For millennia, war was a matter of land and, later, also of sea. Cities were conquered, territories occupied, defensive lines broken. In the collective imagination, conquest was associated with the hobnailed caligae of legionaries trampling wounded enemies, and later with “boots on the ground”; the boots of raiders.
Victory had a precise geography: advance, occupy, resist. War was represented by moving forward or defending a specific boundary line, the Trebbia during the Second Punic War, the Piave line or the Volga near Stalingrad. Then, slowly, something began to change. First as an intuition, then as a promise, finally as doctrine: war could be won from above.
That promise – air superiority not as an aid to the army but as a decisive tool – spans more than a century of military history. It is a story of technological innovation, recurring illusions, and ambiguous results. And it is a story that today, in the war between Israel, the United States, and Iran, becomes central again.
The Idea Before Technology
Even before airplanes existed, someone had already imagined their potential. In 1794, during the European Revolutionary Wars, the first hot air balloon of the French Aerostatic Corps was used to observe the battlefield. They did not fight, but looked from above and signaled enemy positions with flags and conventional arm signals: an advantage no army had ever had.
During the nineteenth century, while technology lagged, imagination ran fast. Writers and thinkers envisioned a world where flight would erase borders, make defenses obsolete, and transform war. H. G. Wells published in 1908 “The War in the Air,” where he predicted the uselessness of fortifications and coastal defenses, made superfluous by battles decided far above the boots struggling in the mud. It was a utopian vision, but it already contained a fundamental insight: control of the air would change the nature of conflict.
When flight finally became reality, at the beginning of the twentieth century, that insight turned into doctrine. Airplanes were born as reconnaissance tools, but it didn’t take long for someone to ask: why limit ourselves to observing, when we can strike?
World War I: The Laboratory
It was World War I that turned this intuition into practice. At first, pilots carried pistols; then came machine guns, and finally bombs. Initially, they were simple grenades piled next to the pedals, which were thrown down by hand. Then, with technological progress, planes began to be built around bomb bays, then pylons and racks on the wings designed to hold missiles ready to launch. Cities began to be hit from above, first sporadically, then with increasing regularity.
German bombings of British cities during the Great War, initially carried out with airships, represented one of the first attempts to strike not only the army but society as a whole. The idea was simple and powerful: terrorize the civilian population to break their will and force the government to surrender.
It didn’t work. The battle was decided in the trenches, in the mud and blood of positional warfare. Yet, instead of filing that experience as a failure, many theorists drew the opposite conclusion: the strategy was right, the technology still insufficient.
Between the Wars: The Birth of an Illusion
In the period between the two world wars, the theory of strategic bombing reached its maturity. The Italian Giulio Douhet argued that an independent air force capable of striking enemy cities and infrastructure could win a war in a few weeks. The American Billy Mitchell, before the U.S. General Staff, demonstrated – by bombing old battleships – that even sea dominance was vulnerable from above.
The message was clear: the war of the future would no longer be fought on the ground, but in the skies.
In the eyes of the military, this vision also had a “noble” moral dimension: better to bomb, intensely but for a few days, thousands of innocent civilians than to drag millions of men into years of slaughter in the trenches. It was, in intention, a shortcut to a shorter and less bloody war. In reality, it would prove to be something very different.
World War II: The Test of Facts
World War II was the ultimate proving ground. All the major powers employed large-scale strategic bombing, with different but often overlapping objectives: destroy industry, paralyze logistics, break the morale of the population.
Nazi Germany tried to break the United Kingdom with the Blitz: an intensive bombing campaign on British cities. Coventry was razed to the ground, London was hit for months. Thousands of civilians died. But the result was the opposite of what was hoped: instead of collapsing, British society united.
The Allies also adopted the same strategy against Germany. Dresden and other cities were completely razed. The indiscriminate American bombings of the civilian population caused hundreds of thousands of victims in Germany and Japan, but also over forty thousand deaths in Italy alone. Civilian deaths not attributable to unpleasant but inevitable “collateral damage,” but targeted and murdered with premeditation to create terror and popular uprisings.
Yet, paradoxically, German industrial production peaked precisely in 1944, in the midst of the bombings on their cities.
There were important tactical results: bombings on oil plants limited the operational capacity of the German army. But the war was not won from the air. It was won with the landings in Sicily and Normandy; but above all with the unstoppable advance of the Red Army to the heart of Berlin.
In the Pacific, the destruction of Japanese cities with incendiary bombings – culminating in the devastation of Tokyo – and the use of the nuclear weapon led to Japan’s surrender. But even here, the role of bombing in breaking the will of the population remains controversial. The decision to surrender was made, not by a popular uprising, but by the political-military elite when it understood that this was a war the Empire of the Rising Sun could no longer win.
From the Cold War to Vietnam: Power, but Not Decisive
When, after 1945, World War II ended to immediately make way for the Cold War, strategic bombing became synonymous with nuclear deterrence. The capability to destroy the enemy from the air existed, but its actual use became unthinkable.
When the United States returned to massively employ air power in Vietnam, the same expectations re-emerged: to break the enemy without massive ground commitment. The bombing campaigns were among the most intense in history.
Once again, it was not enough. North Vietnam absorbed the blows, tightened ranks, adapted its strategy, and continued fighting. The bombing inflicted enormous damage but did not produce a decisive victory; rather, a resounding defeat for U.S. troops, who were forced to hastily abandon Vietnam on April 30, 1975.
The Technological Revolution and the Promise of Precision
In the 1980s and 1990s, a new wave of innovation seemed to reopen the discussion. Precision-guided weapons, advanced intelligence systems, Western technological superiority promised something different: to strike with surgical accuracy the vital nodes of the enemy system.
The Gulf War of 1991 was the first major test. The air campaign destroyed much of Iraq’s military capabilities. Yet, it was not enough to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime. Ground forces intervention was necessary to achieve victory.
The case of Kosovo in 1999 is often cited as the only example of success of “pure” air war. After weeks of NATO bombings – and over 500 civilian casualties caused by Operation Allied Force alone – Serbia agreed to withdraw. But even here, the picture is less straightforward than it seems: many analysts believe the withdrawal was mainly motivated by the fact that the Serbs had … completed the ethnic cleansing of their opponents. Also in this case, the role of diplomatic pressure, the threat of ground intervention, and internal dynamics remains a subject of debate.
Israel and the Return to War from Above
Israel, for much of its history, has used aviation as support for ground operations. The wars of 1967 and 1973 were won thanks to a combination of air superiority and ground maneuver.
Starting in the 1990s, however, Israel progressively shifted the focus toward the use of air power and intelligence. The goal was to avoid losses and political costs of prolonged ground operations.
The result has been a series of air campaigns against non-state actors, often effective in the short term but unable to produce definitive solutions. The war has become cyclical: strike, contain, withdraw, only to have to start again.
Iran: The Contemporary Test
Today, in the war against Iran, this evolution reaches its most advanced point. The United States and Israel – between one useless pretense of negotiation and another – are trying to achieve extremely ambitious goals – degrade the nuclear program, neutralize military capabilities, weaken the regime – almost exclusively through air power.
Technology has made giant strides. Precision capabilities are unprecedented. Intelligence systems, assisted by highly sophisticated artificial intelligence models, allow identifying and striking targets with a level of accuracy unthinkable in the past. In purely military terms, the results are tangible: destroyed infrastructure, struck command chains, reduced operational capabilities.
And all this surgically. Just consider the attack on the morning of March 8 at the Ramada Hotel in the Raouche district of Beirut. Israel struck from above a corner suite on the fourth floor of the hotel to eliminate a group of senior commanders of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC). The suite was pulverized, but the rest of the twelve-story building remained standing with all the lights still on.
But the fundamental question remains the same as a century ago: is it enough?
History suggests caution. Bombing can destroy, but it can hardly build. It can weaken a system, but rarely replace it. It can strike a regime, but does not guarantee it will collapse.
The hypothesis of an air-induced regime change – evoked more or less explicitly – appears, in light of historical precedents, uncertain. Even in the most extreme cases, affected societies tend to react by uniting, not disintegrating.
At the same time, it is possible that military pressure produces indirect effects: forcing the opponent to negotiate, limiting their capabilities, altering their strategic behavior. In this sense, bombing can be an effective tool – but, I fear, it is rarely decisive on its own.
A History That Repeats Itself
There is a common thread running through this whole story: every generation believes that new technology will finally make possible what was not before. Every time, reality proves more complex.
War from above has not replaced war fought with boots on the ground. It has transformed it, integrated it, made it more destructive and sophisticated. But it has not changed its fundamental nature: politics, will, and control of territory remain central elements.
In the Iranian case, the future of war – assuming ongoing negotiations do not lead to miraculous and unlikely results – will depend precisely on this balance. If air pressure is sufficient to achieve lasting strategic results, then we can speak of a historic turning point. If instead it proves, once again, a powerful but incomplete tool, then history will have followed its usual course.
And the skies, once again, will have promised more than they could deliver.
