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- [00:00]
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- [00:27]
Martin DeCaro
That's.
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- [00:30]
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- [00:55]
Martin DeCaro
To start your free trial@shopify.com history as it happens. April 17, 2026 Julio Dua's kind of war.
- [01:06]
Unidentified Military Official
We're going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong.
- [01:10]
No stupid rules of engagement. No nation building quagmire. No democracy building exercise. No politically correct wars.
- [01:18]
David M. Kennedy
We have seen horrific reports of a U.S. missile hitting a girls school in Iran.
- [01:25]
Safeway and Albertsons Advertiser
President Trump has suggested the may not be responsible.
- [01:28]
Unidentified Military Official
They're gonna have no bridges, they're gonna have no power plants.
- [01:32]
Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight.
- [01:41]
Martin DeCaro
President Trump and Pete Hegseth's barbarism may shock the world, but an old idea can be found in their threats. Wars aren't won only by killing enemy soldiers. Wars might be won and quickly by bombing the enemy country's capacity to make war or by terrorizing its citizens from above. For these ideas, we can thank an Italian theorist who published an important book more than 100 years ago. That's next as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [02:10]
Narrator (WWII Historical Reenactment)
Today, the Wheel has turned full circle. Berliners are undergoing the ordeal to which they unprotestingly committed the great cities of Europe.
- [02:18]
David M. Kennedy
The first part was long range bombers, which he said could be developed and were could reach into the enemy's heartland or homeland and so disrupt basic industrial capacity, transportation, energy production, communication and so on that the adversary would be unable to support his force in the field. And that's a fairly straightforward Way to think about the essential nature of strategic bombing. But the other target in the enemy's homeland, besides industrial capacity, infrastructure and so on, was civilian morale. And he used the word terrorize advisedly.
- [03:00]
Narrator (WWII Historical Reenactment)
General James Doolittle, General Anderson and other high ranking American officers responsible for the 8th Air Force's heaviest day raid on Berlin meet for the briefing.
- [03:08]
Martin DeCaro
In February 1945, the end of the war in Europe was in sight. On the Eastern Front, the Red army had cut off East Prussia from the rest of Germany as it prepared for a final onslaught on Hitler's Reich. In the West, General Eisenhower signed off on a plan that held the promise of hastening the end of the war, thereby saving the lives of American GIs on the ground in Berlin.
- [03:30]
David M. Kennedy
The aiming points were the center and the heart of the city.
- [03:36]
Martin DeCaro
Its origins dated to the summer of 1944. As historian David M. Kennedy writes in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Freedom from Fear, the British brought to the Americans a proposal aimed explicitly at shattering German civilian morale. Codenamed Thunderclap, it envisioned a combined Anglo American attack on Berlin in overpowering strength enough to kill or seriously injure some 275,000 people. Kennedy goes on to say many of the American airmen recoiled. One senior officer called it another of the British baby killing schemes, and he warned that this would be a blot on the history of the air forces and of the United States. Carl Spaatz then advised Eisenhower that Thunderclap was an attempt by the RAF to have the US tarred with the morale bombing aftermath, which we feel will be terrific. Eisenhower's reply, says Kennedy, was alarming. He had consistently favored precision bombing, said the supreme Allied commander, but I am always prepared to take part in anything that gives real promise to ending the war quickly. The result was an Anglo American attack on Berlin, February 3, 1945, that killed 25,000 civilians.
- [04:48]
Narrator (WWII Historical Reenactment)
Thanks to many previous attacks by the Royal Air Force and the Americans, Berlin was already the most bombed city in the world. But now, starting at midday and spread over only three quarters of an hour, Berlin received 2,500 tons, an American record, though the RAF have twice dropped bigger loads on Berlin. The Huns like things to be done in a colossal way, but it's just possible that this bombing exceeded their wishes or expectations. It all went down into Berlin's Whitehall, where the Nazi bosses were believed to be directing their losing battle against the Red Army. It's reasonable to suppose, too, that 2,500 tons delivered in broad daylight are not calculated to increase Hitler's popularity in a city already crowded with refugees anyway. A number of railway stations were hit, as well as administrative offices near the Willemstrasse and Unter den Linden. Down there they now have fireworks of a different kind from those witnessed by a jubilant people in the good old days of 1938. 1939,
- [05:58]
Martin DeCaro
Bombing enemy factories and transportation hubs, terrorizing civilians to wreck their morale. This is the essence of strategic bombing as envisioned by an Italian with a French sounding last name, Julio Douay, whose book the Command of the air, published in 1921 influenced US war planners decades before a thousand flying Fortresses raided Berlin. Today, the United States and Israel are not carpet bombing or area bombing Tehran as the US and British Strategic Air Forces did to Germany and then Japan in the Second World War. Modern technology makes it possible to precision bomb a factory without leveling everything else around it. But we know precision weapons are not Perfect.
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Interviewer or Reporter
More than 160 children were killed here on Saturday. The strike hit during the morning session in a primary school in Minab.
- [06:50]
David M. Kennedy
A girls school in the southern town of Minab destroyed on Saturday morning. More than 170 people dead.
- [06:56]
Martin DeCaro
And there's also this from the New York Times a couple of days ago. Intense US and Israeli bombardment has destroyed or damaged petrochemical plants in Iran, steel manufacturing plants, pharmaceutical factories, universities, schools, hospitals, banks, seaports, airports, parts of the power grid, bridges, railroads, shops, homes and more. And President Trump threatened to expand the bombing before backing down.
- [07:21]
Interviewer or Reporter
Your messaging on the war has moved from the war is coming to an end to war, going to be bombing Iran to the Stone Ages. And we've heard a range of those kind of messages. So are you. So which is it? Are you winding this down? Are you escalating?
- [07:35]
Unidentified Military Official
I can't tell you. I don't know. I can't tell you. It depends what they do. This is a critical period.
- [07:39]
Martin DeCaro
As I speak into this microphone, a tenuous cease fire is in place. But does strategic bombing work? Iran is still capable of fighting launching missiles. It is holding the Strait of Hormuz. Its people did not stream into the streets to overthrow their government. Did it work in the Second World War? If work is the right word, when hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians were killed in bombing raids, there are obvious moral questions here too, in addition to whether strategic bombing is effective. To Julio Douhay, if an enemy's capacity to make war can be broken, then you can save the lives of your own soldiers and end the war faster.
- [08:22]
Narrator (WWII Historical Reenactment)
If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a reign of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth.
- [08:30]
Martin DeCaro
David M. Kennedy is one of my favorite historians. He is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and the author of Freedom from the American People and Depression and War, 1929-1945. Our conversation next Tap. Subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads, enjoy early access and all of our bonus content, or go to historyasithappens.com to sign up.
- [08:54]
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- [09:23]
Martin DeCaro
to save David M. Kennedy, welcome back to the podcast.
- [09:29]
David M. Kennedy
Glad to be back with you, Martin.
- [09:31]
Martin DeCaro
You know, it was from you that I learned about Julio Dua from reading your big book. Published, wow, a quarter century ago already, wasn't it?
- [09:40]
David M. Kennedy
Yeah, think of that. Well, I'm glad you learned something from that big book.
- [09:44]
Martin DeCaro
I've learned a lot from it. It has served as the basis for many a podcast episode, although here I came to the book as a result of something I read in the New York Times. But I've also seen Douay's name circulating online here and there. I'll just read a couple of sentences from a New York Times article about the bombing of Iran that started on February 28th by the United States and Israel. The war has delivered a staggering blow. Intense US And Israeli bombardment has destroyed or damaged petrochemical plants, steel manufacturing plants, pharmaceutical factories, universities, schools, hospitals, banks, seaports, airports, parts of the power grid, bridges, railroad, shops, homes and more. Is that Douan?
- [10:30]
David M. Kennedy
The short answer is yes. So you want to talk about the person of Julio Douay a little bit?
- [10:34]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, let's start there. Let's start with who was Julio Douay?
- [10:37]
David M. Kennedy
Well, he's an interesting character. He's Italian, although he seems to have a French name. And that's not just some kind of mistake. His family was from Savoy, up in the northwestern corner of what's today Italy, and it was an area that was bicultural, you might say, both Italian speaking and francophone, and it went back and forth between France and Italy over a couple of centuries. But his family moved to the south of Italy, when Savoy was taken over by France at some point in one of the episodes in the early 19th century. And he was a military officer from the beginning. By all we know about him, he was quite a cantankerous soul. He was at one point court martialed and imprisoned for a year because of something he said about the conduct of the Italian army in World War I.
- [11:23]
Martin DeCaro
He may have had a point.
- [11:24]
David M. Kennedy
He was eventually released from prison and served briefly on the Piave River Front, the Isonzo river front up there, northeastern Italy, against the Austro Hungarian Army. And then after the war, he became a theorist. He was in a family of theorists who were trying to think about how the next armed conflict, should it come, could be fought on a different basis from the war that had just concluded, World War I. And as we all know, everybody knows in their school books, World War I was a war, at least on the Western Front, was a war of stasis. Very, very little movement by the troops on either side. God awful bloodletting battles to move the front by a few hundred yards or less. And everybody was looking for a way to avoid fighting that kind of war in the future. So there were a lot of people thinking about this, and Douay was one. Some people were thinking about what came to be called blitzkrieg. The great German theorists of that were Guderian and Rummel. And on the American side, among others, it was General Patton. And their idea was a very rapidly moving motorized armored column could penetrate deep into enemy territory very fast and encircle the adversary force, and the war would be over very quickly. So that was one theory about how the next war could be different. But Douay was, in some sense, even more forward looking, I dare say maybe even more clever, because he seized on the idea that there was a new technology that just appeared in the very early 20th century called the airplane. And the airplane properly deployed, as he thought properly deployed meant, could change the character of warfare. It would not be just another weapon. It would be a transformative piece of technology. Airplanes have been deployed in World War I mostly to support ground troops. That's called tactical air support. But Duet invented a new level of thinking about all this called strategic aerial bombing, as distinguished from tactical air support. So as he wrote in his famous book in 1921, I believe it appears in Italian, Il Dominio del Aria, or the command of the air, he argued that it properly deployed the aircraft, changed the nature of warfare by directing air power not against the enemy's force in the field, but against the Enemy's homeland. And this was, again, there have been some experiments, you might say, with this kind of thing in World War I. Dirigible attacks on London, some German attacks on Liege in Belgium. But it was not very theoretically thought through. And it was. They were kind of isolated episodes. But Douay made a strategic doctrine out of this. He really developed the idea. And it had two parts, one more controversial than the other. The first part was long range bombers, which he said could be developed and were. Could reach into the enemy's heartland or homeland and so disrupt basic industrial capacity, transportation, energy production, communication and so on, that the adversary would be unable to support its force in the field. And that's a fairly straightforward way to think about the essential nature of strategic bombing. But Douay added another element to this, and this has been highly controversial ever since. And he was unapologetic about it. The other target in the enemy's homeland, besides industrial capacity and infrastructure and so on, was civilian morale. And he used the word terrorize advisedly. Strategic bombing, properly deployed, will so terrorize the enemy's population that they will force their government to throw in the towel. And again, it'll be a very quick end of the war. And again, there are other elements in the book, if anybody bothers to read the book these days, that readers in the 21st century will find discomforting. Because he in essence argued that foreshortening the war, any future war, by deploying this new technology, though it might take a lot of civilian lives, would preserve the lives of the cream of society, which was young manhood. So there's a very gendered part of the argument here that, again, modern readers probably find pretty discomforting. But the idea was that there were these two objectives. Destroy the enemy's industrial capacity, infrastructure and terrorize the population.
- [15:39]
Martin DeCaro
I'm not sure either one is correct. Let's start with the second part of that. Terrorizing the civilian population to convince them, well, morale bombing. But if they're living in an authoritarian police state like Nazi Germany, I'm not sure this has ever happened in the history of warfare. Since the development of strategic bombing doctrine, say, North Vietnam. Every time the United States would send in the bombers, the B52s over North Vietnam, it had the purpose of trying to convince the other side to quit or to give more at the negotiating table.
- [16:11]
David M. Kennedy
Table.
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Martin DeCaro
I'm not sure that ever worked.
- [16:13]
David M. Kennedy
Well, there's one conspicuous exception to what you just said, and that's the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki in 1945. Very big exception. But let's go back a bit to earlier phases of World War II, because this became a point of ongoing contestation between the air power people and the infantry, or ground people and the navy, for that matter, in both this country and in Great Britain. I might say, parenthetically, that of all the militaries around the world that studied Douay and adopted his or thought about adopting his doctrine, only two actually did. The UK The United Kingdom and the United States. Both made the bet that in the event of a future war, they would place their principal emphasis on building a strong strategic air arm, and a navy, too, and, of course, a ground force. But putting the strategic air arm at the center of the equation was something that happened only in the UK and in the US Of A. So when the war gets going, the United States enters the war. The first American strategic raid on Nazi occupied Europe happens in August 1942. And the decision to do this was made about a decade earlier, by the way, when the decision was made to build a strategic air arm, which is a big deal, you had to get the factories built and built, the airplanes and so on. And for the next three years, think of the date. August 1942 is the first American strategic air strike on Nazi occupied continent of Europe. The war is over. Just about exactly three years later, the war in Europe ends in May of 1945. So the principal front from which the United States carried the battle to its Nazi adversary was in fact from the air. And the debate went on right down to the war's conclusion in Europe whether bombing all by itself might be sufficient to bring the Germans to heel. And of course, the infantry people like Bradley and Eisenhower and others said, no, we must have ground troops. And that's the only way we're going to bring this to conclusion. Conclusion. So one of the things that happened toward the end of the war was the War Department created something called the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. And this was an effort to be scientific about gathering information about just what exactly had been the role of air power in eventually defeating the Nazis. And they sent in teams of economists and chemists and physicists and sociologists and psychiatrists and so on to try to answer this question. And the result was inconclusive. They couldn't come to a sharp conclusion about whether air power had been a significant or the most significant factor in forcing the defeat of Germany. Then the next thing that happens, of course, is the Enola Gay and Box car drop these two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, and then Japan surrenders and the air Power people immediately say, see, this is proof of concept that we never had to invade Japan, never had to put ground troops on the beach, and we brought Japan to heel simply by the application of strategic air power.
- [19:11]
Martin DeCaro
Well, overconfidence in air power has continued to be a problem to this very day. Even if it's not strategic or area bombing or morale bombing, even if it's precision strikes that are aimed to take out one terrorist, one factory, what have you, there's still overconfidence, air power. But let's go back to the United States during World War II. I mentioned the term morale bombing. There was a terror bombing, right? Eisenhower attacking Berlin in 1945. I'm sure the German people were demoralized and wanted to quit, but given their government, that was not going to happen. They couldn't convince their government to quit. Part two of this rather long setup. David Kennedy, on the American side, didn't they convince themselves they weren't really going after civilians? That was the British job. And Carl Spaatz, who was in charge of the American side, convinced himself they were only going after factories and doing it so effectively that the invasion of Normandy would be unnecessary.
- [20:10]
David M. Kennedy
Yeah, that was the argument.
- [20:11]
Martin DeCaro
Gosh.
- [20:12]
David M. Kennedy
And yes, you're absolutely right. At least the official position of the United States Army Air Force, as it was then called, was that it only bombed by daylight and the precision bombing on targets of high economic or military value. While the Brits, on the other hand, who had suffered tremendous losses from their air fleet in the first several months of World War II, gave up on precision bombing. Bombed mostly just by night. The euphemism they use as their area bombing, meaning they get over a city and just drop loads of bombs indiscriminately. That was the terror part of the Douayan logic in spades. The Americans like to convince themselves or reassure themselves that they didn't do business that way. They only hit these high value targets. But as you just intimated, that was a little bit of Hypocrisy, and not 100%, but hypocrisy, after all, is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. So there, there was some virtue in it. But you mentioned that raid on Berlin in February 1945, where the air people came to Eisenhower and they said, the Germans are back on their back foot. They're just about to go. If we do one big morale bombing, terror bombing raid on their capital, that'll be it. That'll break their will. So Eisenhower for the first time, officially okayed a terror bombing raid. There was no particular military or economic logic to it.
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Narrator (WWII Historical Reenactment)
As the Red army approaches from the east, as bombs crash down from Allied planes, as the fires spread and the refugees increase, Nazi leaders, leaders raised the old cry of fight to the last. But in one respect, they have changed their tune. No longer do they call Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt military idiots. They've now been transformed into arch criminals. In fact, of course, they know that the big three have beaten them. And they're afraid.
- [22:07]
David M. Kennedy
We think that 25,000 civilians died that one night in Berlin in February of 1945. And of course, the Germans didn't surrender, not for another three months. So among the things that the Strategic Bombing Survey people found out, two things. One was the capacity of the German economy to distribute its productive facilities across a very wide geographic area so that wouldn't concentrate to make them easy targets confounded some of the logic of strategic bombing. Secondly, they found that in many cases, again, the evidence is conflicting and not 100% consistent here, but they found that terror bombing, morale bombing, what the British commander called unhousing the civilian population of the adversary, had just the opposite effect of what was intended, that it stiffened people's will to resist. They resented being made targets of a terror campaign and recommitted themselves to the cause of victory for their own side. So there are perverse implications of this as well.
- [23:09]
Martin DeCaro
As you mentioned here on page 603 of Freedom from Fear, a 1926American training manual spoke of air power as a method of imposing will by terrorizing the whole population. And a 1930 manual acknowledged the importance of attacks on civilian populations in the back areas of the hostile country. So Douay's ideas infiltrated American thinking pretty early on in the 1920s. And we've just been discussing at least
- [23:37]
David M. Kennedy
again, let me repeat. Because this is a sensitive area, morally speaking, the official American position was that it only dropped bombs on high value economic and military targets. In practice, that was less true than people desired or told each other. But it was at least it was official policy. And it exercised some kind of constraint on the American Air Force until very, very late in the war. But a former student of mine actually taught at West Point for many years, named Conrad Crane, he did a very detailed granular study of the actual execution of American strategic bombing in Europe, in the sense he revisited the Strategic Bombing Survey, he did interviews with pilots and crews and so on, and he found that there was casual talk at some points amongst the air crews when they were launched out over Germany, and for whatever reason, they couldn't reach their target. Either it was occluded by weather or the enemy anti aircraft program was too stiff for them or whatever and it was a badge of disgrace to return to your base with your bomb bay still full. So they would just dump the bombs wherever they thought they might do some damage. They couldn't really see through the cloud cover. Often the kind of sick joke that circulated among some of these crews, those bombing days were called women and children days where they really kind of by default embrace the terror dimension of the Douay and strategy. But again, it's important to, I think, recognize that at least officially, that was not the doctrine. And there was, there was an honest effort to try to hold to the bombing only strategic targets. And here's another footnote to this which I've always found interesting. The air power people on the US succeeded sufficiently at the end of the war, just after the war, in creating a new military branch, the Air Force. It was part of the army until the end of World War II and beyond a little bit. But in Great Britain, where there was expressed moral discomfort during the war and certainly at the end and after the war about the so called area bombing campaign, the head of the Bomber Command in the uk, his name was Arthur Harris, he was known as Bomber Harris. He's the only senior commander in the British side who was not elevated to the peerage after the war. He was knighted, but he wasn't made a lord. And that's thought to this day to be some kind of an indication of the British public's bad conscience about the way they conducted the war.
- [26:04]
Martin DeCaro
I'll add two more remarks about the Second World War and then we'll move on to another subject, the fight that you detail in your book. Eisenhower, trying to get the air arms under the command of Supreme Allied Headquarters. They were acting independently and also driving this policy forward. Carl Spaatz. It was enormous cost to the bomber crews themselves before they could get the proper fighter, fighter escort. So many bomber crews got over their targets or didn't get over their targets, were blown out of the skies in the supposedly self defending B17 fortress, which wasn't a fortress at all. So in the interest of time here, David, after 1945, wasn't all this supposed to be outlawed? The indiscriminate bombing of civilians.
- [26:52]
David M. Kennedy
This is interesting. You and your listeners have probably heard of the Geneva Conventions. They go back well into the early 20th century. And before that there were conventions at the Hague which are kind of the predecessors to Geneva Conventions. But up down through World War II, those international conventions were Mostly directed to ensuring proper treatment of prisoners of war and in ensuring certain civil liberties or at least basic provisions of the staff of life to people in occupied countries or territories. And there was no explicit address to the question of what it is or is not legitimate to do to civilian populations in wartime. And that becomes part of the Geneva Convention of 1949. So it's after World War II. So, yes, there is an agreement, and the best of my knowledge, most nations signed it, including the United States. And it does prohibit deliberate targeting of civilians as an instrument of war. And you might ask, well, how is it the United States figured prominently in this discussion, having just dropped two weapons of mass destruction on two Japanese cities, Quite deliberate targeting of civilians to force Japan to surrender. There's been some element of bad conscience in this society ever since about those episodes. Episodes. We were familiar with those. But nonetheless, the United States signed the Geneva Convention of 1949. And ever since, again, the language enters popular discourse today about collateral damage and protecting civilians from harm. It's supposed to be a rule of warfare that you cannot violate with impunity. Well, it's hard to argue that Israeli Defense Force in Gaza, or recently the United States and Iran have scrupulously adhered to the dictates of that convention.
- [28:40]
Martin DeCaro
Donald Trump was just threatening to do a perversion, even a more extreme version of Douay in Iran. As it is, as I said at the top of our conversation, plants, steel manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, universities, schools, hospitals, banks, seaports, airports. That's right out of the Douay playbook and with modern armaments, are so much more destructive than the stuff they were dropping in the Second World War. Israel and Gaza, I mean, there's something else operating there as well, what the genocide scholar Dirk Moses calls the permanent security logic, where a genocidal and military logic can happen at the same time. But almost any military, we know this, David, any military, any government can say, well, we're really going after these guys. Hamas, trying to cripple Iran's military industries. You can always point to something that's a legitimate target. In the meantime, in the process, you're destroying everything else.
- [29:36]
David M. Kennedy
Well, that's right. And in fact, the rhetoric that President Trump used recently about destroying a civilization.
- [29:43]
Unidentified Military Official
But we're giving them, we're giving them till tomorrow, 8 o' clock Eastern Time. And after that, they're going to have no bridges, they're going to have no power plants. Stone ages.
- [29:57]
David M. Kennedy
Yeah, if you take that at face value, that that is a just a bold face statement that we're going to commit war crimes. That would be a recognizable, almost unarguably clear case of a internationally agreed war crime. That's one of the definitions of genocide, is that you seek to actually exterminate an entire culture in all of its expression and manifestation, not just its human logic or human beings, but the cultural heritage and the monuments, the history and so on and so forth. It would make me ashamed of my country if we fully embraced that logic.
- [30:30]
Martin DeCaro
What do you think accounts for of the overconfidence in air power on the part of the United States, the idea that you can win a war with air power alone?
- [30:40]
David M. Kennedy
Well, let's go back to something that Douay said, that trading some of the enemy's civilian lives for the preservation of your young men's lives was a bargain he was willing to make. A less malicious version of that, I guess, is that the air power advocates have long thought that proper application of air power was a way to foreshorten any conflict. And the shorter the conflict, arguably, you lessen the loss of life. So there is. There is a kind of almost a feeling that air power can be antiseptically applied and it could do the job. And we don't need to risk our lives, the lives of our young people. I, not too long ago visited Creech and Nellis Air Force bases in southern Nevada. That's where they train drone pilots. And they also actually operate sub drones over at that time, over Iraq. So that's how long ago I was there. They actually operate them from stations in southern Nevada. Operators there are actually flying drones over places in Iraq at that time. And there was a lot of controversy in our visit there about whether those drone pilots sitting in overstuffed chairs in air conditioned rooms in southern Nevada were warriors or not, whether they were eligible for military decoration. And again, no easy answer to that kind of question. But I can tell you this. It was so antiseptic. These young people were directing munitions at people 8,000 miles away, people from whom they were in no danger whatsoever. They couldn't possibly be touched by their adversary. Whenever they directed fire that killed somebody, they were required to go into therapy. So again, it's a recognition that this is a different kind of warfare. And to talk about asymmetrical, and you could sit in the safety of southern Nevada and kill people wholesale in Iraq. I mean, the idea that any warrior in Thermopylae or Waterloo or whatever would need therapy after killing an adversary is just crazy because you're in combat and you're both in the heat of battle. But this is a different kind of warfare and it's, it has its own psychological characteristics that I think are really, really strange.
- [32:51]
Martin DeCaro
Dehumanizing video game kind of warfare?
- [32:55]
David M. Kennedy
Well, yeah, absolutely, yeah. If you, in fact, if you watch the screens of these operators that I was watching, you couldn't help but make the association with video games. And there was some kind of low level discussion when we were there that the people they recruited to do this were, were people who were particularly good at video games.
- [33:11]
Martin DeCaro
Final question here, but briefly, I'll clarify something I said earlier during one of my lengthy questions about how any government, any military, can point at a target and say, that's a legit target and we're going after only the, the militia or the enemy military. What I really wanted to get at was the dual use issue. That pharmaceutical plant could be used to make XYZ that goes into bombs and that really gets sinister. So my final question is, when you heard the Israeli US I don't want to call it a plan, magical thinking that by assassinating with airstrikes Iran's leadership, it could collapse the regime and lead to mass protests in the streets. What did you think?
- [33:54]
David M. Kennedy
I think, I'm not sure if I heard you use the word. I think you did, but if you didn't, we both deserve to use it as hubris. Was the assumption that we are so omnipotent and omniscient that we can surgically target these kinds of attacks on individuals and the response will be exactly what we expect? Well, we learned it actually, that's not the case. Apparently in Iran, as far as I know, we're getting leadership as the replacement cadre of leadership is actually more hardline and less flexible than their predecessors. But also, from all we know, the expected uprising of the Iranian people, there's no sign of that whatsoever. So again, I think you've introduced another layer of complexity here that arguably there are targets that appear on the surface to be civilian but can lend themselves to some kind of military application. And then we enter this zone of complexity where whether attacking that target is legitimate or not, and I must say, embedded in many if not most American military units until recently were people from the Judge Advocate General Corps who were there to advise precisely on these kinds of questions. Is this a legitimate target? Is there some collateral damage that we can legitimately justify? So on and so forth. And this Defense Department, it's my understanding, has stripped those Judge Advocate General advisors out of many, many, many units. So they've apparently opened the aperture where it's easier for commanders on the ground or in the fray of battle to risk collateral damage to a degree that they weren't. So they weren't so able to do as recently as several months ago.
- [35:35]
Martin DeCaro
Well, you know, Douay had a point. He had witnessed Italy's performance, if you will, during the First World War 11 battles of the Isonzo River. His experience was trench warfare. So, you know, he had a point. We need a way to break away from this. But in those days, correct me if I'm wrong, the idea that wars, wars were necessary and unavoidable. So if we're going to have to keep fighting them, maybe this is the technology that'll make us avoid fighting the last war. But today, with conventional weapons being so destructive, to hear what you just said about, you know, the legal acrobatics that are being performed to justify the destruction of another country is really disheartening.
- [36:16]
David M. Kennedy
Maybe on another occasion we could extend this discussion because we're not talking just about air power, but also the application of all kinds of artificial intelligence and other information technologies to make this kind of warfare ever more lethal.
- [36:31]
Unidentified Military Official
It means we will fly all day, all night, day and night, finding, fixing and finishing the missiles and defense industrial base of the Iranian military, finding and fixing their leaders and their military leaders. Flying over Tehran, flying over Iran, flying over their capital, flying over the rgb, Iranian leaders looking up and seeing only US and Israeli air power every minute of every day until we decide it's over.
- [37:07]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of History as it Happens, we're going to stay on the subject of war in the greater Middle East. What does Greater Israel ideology mean? What are its historical origins? Origins? What does it mean today as Israel wages war in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran? We'll be joined by Ian Lustic next as we report history as it happens. And you can stay up to date on what I'm working on here by signing up for my free newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for History as it happens.
- [37:44]
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- [38:26]
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