A very quick breakfast post before an excursion of a few hours. Our next project will be analysis of a sea battle. The fleets approach and Olaghi's entire air force attacks the rebels but unsuccessfully. We will discuss why.
Mishka has heard:
"...that Olaghi has a slogan: 'Victory through air power.'" (p. 149)
See:
Fighting On Foot
Alliteration And Air Power
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And Mr. Stirling explained in a comment to "Fighting on Foot" why air power alone was so ineffective in deciding wars till very recent times. It took drastic advances in the precision guiding and aiming of bombs before they could do any real damage to a determined enemy. So, Olaghi's slogan "Victory Through Air Power!" was premature.
Sean
Though air power became decisive at -sea- much earlier, in the 1930's and 40's. But high-level bombing wouldn't do; it had to be dive-bombers (which are quite precise, but very vulnerable) or torpedo-bombers (ditto).
At sea the target is big and conspicuous and isolated on a flat surface and can be totally destroyed by anything that lets water into the hull or sets it on fire.
On land, close air support by aircraft that got very close to the target -- and hence was very vulnerable -- could be quite effective, though not completely decisive.
What's made it much more effective in recent years is precision guidance, which reduced the error radius from thousands of yards to a few feet. This can be applied to shells and rockets as well as bombs, and it means you can hit very accurately from far away.
And nuclear weapons delivered by air are very effective -- because they don't need to be precise to really screw the target up.
Other weapons would be: nerve gas, for instance. One liter of VX contains 100,000 lethal doses, though you can never distribute it perfectly. Still, even a few tons of nerve gas dropped on a city would generate nuclear-level casualties, without destroying the infrastructure.
Incidentally, in a nerve-wracking historical footnote, the Germans -had- nerve gas in 1939-40, but were afraid to use it lest we retaliate in kind...but we couldn't, because we not only had no nerve gas but didn't even suspect it existed.
It apparently just didn't occur to them we wouldn't have nerve gas of our own; as usual, German espionage/intelligence work was terrible.
It was discovered by accident by German chemists researching insecticides, and German industrial chemistry was the most advanced in the world at the time.
(This is a plot point in my latest books, the BLACK CHAMBER series.)
A blitz on London with Sarin gas in 1940 could have inflicted the million-plus casualties the authorities were (wrongly) expecting, and probably knocked Britain out of the war.
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