Page 53 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo I

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capable of being a flexible foreign policy instrument; it comes as no surprise that the
expression “gunboat diplomacy” was coined. According to its proponents, “there are no
other substitutes for military support, neither air-, nor ground-based, because their use
would lead always to the violation of international rules on sovereignty over spaces, to a
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manifest act of hostility, and thus to the worsening of crises and tensions” .
Others, however, have argued that air power has largely replaced maritime power as
an instrument of foreign policy, in particular “of deterrence and compellence, thence of
coercive diplomacy””, and that the “politics of the fighter-bombers” [...] has partially re-
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placed that of the “gunboat” . Naturally, however, any serious military policy requires
almost invariably thinking in terms of joint forces, and the achievement of political and
diplomatic goals almost invariably requires a control of the territory that can only be
guaranteed by ground troops. A need already recognized by a theorist of sea power, Sir
Julian Corbett: “... for a maritime State to make successful war and to realise her special
strength, army and navy must be used and thought of as instruments no less intimately
connected than are the three arms ashore. [infantry, cavalry and artillery] [...] Since men
live upon the land and not upon the sea, great issues between nations at war have
always been decided -- except in the rarest cases -- either by what your army can do
against your enemy’s territory and national life or else by the fear of what the fleet makes
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it possible for your army to do” .
The advantages of air power are “the speed of intervention, the broadness of its scope
of action, [...], the “verticality”, which make air strikes independent of the constraints
of the terrain morphology, the possibility to resort to violence according to the needs of
politics and the reactions of the opponent, safeguarding air strikes from the pervasive

influence of the media before they take place [...] aircraft provide virtual power, without
the deployment of forces on the land or sea near the theatre of operations” .
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The same author quoted above indicates, however, that “superiority at sea, thanks to
its ubiquity, mobility, flexibility, and now also thanks to the ability to hit inland targets
with aircraft, on-board cruise missiles and amphibious operations, undoubtedly repre-
sents a very significant tool of the diplomacy of violence for surgical operations on a
planetary scale. In this role, the naval forces are more competitive compared with the
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air force” . A fleet sailing in international waters may allow its on-board air force to hit
its targets without having recourse to military bases in friendly foreign countries and
without asking other states to use their airspace.

12 G. Giorgerini, L’Unione Europea e la strategia marittima, in Affari Esteri, a. XXVII, no. 107 (Summer
1995), p. 586.
13 C. M. Santoro, Potere aereo, deterrenza e compellenza and C. Jean, Osservazioni sul potere aereo, in C. M.
Santoro (edited by di), Italo Balbo: aviazione e potere aereo, Rome 1998, pp. 229-50 (243 and 248 for the
quotes). On this topic cf. Airpower in 20 Century. Doctrines and Employment. National Experiences, mono-
th
graphic issue of the International Review of Military History, no. 89, 2011.
14 J. S. Corbett, Italian edition of Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (Alcuni principi di strategia marittima,
Rome 1911, pp. 19 and 24). The joint strategy was devoted some attention by the Swiss Antoine Henri de Jo-
mini (cf. F. Sanfelice di Monteforte, Jomini e il mare, in Rivista Marittima, a. CXXXI, July 1998, pp. 13-23).
15 C. Jean, Guerra, Strategia e Sicurezza, Bari 1997, pp. 148-49.
16 Ibi, p. 143.