So then, where am I going with all of this great war talk? We have this horrible story about a whole global order getting sucked into a total war, and now we have these worrisome conditions building up once again, and then there is the sudden thunderclap of this Russia-Ukraine conflict. Oh boy, it is all happening again. Well, maybe or maybe not, but also, not so fast. We still have some more details to fill in: much has changed in the last century, and that changes the shape of what happens next.
The shock and horror coming out of the meat grinder theaters of WWI, and the accompanying changes in perceptions of and relation to violent conflict in general, would have a profound effect on future war planning and deliberation in the industrialized nations. That "never again" resolution that follows collective catastrophe and tragedy would soon find expression in various rapidly developing technologies and their associated combat doctrines. These developments were numerous, but for our purposes we'll focus on aerial capabilities and aerial bombardment in particular, which contain in their evolution hidden traces of the changing relations of violence in the modern world.
We did see early forms of aerial combat develop in WWI: the smaller biplanes would be used for strafing runs, dogfighting, and reconnaissance, and these aircraft would drop smaller explosives like grenades on ground targets as well. Balloons and zeppelins were also developed to drop bombs and cut through the fog of war through surveillance. Strategic bombers and the first aircraft carriers were even developed at this point. But the form would not yet become dominant and would serve as ancillary force to the massive trench-based ground war, at least on the Western front.
The aerial technologies would continue to develop rapidly, advancing the potential of new forms of warfare, but there was something else also driving the ascendance of that tendency, something a little less tangible. There was a tantalizing promise held in advanced aircraft: within that technological suite, there was the possibility of both the increasing distance from violent combat itself, and a theoretically more precise method of striking at the enemy.
With the WWI meat grinder still fresh in their minds, a whole generation of war planners and generals would be looking at strategic bombing as a way to cauterize the open wounds of total war and shorten the conflict through shock and awe, therefore cutting down on the casualties of war. This unfortunately didn't work out in practice, but for some time it served as an irresistible theoretical carrot to dangle.
There was also another prong to that argument. Anyone paying attention to contemporary US foreign policy could see that the tortured arguments for the precision strike have been alive and well for over half a century at the least, despite those strikes being less precise than hoped in practice. The idea then - as it is now - was that with superior aircraft, reconnaissance, and targeting technologies, military leaders could suss out crucial military targets and wipe them out surgically, harming the capabilities of the enemy afar with minimal military or civilian casualties.
With the fires of WWII breaking out, it was time to test out these doctrines. The coming of WWII certainly did not see the disappearance of ground combat; its nature only changed with the rapid advancement of a number of technologies for engagement on land, sea, and air. Indeed, modern war would grow more complicated in many ways, challenging the theoretical underpinnings of aerial bombardment in new ways.
For one thing, precision strikes certainly did happen. Pure military targets were being taken out all of the time, but with that new threat came a host of new countermeasures in the form of of new offensive aircraft and ground to air defensive measures, among many. Troops still needed to be sent in to take out air defenses, sea power needed to be employed, all with their own unique abilities and vulnerabilities. One way around some of these new dangers was to conduct night raids, but one of the problems with that method is apparent: how do you know what you're even bombing?
Needless to say, with the rapidly advancing arms race, and the full expression of industrial power, WWII would become just as prolonged as the first, and as time dragged on, the desperation grew once again. Arguments for precision strikes would shift in emphasis over to arguments for truncated a tortured, destructive, and drawn out conflict with full city bombing of civilians to strike terror and subdue the enemy. If you've been developed those tools, after all, that is where the logic went. This doctrine would find its full and absurd expression in the nuclear bomb.
Again, we had a conflict completely spiral out of control, smashing through various theoretical attempts to influence the course of the conflict, until the great powers ended by mutually beating the stuffing out of each other, culminating with the dropping of the bomb, which would set the tone of the decades of cold war to come. After the dust finally settled, WWII claimed the dubious honor as the deadliest conflict in human history.
Of course the US was willing to drop a nuke or two as long as it was the only one possessing the bomb. It wasn't until nuclear proliferation, the development of nuclear weapons by multiple powers, and the emergence of MAD that the hot war-suppressing aspects of the bomb would come into play, a lingering threat which still hangs over us today. In a century, so much has changed so rapidly.
There is still plenty of ground to cover, but we're getting there.
