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Strategic Bombardment and Kosovo: Evidence from the Boer War

In 1999, John Keegan, formerly sceptical of strategic air power, described the Kosovo conflict as a turning point in the history of warfare. For him, it proved that war could indeed bewon by air power alone. He provided his support for a view that conventional aerial bombardment could be used to defeat an opponent with origins traceable back to Douhet after the First World War. This article finds that the use of air power in Kosovo was not a turning point in the history of warfare.Aerial bombardment may well have brought about Milosevic’s capitulation, but it will argue not only that the circumstances were rare, but also that they had happened before, nearly a century earlier, in the BoerWar.The question of whether Kosovo proved to be a turning point is thus tackled in two parts. The first of these looks at theKosovo conflict itself. It will examine the argument that air power can prevail over an opponent. It will provide evidence for the view that this lies in a capacity for precision air attack to cause destruction while minimising casualties and for this to cause domestic pressure to be directed towards the country’s leadership. The circumstances required for this to happen will be shown to be rare for two reasons. First, because opponents other than Milosevic’s Serbia are less vulnerable to public pressure. It was a regime which lacked the authoritarianism to be found in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Mullah Omar’s Afghanistan and was not a terrorist or guerrilla organisation, such as Hezbollah, which can avoid being answerable to the society within which it operates. Second, it cannot always be assumed that it will be possible to win air superiority over the territory of the opponent. The United States, in coalition with NATO allies that included most of Western Europe, confronted a much smaller opponent in Serbia. A balance of forces such as this need not always occur, especially given that Great Power status is impermanent. The second part of this article presents evidence from the Boer War, fought between Britain and the Afrikaner Republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State from Strategic Bombardment and Kosovo: Evidence from the Boer War