Bombing alone didn’t take out North Vietnam or Nazi Germany, and enough conventional bombs to reduce 75% of Imperial Japan to rubble wasn’t enough to make them wave the white flag until we induced two ground-level sunrises.
The Luftwaffe couldn’t make the British crack under the Blitz either.
Non-nuke air and missile attacks have never by themselves induced a surrender or triggered a civilian revolution to produce regime change in any meaningful form in modern conflicts.
Good points, pburiak. Conventional bombing can do a lot of things. Destroy infrastructure, wreck production facilities, etc.
But it’s quite clear from history that it alone cannot force a country to surrender.
I remember seeing a picture of a street in bombed-out German town. The war was still on. Someone put up a sign, in German. Translated, it read “You can destroy our town but not our will.”
Sure, maybe the propaganda ministry put it there. But the sign was made from a bedsheet. It looked legit to me.
That is the conventional wisdom. Maybe this time really is different:
There was a giant propaganda operation during WWII overselling our bombing effectiveness (Norden Bombsight etc). Almost every bomb now is accurate to a few feet. Navigation and electronic targeting intelligence (e.g. the pagers, the traffic cameras, drones,AI ) are also more advanced. Airstrikes in WWII didn’t decapitate German and Japan leadership like we did Iran the first day.
We are relying on the locals to mop up, and their disposition to us is also better than WWII. I think that the steps, logistics, psychological factors, materiel requirements, and timing can be predicted by people like Special Forces and Mossad. My guess is a lot is happening but the professionals know it takes months for insurgencies and revolution to work, thus the slow roll negotiation phase. And our side can’t talk about thatif they want it to work, unlike airstrikes.
Even that didn't do it on it's own.
It wasn't until the Soviets declared war and invaded that Japan finally gave up. For all their bad decisions in the war, avoiding Soviet occupation (aside from Sakhalin and the Kuril islands) was probably their smartest move.