Air superiority is supposed to deliver a quick triumph. But history has shown that promise to be written on the wind
To explore the roots of Donald Trump’s Iran military strategy and the pugilistic rhetoric of his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, means looking back 105 years. In 1921, a year before Benito Mussolini and his blackshirts marched on Rome to launch the Fascist era, an Italian general named Giulio Douhet published The Command of the Air, proposing a revolution in warfare.
Victory in the future, he said, would no longer come from the grinding trench combat of the Great War. Instead it meant large-scale aerial bombardments, targeting not just combatants but civilians and civilian infrastructure and logistics.
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