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the ground resulted largely in a stalemate. The advent of the airplane for Douhet changed all
of that. Airplanes carrying bombs could bypass land armies fighting on the ground and hit
directly the most decisive and vulnerable part of an enemy nation; the people concentrated
in cities. Douhet believed that because of the limitless of space and what he perceived as the
airplanes ability to move unhindered through it regardless of defensives measures by the
enemy nation, war had been transformed to where the decisive and most important fighting
would occur in the air and not on the ground. The end result of air combat would be the
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gaining of “command of the air” and would allow a nation’s airplanes to fly unhindered over
enemy cities and drop bombs on them with the primary intention of killing large numbers
of civilians. This would produce, as Douhet argued, a cracking of the enemy nation’s will to
resist which would in turn cause its government to sue for peace. 13
In Douhet’s conception of future war, the enemy nation’s people would be the direct focus
of an aerial bombing campaign because he believed that in modern, industrial societies the
people as a collective whole were weak and could not withstand for long the pounding of
aerial bombardment. Prior to the age of industrialization and urbanization in many European
countries the people were largely perceived to be stronger due to the difficulty of rural life.
Douhet and other military theorists viewed urbanized societies being tied to the amenities of
urban life and their ability to withstand punishment by military force in war as low. For
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Douhet, therefore, a quick, ruthless, and overwhelming attack by airplanes dropping bombs
from the air against enemy cities and their populations would be enough to force capitulation.
According to Douhet such a bombing campaign would bring about “a complete breakdown
of the social structure…subjected to this kind of merciless pounding” and would lead to the
people, “out of self preservation” demanding “and end to the war.” there were other air-
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power theorists from various countries that adopted at least in principle Douhet’s conception
of future war with a focus on enemy populations. For Douhet and other airpower theorists
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people—civilian populations--had become decisive in war.
But Douhet’s conception from the 1920s of future war where populations in cities would

12 Guilio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari, new imprint by the Office of Air Force History
(1942; Washington, D.C.; USGPO, 1983), 57-59, 71-106. For analyses of Douhet, see David MacIsaac,
“Voices of the Central Blue: The Air Power Theorists,” in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Peter Paret
(Princeton University Press, 1986), 824-647; Philip Meilinger, “Guilio Douhet and the Origins of Airpower
Theory,” in The Paths of Heaven: The Evolution of Airpower Theory, ed Philip S Meilinger (Maxwell Air
Force Base, Ala, Air University Press, 1997), 1-40; and, Azar Gat, “Futurism, Proto-fascist Italian Culture
and the Sources of Douhetism,” War and Society 15, no. 1 (May 1997), 31-51.
13 Douhet, 35.
14 On this point see especially Azar Gat, Fascist and Liberal Visions of War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998),
43-79; and Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 541-542,
598-602. For an excellent overview on civilians in war over time see Mark Grimsley and Clifford J. Rogers,
Civilians in the Path of War, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).
15 Ibid., 58.
16 Most notably from the American perspective see William Mitchell, Winged Defense: The Development and
Possibilities of Modern Air Power—Economic and Military (1921; rpt, New York: Kennikat Press, 1971),
215; for recent analyses of the American approach see Conrad Crane, Bomb Cities and Civilians: American
Airpower Strategy in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993) , 12-27; and Gian P Gen-
tile, How Effective is Strategic Bombing? Lessons Learned from World War II to Kosovo (New York: New
York University Press, 2002), 11-15.