Gods in flight.

• Author: Overy, Richard
• Position: The Age of Airpower - Book review

Martin van Creveld, The Age of Airpower (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 512 pp., $35.00.

Almost exactly a hundred years ago, a young Italian airman dropped a couple of grenades from a small biplane on Turkish soldiers in the war between Italy and the Ottoman Empire for control of the largely desert territory. The grenades were difficult to use, and the crew had to pull out the pins with their teeth. But according to most accounts of the history of aerial warfare, this launched the bombing age. Now, a century later, expensive high-tech fighter-bombers are patrolling over the same desert areas, this time destroying the ground units of Colonel Qaddafi's discredited army (and occasionally civilians). The power of the weapons and how they are delivered has been transformed. The questions that first arose in 1912 about the effectiveness and morality of air attacks remain.

Martin van Creveld completed his new history of the airpower century just before NATO provided a neat top-and-tail to the story. But he would no doubt argue that the effectiveness of the new strikes on Libya

is questionable. His thesis is broadly that the importance of modern air forces has been greatly exaggerated: they can neither hold land nor deploy over long distances; their accuracy is not a great deal better than the German Ju-87 "Stuka" dive-bomber of World War II; modern aircraft are expensive to maintain in the field and too few in number to confer a formidable advantage. In this case he might well add that the strategic confidence that air strikes would make the difference in the Libyan civil war has, like so much airpower extrapolation, proved to be misplaced. Qaddafi's forces are taking evasive precautions, the ebb and flow of the conflict is difficult to gauge, and NATO has never really spelled out its aims. Invasion and occupation might do the trick, but as the legacy of Afghanistan and Iraq has shown, this is a much riskier business than it might once have looked.

On issues of morality, van Creveld plays his cards close to his chest. His real beef is not about the ethical questionability of using aircraft in the knowledge that they will also kill civilians, but about the waste of resources and the unredeemed promises which result from the wrong choice of strategy and weapons. It is not perhaps bad faith on the part of the century's air-force generals-who seem to have sincerely believed in the power of their armaments--but misplaced optimism and blind disregard of the facts. From Libya in 1912 to Iraq in 2003, van Creveld argues that it is really armies that matter (and occasionally navies). Airpower has been a misnomer.

This is a deliberate polemic. Ever since it was clear that aircraft could carry bombs and machine guns to inflict damage on enemy aircraft and troops, nations have wanted to have them. The suggestion that they actually achieve very little on their own would scarcely have stopped the stampede for larger, faster and more destructive air platforms. When nation-states had the chance to stop the rush--in 1922-23 at the Hague conference or the disarmament conference of 1932-34--they balked at the idea. Even the antiwar lobby of the 1930s thought that an international air-police force would be sufficient to ensure a permanent state of world peace, without ever thinking how this might work. Van Creveld focuses on one of the key reasons for the failure of air disarmament--the strong desire of the imperial powers to be able to use aircraft to quell the rising tide of anticolonial protest. The Royal Air Force War Manual...