The Ranged War Is Still In An Early Stage

And its impossible to say how it will work out

Hello All,

I am going to start this piece with a little historical comparison. When do you think the strategic bombing of Germany first became serious? The answer is the summer of 1943. It was at that point that the Combined Bomber Offensive kicked into high gear, with operations such as the British attacks on Hamburg (Operation Gomorrah—July 1943) and the first mass US attacks on German ball-bearing and aircraft production (Schweinfurt and Regensburg—August 1943).

Destruction after the firebombing of Hamburg Germany in July 1943—we are not even that far into the Russo-Ukraine War.

This was almost 4 years after World War II started in Europe. And yet, even then British and American planners had only an incomplete understanding of how to use strategic air power and still lacked the technology and needed mass to disassemble the German war economy. It would take almost another year until the British and Americans had the tools and doctrine needed to make the strategic bombing campaign truly effective. Between the Summer of 1943 and 1944 there were important advances in technology (Mustang-ranged fighters), production (US/UK aircraft were turned out in greater mass), and tactics (the focus on attacking fuel and transport) that needed to happen before strategic air power became extremely effective.

I say this because we are arguably at close to identical hazy stage of understanding about how the strategic bombing campaign/ranged war between Russia and Ukraine is really going to work out. We are only three years and eight months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was launched (which in World War II equivalence would be April/May 1943) and the echoes between what is happening now and what happened then is striking.

Many things will occur in the next year in terms of technology, production and mass that will make the strategic air power war between Russia and Ukraine far more destructive and potentially telling than what we are seeing now. We are not in the middle of the strategic air war, we are nearer its beginning, and many assumptions about where the war is heading will have to be rewritten over the coming months. I thought it would be useful if I wrote about how all three of these categories could/will change in