I must say I’m a little surprised myself - that a planner and scientific analyst would confuse potential with realized capability. You flew much more modern aircraft than those which bombed Germany in the early 1940s, and yet I will venture to say that you wouldn’t want to be in a foxhole when a B-52 was level bombing from high altitude and was aiming within 100 yards of you and flying directly toward you. And that’s with radar helping the B-52 know its own velocity much better than the B-17 crew knew their position, velocity, and the wind conditions. Even with the B-2, they realized excellent bombing accuracy by dropping guided missiles known as “smart bombs.”Which ought to tell you something about the limits of the accuracy potential of WWII bombers.
One cannot help but note that c_I_c comes tantalizingly close, but misses the mark - as do many who *think* they know a lot about something, but do not.
After getting to know many officers from all US armed services and several other (not all allied) nations, I am aghast that most leaders still flounder about only a few steps out of the horse and buggy era, when it comes to their grasp of air power.
I will concede to an imprecise (too concise?) choice of words: in 1918, the strategic impact of air power (only one portion of which can be termed “direct” bombardment) was merely potential: the more foresightful were just beginning to imagine the concepts, while the engineering, manufacturing, and operational developments enabling sufficient ordnance delivery with sufficient accuracy to affect outcomes were yet to be forged. The United States did more than any other nation to turn “potential” into “actual” in the 1930s, and that power was brought to horrific reality in the early 1940s.
Perhaps I should have written that potential to affect outcomes by direct air attack (and a whole bunch of other airpower - created or facilitated capabilities no other poster has yet bothered to bring up) became actualities on a small but decisive scale during World War Two.
Vexingly, the US military establishment itself has been retreating from the level of air power it built up in the late 1940s and 1950s. Some blame the inconclusive involvement in Southeast Asia, but I date it to August 1945: on learning about the use of atomic weapons in action against Imperial Japan, our self-appointed moral betters (the religious and scientific communities, chiefly) promptly declared such methods “morally unacceptable” and commenced what became a decades-long mission to “re-educate” the American public. They claim they had only the highest of motives; perhaps they were upset that we’d won so easily.
Purity of motives aside, by the early 1990s their relentless cultural counterattack bore fruit. It was aided at propitious moments by elements within other defense establishment branches, and even within the United States Air Force itself. Noting the ever-dwindling size of our arsenals, one cannot deny that the peace freaks have been victorious.
On a purely technical level, airborne radar did nothing to reduce bomber miss distances that c_I_c cannot resist lecturing us about ... throwaway comments about B-52s versus B-17s amount to very little: radar allowed a lot of other things to happen, but when pinpoint aiming accuracy was called for, optical systems reigned supreme for far longer than most citizens know. It might interest the forum to learn that various versions of the Norden bombsight saw duty in Southeast Asia. B-52 bombing and navigation systems of the day (none of which remain in service today) were designed for other tasks; the “guided missiles” and “smart” bombs c_I_c purports to know something about are of no moment to this discussion, as they operate by principles that are categorically different.
Many additional blunders have been committed in this thread, on levels from the minutely technical to the most overarching concepts of conflict. I have neither the time nor the bandwidth to refute them all - assuming I could do so without boring the forum into a coma.
Suffice to say that objections to air campaigns of WWII reduce to the complaint - endlessly repeated - that it somehow the Allies were not playing “fair” by raining death and destruction from on high. All the moralistic verbiage spilled across countless pages since then amount to precious little beyond post hoc window dressing: it bears repeating that complainers have gotten the rhetorical cart before the horse.
First, win the war. Then, worry about morality. If this formulation bothers you, I can only remark parenthetically that if we fail to win, all talk of morality (or the lack of it) stops.