Page 200 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

702 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

the war the civilian population might become involved in some form with the fighting. But
the airpower and counterinsurgency theorists inverted this process where the first step in war
would be to involve the people. For the airpower theorists involvement would mean bomb-
ing them from the sky. For the counterinsurgent theorists involvement would be securing
the population with military force in order to get at the insurgents. After this involvement
between the people and military forces, in either of the two cases, military forces might be
engaged along the lines of more traditional warfare.
Both airpower and counterinsurgency theorists believed that they had identified a new
form of war that was radically different from warfare of the past. Common to these two
groups was hubris; in their minds they alone had discerned a new form of warfare and they
alone held the keys to its success. In making such hubristic claims both groups reduced the
complexity of traditional wars into the absurdly simple. The American Army’s new counter-
insurgency doctrine continues this sentiment by proclaiming that counterinsurgency warfare
is the “graduate level of war.” Implicit in this statement is the notion that other forms of
11
war that involved mass armies fighting one another was less difficult and considered the
“undergraduate level.”
In both cases the people of a given country became the focus of war because both sets of
theorists perceived that large battles between opposing armies would no longer occur. Direct
involvement with populations by military forces became a surrogate for fighting between
large armies on open fields of battle. As airpower and counterinsurgency theorists viewed the
world around them, they assessed that war had fundamentally changed which called for radi-
cally new and revolutionary approaches to fighting it. They then built theories and practices
of their new kind of war that saw people and populations as the decisive element that if dealt
with properly would produce victory, and if not, defeat.
Ironically, both sets of theorists believed that by focusing on the people as the central
element in war they could make war less destructive and less harmful to the populations.
This seems at first glance absurd for airpower theorists and their approach to getting at the
population of an enemy country via aerial attack and killing. But airpower theorists like the
Italian Army officer Guilio Douhet reasoned that based on the experience of the fighting in
the trenches in World War I where millions of soldiers were killed, an aerial attack against
enemy populations would wreak such havoc that it would quickly break the morale of the
population and force the enemy nation to surrender. With the counterinsurgency theorists,
conversely, since it was so difficult to find and kill insurgents within a nation’s population
because they could use the population to conceal themselves, counterinsurgent theorists rea-
soned that if the people were protected from insurgent violence then at some point the people
would turn against the insurgents.
In the years following the end of World War I the Italian army officer Guilio Douhet
imagined a way to avoid the type of war that his country among other European countries
experienced in the trenches where millions of soldiers were killed. For Douhet the airplane
offered a revolutionary change to warfare. Douhet reasoned that based on the recent experi-
ence of trench fighting in World War I that future wars would not be fought along those lines
because after four years of fighting in the trenches and huge numbers of deaths, the war on

11 FM 3-24, 1-1.; also see Kilkullen’s Interview with Charlie Rose.