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Editor’s Note
Amid the ongoing Gulf War, it signals a significant shift in modern warfare: air power is no longer the exclusive preserve of traditional air forces. Iran’s extensive use of drones and distributed strike systems shows how non-air arms can generate effects once associated only with aircraft, as the author argues. This piece highlights both continuity and change in the logic of aerial coercion, drawing parallels with World War II bombing campaigns. The lessons, the author suggests, are relevant for India as well, particularly when considering future contingencies such as OP Sindoor 2.0.
The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same
“For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”
—Book of Hosea 8:7 (Old Testament)
Echoes of an Earlier Air War
The ongoing confrontation in West Asia has rattled strategic and military thinkers across the world. Yet, if one takes a step back and reviews the air campaign of the Second World War executed by Bomber Command under Air Marshal Sir Arthur Travers Harris, a striking similarity begins to emerge. The character of warfare has certainly evolved, but its fundamental nature often remains unchanged.
The evolution of aerial warfare from World War II to the contemporary era reflects shifts in technology, doctrine, legality, and political constraints. However, this does not necessarily represent a complete departure from the underlying logic of strategic coercion through air power and the enduring choice between putting TNT on the ground and placing boots on the ground.
The bombing campaigns led by Harris during the Second World War remain the most prominent example of deliberate strategic bombing aimed simultaneously at destroying industrial capacity and weakening civilian morale. Harris’s strategy, implemented through RAF Bomber Command, relied on the mass bombing of German urban centres. These campaigns have since become central to debates on the morality, legality and effectiveness of strategic bombing.
The present aerial campaign in West Asia is following a comparable trajectory. What may begin as attacks on strictly military targets often expands toward industrial facilities and targets intended to create psychological pressure. The United States and Israel may claim adherence to principles of precision targeting and proportionality under international humanitarian law. However, in the last few days of high-intensity engagement, the practical effects of modern air campaigns invite comparisons with the large-scale destruction associated with World War II bombing operations.
The Enduring Logic of Strategic Bombing
Strategic bombing itself emerged during the interwar period, when air power theorists argued that future wars would be decided by the ability to strike directly at an enemy’s military and industrial centres. The belief that air power could bypass trench warfare and deliver a rapid victory influenced both Allied and Axis planning. In many ways, it is also the bulwark of present air operations.
Today, however, the reluctance to commit large numbers of troops on the ground and the accompanying political sensitivity to casualties have imposed caution on the United States and its allies. The management of the escalation continuum and the aversion to body bags returning home have encouraged an increased reliance on stand-off strike capabilities.
In 1942, RAF Bomber Command shifted from attempts at precision strikes to the deliberate destruction of urban areas and industrial complexes. In the present context, although targeting accuracy has improved dramatically, collateral damage continues to occur. Moreover, the effect on civilian morale often proves quite different from what planners anticipate. Instead of producing despondency, sustained bombing frequently strengthens societal resolve to withstand the enemy onslaught.
The death of school children on the very first day of the conflict and the strike on Kharg Island, an economic lifeline for Iran, handling nearly 90% of the country’s crude exports, appear to illustrate this shift. Such attacks suggest an attempt to cripple Iran economically or at least convey that the focus of the air campaign is moving beyond military objectives toward targets of economic and strategic value. The resemblance to the Bomber Campaign of World War II is difficult to ignore.
Escalation and the Expansion of Target Sets
The comparison between Harris’s bombing campaign and modern aerial operations highlights a broader principle of military strategy: technology changes methods, but not necessarily objectives. Air power continues to serve three primary purposes—destruction of enemy capability, coercion of enemy leadership and psychological pressure on the population.
When conflicts remain limited in both time and space, precision strikes can achieve desired objectives with relatively controlled damage. However, as conflicts escalate, the same objectives often lead to increasingly destructive operations. It is precisely what appears to be unfolding in West Asia today.
The biblical expression that those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind aptly captures the escalation logic of aerial warfare. Once large-scale bombing begins, each side may feel compelled to intensify its efforts to achieve decisive results. Under such conditions, the exit option gradually disappears for both sides.
The bombing campaigns directed by Arthur Harris during World War II remain the most extreme example of strategic bombing in modern history. Although contemporary air forces operate under vastly different technological, legal and political conditions, the underlying logic of using air power to impose strategic costs on an opponent remains largely unchanged.
Precision weapons may have reduced the need for indiscriminate area bombing, but they have not eliminated the possibility of large-scale destruction, particularly in high-intensity or existential conflicts. When political objectives demand quick results, air campaigns tend to expand in scope in ways that resemble earlier doctrines.
Such campaigns often evolve from attacks on purely military targets to industrial infrastructure and public utilities as the conflict persists, acquires political significance for national leadership, or becomes strategically decisive in the context of regime survival. The ongoing escalation in strikes against Iran reflects precisely this dynamic.
The ongoing escalation in strikes against Iran reflects this very dogma of the Trump Administration. Although modern air forces possess far greater precision than those of the Second World War, the fundamental logic of coercion through destruction remains similar to that seen in the campaigns directed by Arthur Harris.
The transition from counter-force to counter-value targeting may not indicate a change in moral standards, but rather the practicality that modern warfare involves entire national systems rather than isolated military units.
Implications for the Sub-Continent: OP Sindoor 2.0
Understanding this escalation pattern is essential for military planners, as future high-intensity conflicts are likely to produce similar pressures to expand the target set beyond the battlefield and into the economic and public domains.
This lesson is particularly relevant in the context of the Indian subcontinent and the possible future contours of OP Sindoor 2.0. An escalation in targeting profiles and a prolonged duration of hostilities could bring industrial targets, economic infrastructure and psychological objectives into the conflict. The air defence architecture established for OP Sindoor 1.0 may therefore require recalibration to address such contingencies.
The objective of a counter-value campaign is often to create conditions in which the opponent’s leadership faces internal pressure to negotiate or terminate hostilities. However, historical experience suggests that such outcomes are far from guaranteed.
The Limits of Coercion from the Air
The German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom during World War II, commonly known as the Blitz, had profound psychological, social and political effects on British society. Yet contrary to German expectations, the bombing did not break morale. Instead, it produced a complex mixture of fear, hardship and resilience.
The German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom caused severe destruction, fear and hardship, but it failed to achieve its primary objective of breaking civilian morale or forcing Britain out of the war, something akin is happening in Iran today.
The population is adapting to sustained bombing, maintaining industrial production and is supporting continued resistance. This experience demonstrated the limits of strategic bombing as a tool of coercion.
It re-emphasised the need to achieve cognitive collapse of leadership; the metrics of victory will still have to be measured on land.
In modern military analysis, the Blitz remains one of the clearest examples that attacks on cities and public infrastructure can impose high costs on a population yet still fail to produce the political outcome intended by the attacker.
Sadly, despite all the planning and red teaming, the US’s plan has led to yet another strategic blunder.
Air Power Beyond the Air Force
The comparison between the bombing campaigns of the Second World War and contemporary operations also illustrates both continuity and transformation in the character of air warfare. One of the most significant changes emerging from the present conflict is that traditional air forces no longer monopolise air power.
For much of the twentieth century, the air domain was considered the exclusive responsibility of the air force. Control of the skies required specialised aircraft, trained pilots, dedicated air bases and centralised command structures. Consequently, air forces emerged as the principal custodians of aerial warfare, while land and naval forces relied on them for reconnaissance, close air support and interdiction.
The proliferation of drones, missiles and distributed launch systems has begun to alter this equation. Iran provides a striking doctrinal example of asymmetry in the air domain. Instead of matching aircraft against aircraft, it has relied heavily on unmanned systems operated by multiple services to generate operational and strategic effects.
This campaign has brought about a material change: the Air Force no longer monopolises air power. The Iran conflict is a strong example of how land forces, IRGC units, and even non-air arms can generate inter-domain effects using UAVs, missiles, drones, and distributed launch systems. Iran provides a doctrinal perspective on asymmetry in the air, where, instead of matching aircraft to aircraft, unmanned systems operated by multiple services have produced operational and strategic effects previously associated only with conventional air power.
These capabilities allow land forces and paramilitary formations to influence the air domain without possessing traditional aircraft. In operational terms, this produces a battlefield where domain boundaries become increasingly blurred. A ground unit may simultaneously conduct surveillance, strike and electronic warfare through systems operating in the air domain.
This transformation represents a broader shift from single-domain warfare toward multi-domain operations.
The Enduring Nature of War
Traditional doctrine defined air superiority as the ability to prevent the adversary from employing aircraft effectively. This definition assumed that aircraft were the primary instruments of aerial warfare. The widespread use of drones has weakened this assumption.
Even when one side controls the skies, the opponent may still launch unmanned systems from dispersed locations, using the air domain merely as a medium through which violence is transferred into the land domain.
Understanding both this continuity and this divergence is essential for military planners. Future conflicts between near-peer states are likely to test the limits of precision warfare, whether conducted by manned or unmanned systems, and revive debates that began during the bombing of Germany in World War II.
Ultimately, the enduring truth articulated by the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz still holds. War remains a clash of human wills. In the final analysis, it is the destruction of that will which determines victory.
Brig Harsh Vardhan Singh, VSM (Author is a serving officer of the Indian Army)
