The delusion of easy victory from the air may have seduced the US into another war

Air superiority is supposed to deliver a quick triumph. But history has shown that promise to be written on the wind To explore the roots of Donald Trump’s Iran military strategy and the pugnacious rhetoric of his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, means looking back 105 years. In 1921, a year before Benito Mussolini and his blackshirts marched on Rome to launch the Fascist era, an Italian general named Giulio Douhet published The Command of the Air, proposing a revolution in warfare. Victory in the future, he said, would no longer come from the grinding trench combat of the great war. Instead it meant large-scale aerial bombardments, targeting not just combatants but civilians and civilian infrastructure and logistics. “[It] is much more important to destroy a railroad station, a bakery, a war plant, or to machine-gun a supply column, moving trains, or any other behind-the-lines objective, than to strafe or bomb a trench. “[It] is not enough to shoot down all birds in flight if you want to wipe out the species,” he wrote, with a grim metaphor. “The most effective method would be to destroy the eggs and the nests systematically.” Douhet’s theories, which emphasized “blows to the mora