The Failure of Strategic Bombing as a Tool of Coercion

Winston Churchill famously praised the resilience of the British people during the Blitz, describing the nightly bombings of London as a “cruel, wanton, indiscriminate” attempt by Adolf Hitler to break the spirit of a tough “island race”.

He was not wrong about the toughness and courage of his fellow citizens. But as one of the United Kingdom’s greatest leaders and historical writers, he created a false impression of the uniqueness of the British wartime experience.

Strategic bombing alone, without the reinforcement of ground troops, almost never achieves its purpose. British resistance was not the exception but the rule.

Just by surviving, Tehran is winning. He said that “the Iranians have really survived an attack that almost no other country in the region would be able to survive”. He added: “They have been attacked by two nuclear-weapon states and they have essentially come out on top… As a result, their deterrence [against] the other states has increased, and their leverage has increased internally.”

That seems obvious. Yet leaders such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump have boasted that they could bomb their adversary into submission and that its people would rise up to overthrow their government. In his latest escalation, Trump called on the Iranian people to rise up: “When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?” Aside from the criminality, that way of thinking seems absurd.