Classic World War II B-29 Superfortress Impacts Air War Strategy Today

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

A well-known text called “Bombing to Win” by Univ. of Chicago Professor Robert Pape explores a host of variables related to the wartime employment of combat air power, with a specific focus on bombing and its destructive and psychological effect. 

Analyzing many air campaigns in recent history, Pape explores the impact of bombing on enemy morale and enemy strategy. 

Pape’s work is significant when it comes to this historic employment of impactful platforms such as the B-29 Superfortress, a massive bomber used to “fire bomb” Tokyo during World War II and famously drop nuclear weapons.  Part of Pape’s analysis discusses the impact of a kind of “coercion” or psychological impact bombing campaigns can have upon an enemy’s resolve, morale or will to fight.  

Pape’s thinking aligns to a certain extent with John’s Warden’s famous “effect-based warfare” paradigm for air attack used with success in the Gulf War and Operation Iraqi Freedom. While the respective perspective and analysis between Pape and Warden likely have many differences, they were aligned in so far as they argued that the optimal impact of air power was to achieve a battlefield “effect” and essentially render an enemy unable and unwilling to fight. This means attacking command and control, supply lines and elements of what Warden called “strategic rings,” identifying specific ways to employ air power in pursuit of a specific battlefield “effect.”  One of the pillars of Warden’s thinking was to argue that simply destroying a country’s infrastructure, people or fielded forces is much less critical to winning a war than attacking high-value targets. Pape’s analysis similarly looks at less recognized, yet arguably more decisive variables central to an air attack campaign. 

What perhaps most interesting and significant about these analyses is the extent to which they inform current thinking regarding the strategic employment of unmanned systems, manned-unmanned teaming and highly-networked, yet more dispersed strategic air attack tactics. 

With this in mind — what about the classic B-29?

Famous B-29 Superfortress – Nuclear Attack