‘Victory Through Air Power’ Put to the Test in Iran

By James H. McGee

Sunday, March 22, 2026

 

Giulio Douhet, a now almost forgotten Italian army general, once reigned as the foremost theorist of what came to be called “victory through air power.” Others, notably our own Colonel Billy Mitchell, would gain notoriety as proponents of the primacy of aerial bombardment as the decisive element in modern warfare, but Douhet’s 1921 treatise Il dominio dell’aria, or The Command of the Air, exerted an outsized influence on air power advocates throughout the first half of the 20th century, and it continues to be debated today.

 

Writing in the aftermath of WWI, at a time when the ability of an air force to deliver explosive ordnance was measured in dozens rather than thousands of tons, Douhet looked beyond the limitations of existing aircraft to a time when fleets of heavy bombers could fill the sky. He postulated that these waves of bombers would overwhelm any defenses — he was contemptuous of the entire concept of air defense.

 

Critically, Douhet also asserted that the weight of aerial bombardment, exerted not just on military targets but also industrial and population centers, would be so crushing that the recipient would be driven to unconditional surrender. This was the crux of his theory and its most influential element. In the 1930s, the air force generals of every developed nation took up this proposition. In the U.S., Britain, and France, they argued that resources diverted from the design and production of heavy bombers were resources largely wasted. Germany, too, accepted Douhet’s theories.

 

Hitler’s Luftwaffe became the first to implement Douhet’s theories. The bombing of Guernica by the German Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War famously demonstrated the meaning of terror bombing à la Douhet, a meaning further displayed over Warsaw, Rotterdam, and Coventry, above all during the London Blitz. But soon, the Germans would find themselves on the receiving end of the combined might of the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Force, led by generals fully committed to Douhet’s vision and certain that they possessed the means to make it happen.

 

In the end, they would be disappointed. While the strategic air campaign made a significant contribution to victory by substantially diverting German resources to air defense, claims that strategic bombing would carry the day proved false. It took the convergence of the Red Army from the east and the British and American armies from the west to see an end to Nazism.

 

Much the same might be said of the B-29 bombing campaign against Japan. Even after the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese industrial cities, the Japanese remained adamantly unwilling to surrender. They also remained ready to inflict massive casualties on any Allied invading force, bloodshed many times greater than the famously sanguinary battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The oversell of strategic air power, confirmed by the several postwar bombing surveys, would haunt conventional air power advocates for decades to come, while strategic bombing went down the almost entirely separate nuclear path.

 

So here we are, a century after Douhet, once again embarked on an effort to achieve victory through air power. For generations, U.S. presidents and our European allies have contented themselves with half measures when it comes to the threat from Iran, pursuing one comforting delusion after another, never willing to face the self-evident fact that, ultimately, Tehran’s millenarian fanatics would achieve a nuclear capability. Repeatedly, world leaders have insisted that this must not be allowed, not least every American president since 1979.

 

We’ve deluded ourselves for one simple reason: the belief that nothing short of the dreaded “boots on the ground” could accomplish the task of defanging the mullahs. Certainly, no one believed that this could be achieved by air power alone, not against a large nation amply provided with the best air defense capabilities Russia and China can provide.

 

Then a door opened, partly because of the massive anti-government demonstrations at the end of 2025, partly because the Twelve-Day War and the successful bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities suggested that an air campaign might be possible. Possible because with air supremacy and the relentless application of “death from above,” the regime might be broken, deprived of its ability to defend itself, unable to prevent the popular will from taking Iran in a new direction. Possible because finally, long after Douhet, or Billy Mitchell, or the RAF’s “Bomber” Harris, we possess the precision technical means to destroy military forces, even a regime’s leadership, without meting out indiscriminate destruction and mass casualties. No firestorms, no Hamburgs or Dresdens; finally, a new way of waging war.

 

We’re now in the process of finding out if something akin to Douhet’s air power vision can be accomplished. What we’re witnessing is an old strategic ambition wedded to hitherto unimagined combat air power. The next several weeks will tell us if this ambition can finally be fulfilled.