Why read Bombing to Win?

Book cover of Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War

Book description

From Iraq to Bosnia to North Korea, the first question in American foreign policy debates is increasingly: Can air power alone do the job? Robert A. Pape provides a systematic answer. Analyzing the results of over thirty air campaigns, including a detailed reconstruction of the Gulf War, he argues that…

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Topics

The Gulf War

Genres

History

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Why read it?

1 author picked Bombing to Win as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Julian Schofield

Author

The best books are those that successfully unseat widely held beliefs that are actually completely wrong and have a terrible influence on public policy.

Robert Pape, in Bombing to Win, set-out to demonstrate that the air force (of nearly every country’s) sociological model that bombing an enemy will produce a cheap and fast victory, is completely false. In fact, Pape shows that there has never been a case where an air force campaign achieved victory on its own, without being closely integrated with naval and army operations.

This is important because countries often start wars believing that air power…

From Julian's 3 favorite reads in 2023.