Making sense of military options in a complex and chaotic world

Few aircraft define the Second World War as much as the Lancaster bomber.

With just two airworthy today, it is a relic of a bygone age, a petrol-fuelled analogue weapon of war, its interior a claustrophobic hellhole. Reeking of a heady combination of leather, oil, puke, sweat, and cordite, and crammed with equipment including 10,000 rounds of ammunition for its eight defensive guns, the “Lanc” was capable, typically, of carrying a bomb load of around 14,000 lbs (over 6,000 kg), though it’s long, unobstructed bomb-bay meant it was versatile enough to be modified to accommodate the 12,000 lb (about 5,500 kg) “Tallboy” and the 22,000 lb (about 10,000 kg) “Grand Slam” bombs. It was the aircraft used in the Dambuster raids carrying Barnes Wallis’s ingenious “bouncing bomb”.

It was a most dangerous, terrifying business. Out of the 7,377 Avro Lancaster bombers built, 3,249 were lost in action.

The average age of the crew of seven – pilot, navigator, wireless operator, flight engineer, bomb-aimer/front gunner, mid-upper gunner, and rear gunner – was just 22, and yet they had to manage unimaginable stress. As one navigator (cited in Sarah-Louise Miller’s excellent new book on the Lancaster) described his task, it was like “taking a seven-hour maths exam while people tried to kill you.’”

The number of casualties was stupendous. During the war, out of a total of 125,000 Royal Air Force bomber command aircrew, 55,573 were killed, 8,403 were wounded, and 9,838 became prisoners of war. 

This means a total of 73,700 airmen (nearly 60% of the total) were casualties. This rate was only higher in the German U-boat service, where fatalities were around three-quarters of the total of 40,000 crew members.

Stalemate

As technology rapidly developed and the war on the ground reached a grinding stalemate in 1917 in World War I, General Jan Smuts was instructed by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George to produce a report on the organisation of the war in the air, out of which was born the RAF as a separate service. In acknowledging the future role of air power, Smuts wrote: “The day may not be far off when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and population centres on a vast scale may become the principal operations of war, to which the older forms of military and naval operations may become secondary and subordinate.”

Early on in the Second World War the RAF’s value was recognised in strategic terms. It was able to take the fight to Nazi Germany despite Britain’s obvious military limitations:  the result of years of underspending and thus unpreparedness.

As Churchill put it in a September 1940 memo to Cabinet: “The navy can lose us the war, but only the air force can win it … the fighters are our salvation ….. the bombers alone provide the means of victory.’”

During the Second World War there was a debate about the method and value of strategic bombing, not least given the costs in blood and treasure, among both the bombers and the civilian populations below.

Today that debate rages on, spurred once more by the attacks this past month on Iran. But as the dust settles, and the theatre of clumsy claim and counter-claim dissipates, a clearer pattern is emerging.

Spinning Technology Revolution

The first is the complexity of the technology involved, and its wider impact.

The bombing attacks carried out by both the Israeli and US air forces on Iran have had a strategic impact, the former over a sustained 12-day campaign, the latter being a precision strike centred around the 30,000 lb (14,000 kg) GBU-57 bunker-buster munitions, along with salvos of sea-launched cruise missiles.

The question is less about the principle of the impact than its duration, and that depends on its linkage to diplomacy and other tools to end war by resolving the conditions behind it.

The Israeli air assault Operation Rising Lion, which began a week before the US raid, hit dozens of military and nuclear sites, including the main uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, centrifuge workshops near Tehran, laboratories in Isfahan, and the Arak nuclear reactor, without its losing any aircraft.

Israel killed as many as nine nuclear scientists and some 30 senior military commanders, including the chief of Iran’s armed forces, Mohammad Bagheri; the head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force, Amir Ali Hajizadeh; and the chief of the Revolutionary Guard, Hossein Salami.

The Israeli operation was the second such attack, the first on 26 October 2024 (Operation Days of Repentance) being aimed specifically at Iran’s Russian-supplied air defence network comprising sophisticated S300/400 missiles, along with old US-supplied F-14 and F-5 fighter aircraft.

In both instances the operations were led by Israel’s F-35 stealth fighter variant, the Adir, against the anti-aircraft batteries and command-and-control centres. In their wake came non-stealthy F-15s, F-16s, refuelling tankers, attack drones and surveillance planes, along with helicopters to deliver special forces to locate and destroy mobile missile launchers.

The special forces units in turn used quadcopters and microdrones to attack their targets, enabling them to stand off and precisely attack their targets with what are effectively inexpensive cruise missiles possessing real-time targeting inputs.

The war in Ukraine has also several lessons, some similar, not least the rapid pace of technological evolution, especially of unmanned weaponry, to the point that today drone upgrades are made in real time between the engineers and frontline combat troops, and the price of a FPV (first person view) kamikaze drone has dropped tenfold from the war’s start in February 2022.

This links to the increasing rapidity of procurement decisions and design, and of mass production processes. There is little use in developing a missile now for production in 24 months, at this rate of technology revolution.

Dramatic turnaround

This has enabled a dramatic turnaround in strategic circumstances for Ukraine. Russia has, for example, lost over one-third of its Black Sea fleet, “rendering it incapable of fulfilling its operational functions”. More than half of Russia’s amphibious assault capability is estimated to have been destroyed. Some marine units have had to be “renewed” three times over, and its missile carriers have had to be relocated from Crimean ports to Novorossiysk to shelter them from Ukraine’s attacks.

All this means that Russia can no longer blockade Ukrainian ports. There is a similar pattern emerging in the air domain where, despite much smaller numbers of aircraft, “Ukraine has effectively neutralized Russia’s air superiority”. A combination of F-16s, the range of US-supplied ATACMS missiles, drone attacks, and Ukrainian air defence has fundamentally altered the Russian strategy.

Russia has moved 90% of its warplanes beyond the 300km range of ATACMS ballistic missiles. The frequency of Russian air-launched strikes and the deployment of guided glide bombs, a key (and devastating) aspect of its ground offensive operations, have decreased by as much as 75% in some areas, despite the increase in the frequency and scale of drone raids such as those launched on Kyiv this month.

Ukraine has similarly proved to be able to withstand Russia’s supposed cyber advantage, leveraging partnerships and commercial sources. Similarly, though Russia numerically at least possesses the upper hand in the war of attrition, the extent of Ukrainian territory under Moscow’s control has remained consistent at around 20%, while Russia’s tactics to advance further have cost it more than a million casualties, currently running at over 1,000 per day and, according to Ukrainian estimates, the loss of 34,000 tanks and other armoured vehicles, suggesting the campaign is driven by political necessity rather than the art of military strategy.

Attrition

Logistical strength is key in such an attritional war and yet Russia’s capacity has similarly been found wanting: a weakness exploited by Ukrainian attacks on logistical hubs and, recently, in its spectacular drone attack on Moscow’s airbases and production facilities. Ukraine is less vulnerable, not least since its production facilities are decentralised and, in the higher-tech area, located outside the country and in those of its Western allies. 

The use of war as a crucible for rapid technology change and shortening of procurement cycles is not new. The Lancaster was developed out of the failure of the twin-engine Manchester bomber. It first flew only in January 1941, but by the end of the war in May 1945, the Lanc was the mainstay of the RAF bomber fleet.

Several strategic lessons from this picture stand out, not least the need for analytical nuance despite the media preference for binary pronouncements of loss and victory.  Modern wars, as recognized by advanced military doctrines like NATO’s, unfold across multiple domains: land, air, sea, space, cyberspace, and the cognitive sphere. Ukraine’s war with Russia is no exception, encompassing all these areas.

Surprisingly, Ukraine is prevailing in at least four domains and contesting Russia in the remaining two. Here is a strategic overview of the main ones.

The Diplomatic Link

Returning to the bombing attacks on Iran, the second aspect concerns the ability to link the attacks to diplomacy and thus its enduring strategic impact.

This operation was designed to prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear weapons capability, or prevent it from being close to doing so. For Israel, this development would present an existential threat. Not for nothing have senior Iranians described Israel as a “one weapon country”.

The military option arose because of the failure of diplomacy to deliver. While diplomatic rounds might have slowed the Iranian programme, the reality is that Iran is closer than ever before to building a nuclear weapon.

Iran was (at least) close to having enough enriched uranium to break out and the IAEA had lost track of exactly how far advanced the Iranian programme was (and the uranium). Best assessments suggested a capability to produce a small number of weapons in a few months, possibly even weeks.

This relates to a question of timing. 

Not expected

Militarily the best time to do this would have been out of the blue, when tensions were low and a strike was not expected. No such moment has existed since the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023.

Even if the enriched Iranian uranium was moved in the run-up to the attacks, the aim was clear: an Iran several years away from achieving a nuclear weapons capability would be better than an Iran just months away; and an Iran several months away from achieving a nuclear weapons capability would be better than an Iran just weeks away. Any delay matters materially to this outcome, given the speed by which a nuclear weapon can now be created, no matter its technical complexity.

Strip away the rhetoric and speculation, and it seems likely that this delay has been achieved.

Not all nations are similarly vulnerable to nuclear weapons. For Israel it is even more pertinent, since its tiny geography and dense population make it particularly vulnerable to even a  small number of weapons of mass destruction.

Genius

The genius of the Israeli action was how it managed to get the tail to wag the dog, compelling the stronger partner to intervene, not for the first (or last) time in international relations. Perhaps the most memorable example of wagging the dog is the 1914 crisis and outbreak of the First World War: Russia can’t let Serbia lose and Germany can’t let Austria lose. So, Serbia and Austria have disproportionate influence.

In the contemporary case, without the US, not only would Israel be diplomatically exposed, but it could not materially have disrupted the deep bunkers at Fordow.

Put differently, invading Iran was never on the cards, nor a campaign aimed at regime change. The air assault provided the option to avoid such a potentially calamitous ground intervention, one that would almost certainly not be supported by Trump’s base.

The question now is whether these attacks make Tehran more likely to accede to diplomatic demands in terms of international supervision and a commitment, fundamentally, to not building a weapon.

Why Trump chose this moment does not, however, relate to Iran alone. American planners know that they cannot fight wars on two major fronts, let alone three, which would be the Middle East, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific.

The bombing of Iran, coupled with Israeli actions in Iran and against its allies including Hamas and Hezbollah, plus the cognitive effect of this on Putin’s Russia, suggests that this was a necessary move to enable a fundamental pivot by the Pentagon on hemisphere defence, and a requirement to focus on the Chinese military challenge in the Pacific.

The Cognitive Value

A third issue around the Iranian attacks concerns the cognitive effect, not only on Russia and the yawning capability gap of its own weaponry, but on wider American strategy.

Tactically, the Russians (and Chinese) must have taken notice that the Israelis evaded supposedly cutting-edge Russian radars and missiles with impunity for nearly two weeks and without any known losses. There are now several hundred F-35s in the service of European NATO nations, plus several hundred more Typhoons, Rafales, and Gripens. As one Western-based former intelligence officer notes, “For Putin this means that Kaliningrad, certainly St Petersburg and possibly Moscow are at significant risk in the event of a war, before we even consider drones and missiles. So too are Russian forces in the Leningrad Military and Moscow Military Districts (and the Northern Fleet).” This calculus would also not have been lost on China, even if the range considerations over the Taiwan Strait are different.

Rewind 80 years and the role played by the redoubtable Lancaster is a prompt to examining the utility and limits of air power. Not only does the strategic bombing of Germany remain controversial because of the loss of civilian life, but because it still took a lengthy time with enormous investment to bring the war to an end, including millions of boots on the ground.

The counter-factual applies, too, in that it could have taken much longer without this investment in airpower, and  this was still the cheapest way in terms of blood and treasure to achieve victory.  

This is the thesis on which Mr Trump and Mr Netanyahu are banking. The problem for them is that the Iranians – just like the Ukrainians with Russia – also have a vote in the outcome.