here’s a certain irony to the fact that the task of keeping the peace in Lebanon falls to 3,000 Italian soldiers now deploying to that country. An Italian soldier, after all, was largely responsible for the Israeli air campaign against Lebanon in the first place. The bombs that fell on Beirut this summer may have been—as new Hizbullah billboards in bombed-out neighborhoods hasten to point out—“Made in the USA,” but the way in which those bombs were used is of Italian design, sprung from the mind of an early-20th-century Italian general named Giulio Douhet. Indeed, Douhet’s theory of strategic air-power, which attacks civilians in order to bring down their governments, may be undergoing a renaissance in Israeli and American defense circles as those nations gear up for possible confrontation with Iran. There are, unfortunately, two problems with Douhet’s theory: It doesn’t work, and it’s evil.
Giulio Douhet’s theory of strategic bombing emerged against the bleak backdrop of the Italian front in World War I, which was a remarkable exercise in pointless bloodshed even by the standards of a war defined by futility. The Italian army spent more than half a million lives hammering away at Austrian defenses in the Alps, to little effect: Austria’s industrial heartland lay just behind the natural Alpine wall, and the factories operating there sent new artillery pieces into the mountains faster than the Italians could hope to fight through them. Douhet, who had been a fan of the airplane since its invention, reasoned that it would be far better to send bombers high over the Austrians’ Alpine deathtrap to destroy the factories that made that deathtrap possible. He was also an ardent Fascist and considered the industrial working class a volatile force that was a threat to its own government. Once the Austrian factories were destroyed, he argued, the angry and unemployed mob would bring down the Austrian state.
Others have tweaked the details of strategic air-power theory since Douhet conceived it, but its essence remains the same: cause so much pain to the enemy’s civilian economic base that those civilians force their government out of the war. The idea isn’t simply to attack the enemy’s military, but to attack the political support that makes it possible for the enemy to field a military in the first place.
That’s the strategy that Israel pursued when it attacked civilian infrastructure across Lebanon during this summer’s air campaign. Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, a career air force officer and devout air-power theorist, promised to “turn the clock back twenty years in Lebanon” if the Lebanese state failed to rein in Hizbullah. The head of Israel’s Northern Command warned that, “once
is inside Lebanon, everything is legitimate.” The Israeli air force made good on those promises when it bombed water pumps in Byblos, glassworks in Zahleh, and grain silos in Beirut. Israeli warplanes even struck the picturesque (and otherwise worthless) lighthouse along Beirut’s Corniche. These targets were struck deliberately and precisely. They had nothing to do with Hizbullah; their destruction certainly did nothing to diminish Hizbullah’s military capacity. They were struck not to defeat Hizbullah on the battlefield, but to “break the will” of a Lebanese population that tolerated Hizbullah’s existence on the battlefield at all.
Yale Herald
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