In The Limits of Air Power, Mark Clodfelter examines the American bombing of North Vietnam as a means of achieving specific American policy goals. Clodfelter relates American war doctrine in regard to air power, starting with the Allied air campaigns of World War II, extending through the Korean War and then into the conflict in Vietnam. He uses these examples of applied air strategy to draw contrasts between the political and military environments in each war, demonstrating that those environments determined the possibility for successful application of air power.
In the Second World War, there existed the clear positive military objective of the destruction of the Axis powers, and very few negative military objectives to restrain the use of air power in the achievement of that goal. As a result, air power unleashed its maximum destructive capabilities, culminating with the detonations of two atomic bombs over Japan in 1945. In this instance, applied air power played a critical role in bringing the war to a successful conclusion, although American air power advocates continued to overstate that role in regard to the destruction of enemy morale, especially in Germany. The ability of a police state, such as Nazi Germany, to maintain the loyalty of its people in the face of devastating loss becomes instructive during the discussion of the effectiveness of air power against Communist North Vietnam.
In the Korean War, the results were somewhat less obvious. In 1953, the Eisenhower administration threatened to use nuclear weapons to end the war, and this, combined with attacks against North Korean dams that raised the possibility of agricultural devastation, finally brought the Communists to the negotiating table. Helping to remove restraints on air power that year was the death of Josef Stalin and the power struggle in the Kremlin that followed; these had the effect of removing the Soviets from the picture in Korea at this critical juncture.
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