To Kill Nations

American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction

Edward Kaplan

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780801452482
• eBook ISBN: 9780801455490
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"Edward Kaplan's To Kill Nations is a fascinating work that packs a thermonuclear punch of ideas and arguments... The work is suitable for anyone from advanced undergraduates to experts in the field."
â• Strategy Bridge

In To Kill Nations, Edward Kaplan traces the evolution of American strategic airpower and preparation for nuclear war from this early air-atomic era to a later period (1950–1965) in which the Soviet Union's atomic capability, accelerated by thermonuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, made American strategic assets vulnerable and gradually undermined air-atomic strategy.

Kaplan throws into question both the inevitability and preferability of the strategic doctrine of MAD. He looks at the process by which cultural, institutional, and strategic ideas about MAD took shape and makes insightful use of the comparison between generals who thought they could win a nuclear war and the cold institutional logic of the suicide pact that was MAD. Kaplan also offers a reappraisal of Eisenhower's nuclear strategy and diplomacy to make a case for the marginal viability of air-atomic military power even in an era of ballistic missiles.

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ANTECEDENTS

The air-atomic concept that drove American air strategy for the two decades after World War II did not spring into being fully formed. Rather, like any complex body of thought, it emerged from several wellsprings. Although the genealogy of airpower ideas can be traced back to antiquity, this chapter’s purpose is more modest. It will show the links between airpower thinking before 1939, subsequent wartime experience, and the first postwar conceptions of atomic warfare. This entire span of ideas was within the living memory of the postwar Air Force’s generals and senior thinkers, and formed the context into which they placed the atomic bomb. While the first airpower theorists made fundamental contributions, the clear and abstract thought developed during the immediate prewar years, particularly in the Air Corps Tactical School, reinforced by personal experience in the skies over Europe and Japan, had the most profound and direct effect on these leaders. In turn, they integrated the new atomic weapon into an existing framework of theory and hard-won experience, creating the air-atomic idea.

The Roots of Airpower Theory

Compared to its land and naval cousins, airpower theory is in its infancy. Bookshelves are packed with studies of the development of airpower doctrine over time, but the influence of three primary thinkers can be most readily discerned in postwar US Air Force (USAF) theory: Giulio Douhet, Billy Mitchell, and the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS).1 Douhet’s abstract theorizing, while not a direct source of postwar thought, contains several important concepts that illuminate it. While both he and Mitchell are perhaps best understood as “prophets” of airpower rather than as sources of wartime practice, the ACTS officer staff were the immediate predecessors of American wartime theory and the progenitors of air-atomic strategy. These thinkers derived their ideas by generalizing from their experiences during the First World War.

Giulio Douhet, the Great War Italian infantry officer, conceived of a separate role for airpower, independent of land and naval forces. He was a pioneer in forging airpower strategy as an independent branch of military theory. Douhet’s general ideas were molded by the particular experience of static warfare between Italy and Austria. He believed airpower could protect Italy from future devastation by attrition. Land war was doomed to produce grinding static fronts, because technology had given the defender a decisive advantage. Airpower was freed from this deadlock by its ability to pass over the opposing army. In his 1921 book, The Command of the Air, Douhet outlined a short and decisive air-centered war. Fleets of bomb-laden “battle planes” would seek out and destroy the enemy. In an era before radar, he concluded that the only effective defense against aerial attack was the destruction of bombers at their home bases. After this exchange of blows, a victor would emerge, whose surviving bombers could roam at will over the enemy’s cities. With command of the air established, Douhet hoped the enemy nation would sue for peace.2

If the enemy government failed to do so on its own, or its populace did not exert sufficient pressure to force this comparatively bloodless end to hostilities, Douhet’s bombers would “inflict the greatest damage in the shortest possible time” (emphasis in original).3 However, the ability of airpower to strike any target did not mean that every target should be struck. He identified six major sets of targets for attack: industry, transportation, infrastructure, communication nodes, government buildings, and most important, popular will. This demonstrates his basic notion that, in industrial warfare, conflict extended beyond the armed forces to societies.4

The dominant air force would damage the recalcitrant enemy as much as possible in the shortest time. Douhet prescribed area attacks using high explosives and incendiary bombing to destroy structures and poison gas to maximize casualties. Thus the enemy would quickly surrender because of the prospect of destruction, or inability to resist, following the obliteration of his industry and national morale. In Douhet’s grim calculus, a short brutal conflict was cheaper to both sides than a repetition of the Great War. “These future wars may yet prove to be more humane than wars in the past in spite of all, because they may in the long run shed less blood.”5

The relationship between Douhet’s thinking and that of the US Air Force in the late 1940s is difficult to establish directly. However, his name is commonplace in the work of civilian strategists such as Bernard Brodie and in the criticisms leveled at air-atomic strategy by the Navy. By the late 1940s, Douhet’s ideas became an integral part of the framework in which the atomic bomb was debated. The huge destructive potential of the new weapon made Douhet’s previously unrealizable thinking seem to be within reach. The siren call for independent airpower to attack an enemy’s centers of power and force capitulation was irresistible, as were the notion that the only defense was offense and the concept of “vital centers,” whose destruction would compel an enemy’s surrender.

Billy Mitchell’s turbulent history serves as the second major influence on the air-atomic idea. His conviction that an independent Air Force should conduct independent air operations with the goal of independent results was a living memory for senior air officers in 1946. As Mark Clodfelter writes, Mitchell’s ideas were rooted in bureaucratic political realities and the vestiges of progressivism. Mitchell, like turn-of-the-century social activists, believed in the reforming power of technology. From an organizational standpoint, he held that only an independent Air Force could understand and apply the revolutionary changes in warfare wrought by the air weapon. An Air Force imprisoned within the Army never could reach its full potential.6

Although Mitchell differed from Douhet in believing that air-to-air combat was a viable means to gain air superiority, he shared the basic beliefs in paralyzing the enemy through attack on his vital centers and that attacking cities would cause fewer casualties than attritional land combat. Intriguingly, he used the progressive movement’s language of order and efficiency to promote airpower to the public during his fruitless campaign for interwar independence.7 Through the use of modern technology, war could be made more efficient, achieving military objectives for a lower overall cost in lives, both friendly and enemy.8 The idea of efficient airpower, implicit in Douhet, struck a chord that echoed throughout the nuclear air age.

Simultaneously, and in sympathy with Mitchell’s campaign for independence, was the third major influence—the Air Corps Tactical School. Its ideas about targeting the fragile “industrial web” of an industrial opponent drove wartime Air War Plans Division-1 (AWPD-1) and Air War Plans Division-42 (AWPD-42) and postwar targeting plans. The Combined Air Force 1925–6 text stated that air attack aimed to undermine the enemy’s will to resist. Airpower was inherently an offensive weapon; defense was wasteful and futile. These early ideas diverged from Douhet and Mitchell in the 1930s with the introduction of the concept of high-altitude precision daylight bombing (HAPDB). The origins of HAPDB can be tentatively traced back to the systematic approach to strategic bombing promoted by a Royal Air Force officer, Lord Tiverton. According to one historian, Maj. Edgar Gorrell and William Sherman “appropriated” Tiverton’s concepts of the “industrial fabric” and “key nodes,” making them into what became identified as a uniquely American style of strategic bombing theory.9 Reasoning from examples in the American economy, ACTS hypothesized that a modern industrial economy was like a spider’s web, with raw materials and goods flowing from point to point. While some nodes of the web were unimportant, others (e.g., ball bearings, oil) were essential to the integrity of several further strands. Identifying and destroying these critical nodes on which the economy depended would unravel the entire structure. Precise and devastating attack on the critical nodes would wreck enemy resistance while minimizing civilian deaths. This concept had the additional organizational benefit, in the fight for Air Force independence, of making airpower a scarce commodity to be carefully conserved. It could be used only against the most important targets, not squandered on support of the Army.10

Although its formal theory for the application of strategic airpower was elaborate, the ACTS acknowledged that the underlying logic was straightforward. Haywood Hansell, primary author of US wartime plans, summarized as a syllogism: modern nations needed industry to wage war, aircraft could penetrate any air defense and destroy any target, therefore air warfare could destroy an enemy’s ability to wage war. Hansell also credited ACTS with creating principles for target selection. Attacks must make the maximum possible contribution to the offensive and should be sufficient to prevent a target’s reconstitution while conserving enough bombers to carry through with the campaign.11

Douhet, Mitchell, and ACTS provided several ideas critical to understanding the atomic era. Most fundamental was the notion that properly applied airpower should operate independently and could be decisive. Exactly what constituted proper application was hotly contested, but almost all airpower advocates shared the basic idea of independent and decisive airpower. Furthermore, airpower promised efficient defeat of an enemy in a short time, with only a fraction of the resources required in 1918. All these thinkers firmly believed that the bomber was the answer to static land warfare. Finally, the ACTS idea of targeting a fragile industrial economy took hold with great force.

Plans and Outcomes in Europe

These prewar ideas, most directly those developed at ACTS, fed into wartime plans. Hansell holds that without the preparation of doctrine at ACTS, the first operational plan, AWPD-1, could not have been written in July 1941. It established target systems consistent with the prewar thinking: German electrical power, transportation, oil, and morale. Secondary targets included air bases, aircraft factories, aluminum plants, and magnesium plants. Ranking far below those targets were other military objectives.

The first major revision of the war plan, AWPD-42, written in the bleakest days of the Stalingrad campaign when a Soviet collapse seemed imminent, changed the priorities. The German air force, submarine building yards, and transportation moved to the top of the list, followed by the old standards of electrical power, oil, aluminum and its derivatives, and rubber. The final Combined Bomber Offensive plan, written and approved in the spring of 1943, changed the target list again, placing the German aircraft industry, ball bearings, and oil at the top of an expanded list. Despite the exigencies of war, plans always emphasized industrial targets based on the ACTS targeting syllogism.12

The 1945 US Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) assessed the effectiveness of this targeting in damaging the German war effort. Several historians, notably Gentile and MacIsaac, have described the survey as a flawed study used to promote service agendas, usually Air Force independence, but also at times the Navy’s policy. Gentile charges that the survey’s authors deliberately distorted the study by phrasing questions in terms of the effectiveness of the attack on industry, rather than probing the impact on morale. In fact, the survey reflected typical organizational behavior. Its authors defined the effectiveness of bombing in terms embedded in the routines of wartime air operations: industrial targets damaged and the effects on military production, measured in units of weapon systems and aggregated indicators such as gross domestic product. Whether the airpower advocates who framed the questions were consciously or unconsciously biased, and no matter the validity of their conclusions, they pushed air (and nuclear) strategy along the track they favored.13

After a thorough ground survey, research, and extensive statistical analysis, the USSBS concluded that strategic bombing attacks had badly disrupted key industries. Compared to its peak, aviation gasoline production fell by 90 percent and other oil-based products by half by December 1944. Attacks on transportation reduced rail car loading by three-quarters, over five months of attacks in 1944. Steel production fell by 80 percent in only three months. Compounding the cost of the lost industry, 20 percent of the German nonagricultural labor force became tied down in repair and reconstitution. The survey further found that German armament production underwent accelerated collapse in early 1945. Armament output in March 1945 was less than half of its July 1944 peak. According to the USSBS authors, 90 percent of this decline was due to bombing.14 Particularly notable about these statistics was the relatively late effect of the bombing. The survey’s authors repeatedly noted that most bombing sorties took place after mid-1944. Thus the decisive attack took place only after several years of buildup.

The USSBS reflected what airpower advocates believed the war’s experience had shown them. Though controversial, these figures led the survey’s authors to several conclusions, framed as signposts for future...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Antecedents
• 2. Declaration, Action, and the Air-Atomic Strategy
• 3. Finding a Place
• 4. The Fantastic Compression of Time
• 5. To Kill a Nation
• 6. Stalemate, Finite Deterrence, Polaris, and SIOP-62
• 7. New Sheriff in Town
• 8. End of an Era
• Conclusion
• Key to Sources and Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index