Warden (2000) argues that since the Third Reich’s attack on Poland, no country has ever won a war against enemy air superiority (Warden 2000: 10).
Meilinger (1995) posits that ”whoever controls the air generally controls the surface,” (Meilinger 1995: 3). Douhet (1921) simply proclaims that ”(…) to have command of the air is to have victory,” (Douhet 2009: 25). In exploring this question, I will argue that it might not be as much about the extent to which wars can be won with air forces, but rather the extent to which they can be won without them. When asking a question as broad as ”Can air forces win wars?”, significantĭiscussion is invited, for air forces have been used for a wide variety of purposes in a wide variety of wars. This section will consider modern theorists’ views on the importance of airpower. Others (Meilinger 1995 Pape 1996 Byman & Waxman 2000 Boot 2003 Pape 2004) urge caution – what was envisaged, however, would not come to pass for many decades, if even then (Meilinger 1995: 11). With the capabilities that were made apparent in WWI, many theorists, such as Douhet (1921), began dreaming of future uses of airpower. With only a century of military history to rely on, the arguments for and against airpower can seem overly polarized. For most of military history, mankind has not mastered the air, and thus the majority of military theorists have not accounted for it (Buckley 1999: 1).
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