Is Aerial Warfare Doomed

[surfnole]

An Interesting Read

 

[SDF2BUF2MCO]

Countries will still need/use airpower to compliment their armed forces. Still need the navy and certainly the ground troops. Thus far, history has shown airpower alone cannot defeat an enemy. With that said, we stopped after two nuclear drops on Japan. So who knows? But in today's modern forces that may not have to come from airpower.
Still need to control the land, the sea, and the air.

 

[sky37d]

the date was 1934. wonder what that author thought 7 years later?

 

[avbug]

We didn't stop a war with nuclear weapons release on Japan. We did that to demonstrate our capabilities to other nations. The Japanese were defeated no matter how one cuts it. Thank the Oppenheimer club for use of the bomb.

 

[Loafman]

I'm of the opinion that the war would have dragged on longer and more lives lost had it not been for the dropping of the bomb. Would we have won eventually? I suppose so, but the decision saved the lives of a lot of Americans.

 

[avbug]

That may be, except that the Japanese were trying to surrender. We refused to accept, and dropped the bomb(s) instead as a show of power to our allies.

 

[Vladimir Lenin]

d@mn maglev and its war possibilities

 

[WrightAvia]

Before we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese war machine was pretty much doomed. They didn't have enough diesel to fill up the ships and submarines they had in inventory, prior to the A-bomb attacks.

Their war machine was down to less than one tank of fuel.

All we had to do, was provide a blockade around Japan, we didn't have to invade. It was an invasion of Japan that was supposedly going to cost American lives. During the blockade, we could have targeted military targets, manufacturing and agriculture, bringing Japan to the bargaining table.

I don't think we owe anybody an appology for bringing WWII to an end, I just think that the use of the bomb to end it, bears reflection.

 

[Super 80]

Interesting read? Well actually, it shows the folly of his thinking, since just little over a decade later all his claims of what airpower couldn't do were largely disproved with what airpower could do.

A little history: the development of the musket made the ancient Greco-Roman infantry division tactic of moving in large arrays a deadly game of chess. Suited more for ancient weapons of the lance, sword, spear and bow (with the latter being the artillery of the day) the introduction of musket and cannon often won the battle before the two sides could meet in hand to hand combat. Picket's charge at Gettysburg is a notable example of the folly of marching in the open under withering fire. Two hundred years earlier, Picket could have been a hero.

After the Civil war, the musket gave way to the rifle, and ball and cap to the cartridge. Repeating rifles soon followed and in the field of artillery, howitzers and mortars were developed to replace the smooth bore cannon. The increase in firepower was not matched with the development of tactics, and the military, in typical institutional style, continued to work with formation arrays of infantry and cavalry that were all too easily decimated by the enemy. What ensued was a stalemate where a large lethal zone separated the enemy lines: no man's land.

The British were the first to try to get around this problem by introducing landships and airships. The former were called tanks by mistake, and as a ruse for what was taking place, the name stuck. Of all the tank designs, only the Mk IV tank with its trapezoid tread design attained suitable speed (5 mph) and it was the only one that could cross the trenches. The German design was slower and couldn't ford the trenches. The French design had the first revolving turret, but it was too small to be effective.

The British first used the tanks successfully at Cambrai in Nov of 1917. There 378 were able to break through the Hindenburg line with cavalry and infantry, but they didn't have any logistical support, and the offense stalled when they ran out of gas. Later, the tanks were used again in large numbers, 450 of them were used in Amiens in Aug of 1918, and only later in Sep were a large enough number available to breach the Hindenburg line in an offense that lead to the final line of battle at the Armistice.

Combined with the tank, the Sopwith Camel was the most successful machine invented to cross no man's land. Literally thousands of these handy aircraft worked with the tanks in punching through the German lines. They would take out dirigibles, aircraft and aerodromes, and bomb petrol tanks and other soft targets behind enemy lines. At Cambrai in 1917, they had a 25lb bomb hooked to the centerline to attack frontal positions, but losses to ground fire stopped this tactic.

In WWII, the Germans made the tank the center of their new tactic, maneuver. But the Americans countered with airpower. Without the cover of fighters, George Patton's Shermans were no match for the Panzers. As far as destroying Japan, the island fighting on Iwo Jima and Okinawa proved how tenacious the Japanese were. Without an invasion to hold the main island, the Japanese would never admit defeat. To have invaded would have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives and resulted in millions of Japanese dying. By having Japan surrender with two atomic attacks, the US Army was able to occupy Japan under MacArthur and reshape that nation into a democratic republic. If the army could not occupy the land, nothing would have changed in Japan.

In Vietnam, the ability to pinpoint bomb was just getting started to be an art form like the tank penetration of Cambrai in 1917 led to the tactics of Blitzkrieg. Fast forward 20 years, and the tank and the airplane easily neutralized Iraq's army in three days. Going into GWII, the Abrams tank, stealth bombers, F-18, F-15E with laser guided bombs and GPS accuracy proved that the military might had now achieved an eight fold increase in effective firepower.

Industry, made possible by the profit (greed) motive of Capitalism, using advances in technology, (especially informational systems along with satellites) has perfected two instruments of war, the tank and the airplane that now make modern war possible with unprecedented destruction and lethality.

If the second horsemen of Revelation is war, what makes war possible is Capitalism. It has conquered the world without firing a shot (Look at Communist China for an example of a nation that has instituted raw Capitalism in order to modernize their society and military) and so may well be the first horseman riding on a white horse as the champion of the West, just as Zechariah's white chariot went in Zec chapter 6.

 

[Rate One Turn]

Interesting... Of course, no-one could have predicted we'd have chemtrails 60 years later