Why Air Power Alone Won’t Beat ISIS by Max Boot, Wall Street Journal
Ever since the dawn of the air age more than a century ago, military strategists have been prone to the delusion that bombing by itself can win wars.
Today the air-power fantasy is that dropping enough bombs on Islamic State jihadists will get the job done in Iraq and Syria. The approach is a bipartisan, indeed multinational, daydream, shared by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, and now by Britain and France as well.
Military history offers little justification for such faith…