He fell for the "strategic bombing" meme

>he fell for the "strategic bombing" meme

Has strategic bombing ever affected the outcome in a war? Isn't close air support to help win key battles a far more vital and effective role for an Air Force??

Ask Hiroshima and Nagasaki desu

Nips surrendered cause of soviet invasion. They weren't scared of Americans at all

I mean strategic bombing lost value when it become so effective that we couldn't use it anymore.

you're not wrong in terms of efficient use of assets for actual battlefield results and territory taken. Strategic bombing can at least hypothetically however have a great psychological effect, breaking the enemy's will to fight. This can, of course, greatly backfire (see, e.g., the London Blitz). However, if a country is particularly vulnerable to strategic bombing, the fear can be enough. The best example is probably the Dutch surrender in WW2 following the bombing of Rotterdam. I'd argue the Dutch could still have put up a hell of an opposition to a forced invasion, but the very densely packed urban environment and the desire not to see the massive destruction and death repeated in Amsterdam etc. lead to surrender.

In terms of actually strategically disrupting supply chains, airfields, etc. though, you're usually right. Industry and logistics are often far more widespread and adaptable than strategic planners suppose.

>strategic bombing
>leveling an entire city
not the same

It guarantees that people who value their lives don't pick a fight with you

when will this meme fucking die. What fleet would the Soviets have invaded with? I'll totally grant they were roflstomping the Japs out of Manchuria, but they posed precisely zero threat to the home islands.

Why were all the major German Industries underground by late 1944? Did they enslave moles and ground squirrels to operate their machinery?

Strategic bombing won WW2 moron. How else were Germany's oil refineries destroyed and their tribal settlement tier cities leveled?

Load of crap, the nukes objectively ended the war.

Close air support is outdated far more than strategic bombing.

You tell me.
>Americans nuked people after bombing them this much
The real evil, desu. Bombing destroys a cities capability to give to the war effort, it destroys pivotal factories and supply lines. Are you under the impression wars are won and fought only on open battlefields?

They were not strategic in the least amount of sense, almost all army personall who actually spearheaded the war denounce the strategic use of the nukes to next to nothing. They uphold conventional bombing (pic related) as the reason why Japan was defeated, using the nukes was a simple test of a new billion dollar weapon.

That's lIterally what the term strategic bombing meant until the beginning of the PGM era in the 80s.

The point isn't just to win, but to make them pay.
Countries that lose air superiority get told hard.

This is why no one likes Veeky Forums

Ofcourse strategic bombing helps. Every bit helps. And a lot of bits may eventually win the war.
The Dutch surrendered before the bombing of R'dam.

Jesus Christ, I can't tell if you're a tankie or a weaboo. I also can't decide which is worse.

I have always felt that strategic bombing only works when you have the strategic initiative. If you don't have the initiative, the enemy can just adjust the pace of his operations to work around the bombing.

What does this map mean?

Maybe if you read the text at the bottom you'd know.

The biggest arguments against it's effectiveness are often that it failed in Vietnam and Afghanistan despite a fuck ton of bombs being used.

This misses that all the material used in those wars was transported in from abroad and largely paid for by foreigners.

>Slowly but surely wear down an entire economy of war, and a nations resolve to fight it
>Look I killed that tank

Japan got pretty fucked up by it. America destroyed their entire war industry without a boot on Japanese soil. This isn't including atomic bombardment.

What strategic bombing does is force your opponent to dedicate anti-air assets away from the front while presenting a very real threat to the enemy's strategic assets. Yes, there are generally ways to mitigate the effects strategic bombing has, but enacting that again takes resources that could be spent elsewhere.

Outside the obvious cases in WW2, a good case study for strategic bombing would be the Gulf War. The Coalition was devastating the Iraqis on every level, and the air campaign was so effective that the Iraqi army could have collapsed without any real close air support bombing at all. By the time the ground campaign had started, many units on the ground in Kuwait hadn't even received food in weeks, and when the Iraqis requested an armistice they had to use a helicopter to fly to peace talks because the transportation network in the country had been so devastated that it was not longer possible to drive from Baghdad to Basra.

Terror bombing is what's worthless. Real strategic bombing (as in bombing targets of military value) has proven to have atleast a significant impct on a war.

>America destroyed their entire war industry without a boot on Japanese soil
Eh not really. What Japan did to rectify the situation was turn every building into a manufacturing facility. You could go into practically any house after the war and find a drill press or some other device to keep the war effort moving.