The Age of Airpower - Martin van Creveld

The Age of Airpower is a fairly thorough examination of the use of airpower from its earliest origins in combat up to the present day. He looks at the claims its proponents made, the advances made technologically, the shifts in how it was used and how they tried to use it, and most critically, the things it isn't suited for.

What van Creveld notes is that planes are fairly limited in their effectiveness and utility now. Current airplanes are so expensive not many countries can afford to have large air forces, and are reluctant to use the ones they have, because the cost if one is lost is so great. As he mentions, this is much the same attitude navies began to have towards battleships during World War 2. So you have transport aircraft that will only land and release troops where there's next to no chance of them being shot down, which neutralizes planes' ability to get to places of need quickly. There was also the fact that countries with nuclear capability designed a bunch of planes they promoted as being able to deliver nukes. Except they were never going to use those, so then you get planes built for one thing they'll never be used for. Like the F-105, a "fighter" plane that can't fight other planes, and is relegated to being a bomber, essentially.

The other side of the coin is the nature of the conflicts. Countries with nuclear capability mostly don't fight each other directly, on the chance either side decides to use nukes. So either you get air forces of countries without nukes fighting each other - Israel against Arabic countries, the Greek Civil War - or battles between countries that have air forces, and ones that don't. The thing that becomes quickly apparent is air forces can be useful, but in certain ways. Aircraft can't hold territory, because they can only remain in a given location for so long. If the opposing force resides in cities, aircraft are either neutralized (assuming they wish to avoid civilian casualties), or run the risk of lots of civilian casualties and increasing the size of the opposing force (assuming they don't).

His overall conclusions didn't really surprise me. Mostly it was things I'd either read in other books, or grasped intuitively from reading other books. However, he did highlight some things I didn't know. I hadn't ever considered the implications of nuclear weapons on airpower, or the back-and-forth between politicians and military men on who controls those weapons. And van Creveld discusses several conflicts I hadn't read much about, like the war between Italy and the Ottomans in 1911, which is the first conflict to use airplanes, and effectively illustrated their limitations even then.

'Thus the marines once again demonstrated airpower's greatest advantages - its range, speed, ability to take the opponent by surprise, and the ability to bring concentrated firepower to bear against selected opponents. However, events in Nicaragua resembled those in Libya and Palestine in the sense that the guerrillas did not take long to learn what their flying opponents could not do.'