Does punishment work? Selection effects in air power theory

Abstract

Air power theory initially proposed that punitive attacks against civilian targets could force enemies to surrender. The current literature, however, has largely concluded that conventional bombing is ineffective as punishment. I argue that this is the result of a selection effect. By focusing only on high-profile bombing campaigns, the theory has drawn its conclusions from cases where punishment is likely to fail. This contrasts with deterrence theory, which has analyzed diplomacy in the shadow of nuclear punishment. Air power theory should follow this model by examining how the threat of bombing has influenced diplomacy and broader patterns of international politics.

Acknowledgments

The views expressed in this academic research paper are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the US government, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Army War College.

Notes

1 Giulio Douhet, Command of the Air (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 2019), 7–9. Originally published 1921.

2 Tami Davis Biddle, Air Power and Warfare: A Century of Theory and History (Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College Press, 2019), 6.

3 Using punishment in warfare is often referred to as coercion. Mueller provides a useful definition of “coercive air power” as “the use of air power to make an adversary choose to act in a way that it otherwise would (or might) not act.” Attacks “are not mounted (or threatened) simply to destroy their targets, but… to cause a policy change in the target state.” Mueller’s definition includes “denial” attacks that change behavior by weakening the opponent’s military power, whereas punishment is usually viewed as involving attacks that destroy valued assets or inflict human suffering. See Karl Mueller, “Strategies of Coercion: Denial, Punishment, and the Future of Air Power,” Security Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3 (1998), 184. For summaries of coercion, see Tami Davis Biddle, “Coercion Theory,” Texas National Security Review, Vol. 3, No. 2, (Spring 2020) and Daniel Byman & Matthew Waxman, The Dynamics of Coercion (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

4 Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 318. For other examples, see Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Stephen Budiansky, Air Power (New York: Viking, 2004); Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).

5 There are, of course, exceptions. For examples, see Daniel L. Byman & Matthew C. Waxman, “Kosovo and the Great Air Power Debate,” International Security, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Spring 2000); Mueller, “Strategies of Coercion.”

6 James Fearon, “Selection Effects and Deterrence,” International Interactions, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2002).

7 The “threat” of bombing here can refer to implicit or explicit threats.

8 Ron Gurantz, “America: Air Power Interventionism in a New Era,” in Amit Gupta, ed., Air Forces: The Next Generation (Havant, UK: Howgate Publishers, 2020).

9 Tami Davis Biddle, Air Power and Warfare, 9-10; Phillip S. Meilinger, Airmen and Air Theory (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 2001), 99–102. These tasks include reconnaissance, communication, air superiority, close air support, interdiction, and strategic bombing.

10 Tami Davis Biddle, Air Power and Warfare, 13–20; Meilinger, Airmen and Air Theory, 103–113.

11 On imprecision in their predictions, see Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power, 51–56.

12 Philip Meilinger, “Trenchard and ‘Morale Bombing’: The Evolution of Royal Air Force Doctrine Before World War II,” The Journal of Military History, Vol. 60, No. 2 (April 1996), 250.

13 Tami Davis Biddle, Air Power and Warfare, 28, 30, 39.

14 For an instructive argument about what the bombing did and did not accomplish, see Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).

15 For a review of theories and cases from the pre-war period to today, see Tami Davis Biddle, Air Power and Warfare, 33–53; Peter R. Faber, “Paradigm Lost: Airpower Theory and its Historical Struggles,” in John Andreas Olson, ed., Airpower Reborn (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015), 32–42; Meilinger, Airmen and Air Theory, 129–147.

16 For example, see Eliot A. Cohen, “The Mystique of U.S. Air Power,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 1 (Jan/Feb 1994). This is a select list of post-war air power ideas. In addition to sources in fn. 15, also see Harman Ullman and James Wade, Jr., Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington, DC: National Defense University, 1996) and Stephen D. Biddle, “Allies, Airpower and Modern Warfare: The Afghan Model in Afghanistan and Iraq,” International Security, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Winter 2005/2006).

17 For influential examples, see Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare; Mark Clodfelter, The Limits of Air Power (New York: The Free Press, 1989); Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgement (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973).

18 For examples, see Robert J. Art and Patrick M. Cronin, eds., The United States and Coercive Diplomacy (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2003); Phil Haun, Coercion, Survival, and War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); and Daniel R. Lake, “The Limits of Coercive Air Power,” International Security, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Summer 2009).

19 Melissa Dell and Pablo Querubin, “Nation Building Through Foreign Intervention: Evidence from Discontinuities in Military Strategies,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 133, No. 2 (2018); Matthew A. Kocher, Thomas B. Pepinsky and Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Aerial Bombing and Counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 55, No. 2 (April 2011); Dan Reiter and Michael Horowitz, “When Does Aerial Bombing Work? Quantitative Empirical Tests, 1917–1999,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 45, No. 2 (April 2001).

20 See fn. 5, fn. 18.

21 For example, see Daniel L. Byman & Matthew C. Waxman, “Kosovo and the Great Air Power Debate”; Lake, “The Limits of Coercive Air Power”; Phillip S. Meilinger, Airwar: Theory and Practice (New York: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003), 199.

22 John Keegan, "Please, Mr. Blair, never take such a risk again," London Daily Telegraph, June 6, 1999.

23 See fn. 15.

24 Robert Pape, “Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work,” International Security, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Fall 1997).

25 Max Abrahms, “Why Terrorism Does Not Work,” International Security, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Fall 2006).

26 Matthew S. Gottfried and Robert F. Trager, “A Preference for War: How Fairness and Rhetoric Influence Leadership Incentives in Crises,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 2 (June 2016).

27 Brodie set the tone for the entire field with his early quote about nuclear deterrence that “[t]hus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.” Bernard Brodie, ed., The Absolute Weapon (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946), 76.

28 Schelling argues that nuclear weapons inflict the same amount of damage but in less time. One could also argue that conventional weapons can inflict the same amount of damage in the same amount of time but only with enough money, while nuclear weapons can do it at lower cost. See Schelling, Arms and Influence, 19.

29 Pape, Bombing to Win, 23–24, 36.

30 For a discussion of these visions, see Sherry, The Rise of American Airpower.

31 See Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson, eds., Strategic Nuclear Targeting (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986) and Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 2^nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989) for discussions on fighting nuclear war. See Marc Trachtenberg, “The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis,” International Security, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Summer 1985) on Kennedy risking nuclear war for coercive purposes. See McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 530, and John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1997), 251, on Mao expressing a willingness to fight nuclear war; and Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 490, on Castro advocating for it during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

32 Warden cites Athens’ acceptance of Sparta’s terms in the Peloponnesian War following a potential grain cutoff, the surrender of walled cities under siege, and Germany’s acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles while under the post-war blockade. O’Sullivan cites South Africa in the 1990s, Indonesia in 1999 and Serbia in 2000 as cases where sanctions contributed to a successful diplomatic outcome. The recent 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal is also an apparent success for sanctions. See John A. Warden III, “Success in Modern War: A Response to Robert Pape’s Bombing to Win,” Security Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1997), 173; Meghan L. O’Sullivan, “Iran and the Great Sanctions Debate,” The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 4 (October 2010).

33 For elaboration, see David Baldwin, “The Sanctions Debate and the Logic of Choice,” International Security, Vol. 24, No. 3, (Winter 1999/2000) on sanctions; Virginia Page Fortna, “Do Terrorists Win? Rebels’ Use of Terrorism and Civil War Outcomes,” International Organization, Vol. 69, No. 3 (June 2015), 520–521 on terrorism.

34 Pape acknowledges that both operate by “inflict[ing] enough pain on enemy civilians to overwhelm their territorial interests in the dispute.” His one argument where a difference in scale results in a discontinuity in effect is that nuclear weapons can destroy entire nations whereas conventional bombing cannot. Of course, this is an important part of what distinguishes nuclear weapons from conventional ones. Pape, Bombing to Win, 21, 36.

35 Pape, Bombing to Win, 20. Mueller notes that this is a critical scope condition for Pape’s theory. See Mueller, “Strategies of Coercion,” 192. Pape dismisses this qualifier as unimportant, since coercers will not bother to use air power when the stakes are not high. Mueller notes that the United States usually uses coercive air power in cases where the stakes are not vital. Byman and Waxman argue that the ability to fine tune air power to specific circumstances makes it more usable and that nuclear weapons are too destructive to be credible as coercive tools. See Mueller, “Strategies of Coercion,” 193; Byman and Waxman, Dynamics of Coercion, 102.

36 See Meilinger’s Airmen and Air Theory for an overview of personalities and theories.

37 A similar definition is in Fearon, “Selection Effects and Deterrence.”

38 Daniel Drezner, “The Hidden Hand of Economic Coercion,” International Organization, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Summer 2003).

39 Haun, Coercion, Survival, and War.

40 Pape, “Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work,” 91.

41 Bruce Hoffman, British Air Power in Peripheral Conflict, 1919–1976 (Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation, 1989), 17–18, 25–26, 33–35.

42 Richard Overy, The Bombing War (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 1–9, 525–528. Also see Ernest May, Lessons of the Past (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1976), 134.

43 Byman and Waxman, The Dynamics of Coercion, 97.

44 Byman and Waxman, The Dynamics of Coercion, 92–94

45 Pape, Bombing to Win, 48–54.

46 See Mueller, “Strategies of Coercion,” and Barry Watts, “Ignoring Reality: Problems of Theory and Evidence in Security Studies,” Security Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1997).

47 Francis Gavin, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Nuclear Weapons,” H-Diplo/ISSF Forum, No. 2 (2014), accessed at https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Forum-2.pdf.

48 Pape, Bombing to Win, 50.

49 Pape explicitly excludes even cases where air power was employed if the stakes were not high enough. The stakes of a case are also part of a strategic decision that may be influenced by factors that also determine success or failure. Pape, Bombing to Win, 50.

50 For this argument, see Derek Chollet, “Obama’s Red Line, Revisited,” Politico Magazine, July 19, 2016, accessed from https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/obama-syria-foreign-policy-red-line-revisited-214059/.

51 Jon B. Alterman, “Coercive Diplomacy Against Iraq, 1990–1998,” in Robert J. Art and Patrick M. Cronin, eds., The United States and Coercive Diplomacy (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2003).

52 George Quester, Deterrence Before Hiroshima (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966), 98; Wesley K. Wark, The Ultimate Enemy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 67–69.

53 Many of thinkers of the time considered this implication. Some believed that air power would make wars unthinkable and had these beliefs shattered by World War II. That experience certainly undermined the belief in air power’s coercive effectiveness. A clear parallel exists with nuclear weapons, though these beliefs seem to have been confirmed so far. See Sherry, The Rise of American Airpower, for discussion.

54 Schelling, Arms and Influence, 2–3.

55 Marc Trachtenberg, “A ‘Wasting Asset’: American Strategy and the Shifting Nuclear Balance, 1949–1954,” International Security, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Winter 1988/89).

56 Fearon, “Selection Effects and Deterrence.”

57 Gurantz, “America: Air Power Interventionism in a New Era.”

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Ron Gurantz

Dr. Ron Gurantz ([email protected]) is Research Professor of National Security Affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College.