Russia’s Strategic Bombing Campaign Is Ill-Conceived

Regular Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian power stations disrupt power and water supplies, as well as cellular coverage, in Ukrainian regions for hours, sometimes days on end. The attacks began after a powerful explosion damaged a key bridge connecting Russia with occupied Crimea, and many have interpreted them as Putin’s revenge for the sabotage and for recent battlefield defeats. They are, however, more than that: Strategic bombing is a time-honored, if disputed, war-winning tool. But Russia’s military strategists seem to have missed or ignored some important developments in the debate around it.

Strategic bombing, or attacks from the air on an adversary’s critical infrastructure and industry as well as their surrounding civilian centers, has been a feature of Western warfighting since World War II. The practice inflicted lasting damage on many a German and Japanese city, including Dresden and Hiroshima. In later wars — in Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Iraq — it was employed in a more limited way and with increasing precision, leading to more infrastructure damage and fewer civilian deaths. Throughout the post-World War II era, experts and pundits alike have debated its effectiveness while stressing its unquestionable brutality.

There is still no expert consensus on whether strategic bombing sufficiently undermines an enemy’s physical capacity and national morale to justify its human and financial cost. Some have even described it as counterproductive, since such campaigns can cause a rally-around-the-flag effect — something that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has attempted to cultivate in his public denunciations of the Russian missile strikes.