It is often said that generals are ready to fight the last war. In other words, after every war, the military evaluates the results in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes, but the next war always presents different conditions and problems, making many of these lessons less relevant. Germany and Japan were not North Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh and Saddam Hussein were not Hitler and Stalin. Wars fought with tanks, battleships, airplanes and missiles had limited relevance when fighting against IEDs and drones.

Nevertheless, there is one lesson that modern wars should teach both the civilian leaders who initiate them and the military who bear the brunt of the fighting. No matter how powerful a nation’s military, it cannot bomb an enemy into submission. As J.D Vance told Israel (without a hint of irony), “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every national security problem.”

The ineffectiveness of such bombing, despite its destructive power, has been known for many years. At the end of WW II, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith led a large staff in a government report on the effectiveness of the Allies strategic bombing. In 2004, he summarized his conclusions from nearly 60 years before. Attacks on German arms factories “were sadly useless” as “fighter aircraft production actually increased in early 1944 after major bombing” due to factory and machinery relocation and determined management. The resulting death and destruction in German cities “had no appreciable effect on war production and the war.” This lesson, he opined, was ignored when the United States initiated wars in Vietnam and Iraq. 

Perhaps the reason little attention was paid to Galbraith’s study was that the Allies won the war. According to Daniel Ellsberg, because in 1965 Lyndon Johnson was afraid to send ground troops to Vietnam (much like Donald Trump rejected “boots on the ground” in 2026), “one thing that came easy to an American President was a demonstration by bombing.” Ellsberg believed that since WW II, “there was a widespread belief in the efficacy and acceptability aerial bombing” that played a critical role in the United States entering and escalating the war in Vietnam. After all, the disparity between the superpower military of the United States and that of North Vietnam could not have been greater yet the result was a 10-year war that ended in an American withdrawal and a takeover of all of Vietnam by the North Vietnamese government. Nor did American air power prove any more successful in Afghanistan where, two decades after American forces deposed the Taliban government, it returned to power.

Other countries have also failed to learn the lesson of the insufficiency of air power. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, its 100,000 troops were able to control the cities but not the countryside. They sought to bomb these rural areas but despite four million Afghans fleeing the country, the bombing failed to stop the mujahideen who used shoulder fired missiles against the Soviet aircraft. By 1989, all Soviet troops had been withdrawn.

In 2015, Saudi Arabia launched a massive bombing campaign in Yemen to oust the Houthis from power using airplanes supplied and pilots trained by the United States. The result was a humanitarian catastrophe with, according to the United Nations, hundreds of thousands dying from the fighting or such indirect consequences as hunger. From the bombing alone, 24,000 died, including 9000 civilians. In March 2022, the Saudis announced that they would end hostilities.

None of these failures stopped the Trump administration from initiating a bombing campaign in Iran on February 28. While his reasons for going to war have varied, he seems to have three: regime change, ending Iran’s nuclear program, and destroying Iran’s missiles. 

Iran countered by closing the Strait of Hormuz which caused a dramatic spike in oil prices. Much of Iran’s military, including its navy, was destroyed and their leadership killed, but they were able to retain 70% of their missiles and replace their leaders with younger and more militant figures, including their Supreme Leader’s son. 

Trump has threatened to “decimate” Iran or destroy “a whole civilization” but has always pulled back before his self-imposed deadline. On June 17, the US and Iran signed an MOU declaring a 60-day cease fire during which negotiations on a nuclear agreement will take place and the Strait of Hormuz will be open.  None of Trump’s objectives have been achieved while Iran’s position has been strengthened by its demonstrated ability to close the Strait of Hormuz—something it never did until attacked. 

The war, however, has killed thousands of Iranians, at least 1700 of them civilians, and 13 American soldiers. An American missile strike on an elementary school killed 175 people, most of them children. The UN estimates that more than three million Iranians have been forced to leave their homes.

Has Trump learned the lesson that you can’t bomb your enemy into submission? His most recent statements suggest that he has not. In an interview with Fox News, he threatened that if Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, “you won’t have a country,” causing Iran’s negotiators to walk out of the peace talks. This is probably just bluster, but, with Trump, who knows?

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

George Santayana

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