In 1921, Italian tactician Giulio Douhet advanced a theory of air power that remains influential to this day: air power can win a war without ground forces by bombing an enemy's heartland. By bringing the war to civilians behind the frontlines, reasoned Douhet, they will cease to support the war effort, both materially and mentally. Without the support of the heartland, their army will be forced to surrender. Bombing civilians may be distasteful, proponents allow, but it saves more lives in the long run by shortening wars. Since then, nations have employed so-called "strategic bombing" in all the major wars of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Operating under this paradigm, historians and defense experts portray U.S. Presidents as having to make the tough decision to allow civilian casualties in pursuit of peace — from the fire bombing of Dresden and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Barack Obama's recent decision to launch Predator drone strikes in Pakistan. But the problem, as Pierre Sprey and Marilyn Young tell Bill Moyers on the JOURNAL, is that the paradigm is fundamentally flawed. Sprey, a long-time defense industry consultant, recently co-wrote a paper arguing that strategic bombing is an unsound airpower tactic. Sprey argues on the JOURNAL that not only has strategic bombing never hastened the end of a war, it often costs more in lives and money. And, in the case of Afghanistan, Sprey believes bombing helps Taliban interests. Noting that missiles fired by Predator drones are accurate to within thirty feet, Sprey says:

Does it kill the person it's intended to kill? Not often. And when it does, it usually kills a bunch of other people around. And that, of course, raises the problem that the Predator and the missiles become a recruiting tool for the opposition and — beyond a shadow of a doubt — recruit more opposition than we get rid of by killing the one person at the table that we wanted to kill.

Historian Marilyn Young concurs, and argues that bombing, even when successful, does not win hearts and minds, "I will not be grateful to you for harming someone I don't like in the course of which you kill my kid."

Sprey also headed up the technical side of the Air Force's concept design team for the A-10 close support fighter. Then, against opposition, he helped implement the A-10's innovative live-fire, prototype fly-off competition and subsequent production. Sprey left the Pentagon in 1971 but continued to consult actively on the F-16, the A-10, tanks and anti-tank weapons, and realistic operational/live-fire testing of major weapons. At the same time, he became a principal in two consulting firms; the first doing environmental research and analysis, the second consulting on international defense planning and weapons analysis.

During this period, Sprey continued the work of Col. Richard Hallock (U.S. Army/Airborne) in founding the field of combat history/combat data-based cost effectiveness analysis for air and ground weapons. During the late 1970s, Colonel Boyd and Sprey, together with a small, dedicated group of Pentagon and congressional insiders, started the military reform movement. Attracting considerable attention from young officers, journalists and congressmen, the movement led to establishment of the Congressional Military Reform Caucus and to passage of several military reform bills in the early 1980s. Sprey continues to work with reform-minded foundations and journalists. Numerous articles, books and theses have described the work of Colonel Boyd and Sprey on the F-16, A-10 and military reform. These include Robert Coram's BOYD: THE FIGHTER PILOT WHO CHANGED THE ART OF WAR and James Fallows' NATIONAL DEFENSE.

Her publications include RHETORIC OF EMPIRE: AMERICAN CHINA POLICY, 1895-1901; TRANSFORMING RUSSIA AND CHINA: REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE IN THE 20TH CENTURY (with William Rosenberg) and THE VIETNAM WARS, 1945-1990. She has also edited and co-edited several anthologies: WOMEN IN CHINA: ESSAYS ON SOCIAL CHANGE AND FEMINISM; PROMISSORY NOTES: WOMEN AND THE TRANSITION TO SOCIALISM (with Rayna Rapp and Sonia Kruks); VIETNAM AND AMERICA: A DOCUMENTED HISTORY (with Marvin Gettleman, Jane Franklin and Bruce Franklin), HUMAN RIGHTS AND REVOLUTION (with Lynn Hunt and Jeffrey Wasserstrom), THE VIETNAM WAR: A HISTORY IN DOCUMENTS (with John J. Fitzgerald and A. Tom Grunfeld)

Professor Young has twice been awarded a Golden Dozen Teaching Award and, from 1993-1996, served as Chair of the Department of History at NYU. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Council of Learned Society Fellowship in 2000-2001. From 2001-2004 she directed the NYU International Center for Advanced Studies Project on the Cold War as Global Conflict. In the spring of 2005, she was a Visiting Professor at the Johns Hopkins University SAIS Center in Bologna, Italy and she is currently co-director of the Tamiment Library Center for the Study of the U.S. and the Cold War.

>Read an excerpt from BOMBING CIVILIANS: A TWENTIETH CENTURY HISTORY. (PDF)

Copyright 2009 by Marilyn B. Young. This excerpt originally appeared in BOMBING CIVILIANS: A TWENTIETH-CENTURY HISTORY edited by Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young. Published by The New Press.

Published January 30, 2009.

Guest photos by Robin Holland.