support, in waging joint operations. This emphasis is in keeping with the Defense Department’s increasing focus on great-power competition as the overarching fram...