Smoke over Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, after Russian missile strikes. Photo / Finbarr O'Reilly, The New York Times
Smoke over Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, after Russian missile strikes. Photo / Finbarr O'Reilly, The New York Times
Even though it creates misery and loss, the methodical bombing of civilian centres has more often been shown to rally support for resistance.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia, in ordering missile strikes on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, follows a long line of wartime leaders who have sought to cowtheir adversaries by bombing enemy capitals.
Ever since Nazi Germany's bombardment of London in World War II, enabled by the first long-range missiles and warplanes, nearly every major war has featured similar attacks.
The goal is almost always the same: to coerce the targeted country's leaders into scaling back their war effort or suing for peace.
It typically aims to achieve this by forcing those leaders to ask whether the capital's cultural landmarks and economic functioning are worth putting on the line — and also, especially, by terrorising the country's population into moderating their support for the war.
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But for as long as leaders have pursued this tactic, they have watched it repeatedly fail.
More than that, such strikes tend to backfire, deepening the political and public resolve for war that they are meant to erode — even galvanising the attacked country into stepping up its war aims.
The victorious allies in World War II did emphasise a strategy of heavily bombing cities, which is part of why countries have come to repeat this so many times since. Cities including Dresden, Germany, and Tokyo were devastated, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and forcing millions into homelessness.
Still, historians generally now argue that, even if that did play some role in exhausting those countries, it was largely because of damage to German and Japanese industrial output rather than the terror it caused. Axis countries were also aggressive in bombing enemy cities, casting further doubt on notions that the strategy could be a decisive factor on its own.
And any World War II lessons may be of limited utility in understanding the wars that came after, as countries quickly learned from that conflict to move military production away from city centres. Tellingly, such bombing has seldom worked since.
American war planners discovered this in the Korean War, when bombing Pyongyang only hardened the North's commitment. A decade later, they tried it again in Vietnam. But an internal Pentagon report concluded that striking Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital, had been, "in retrospect, a colossal misjudgment."
American airstrikes on Baghdad in March 2003. Photo / Tyler Hicks, The New York Times
Iran and Iraq struck each other's capitals during their 1980s conflict to try to force one side to back down. Instead, both nations were rallied by watching foreign bombs fall on civilian neighbourhoods, helping to stretch the war to nearly a decade.
Insurgent groups have likewise adapted this tactic, to little more success.
Northern Irish groups struck repeatedly in London, hoping to dispel British commitment to the territory. Instead, the bombings led to more severe measures by British authorities in Northern Ireland. Palestinian groups that ignited bus and cafe bombs in Israeli cities during a period of conflict in the 2000s found much the same result.
Al-Qaeda's justification for the 9/11 terror attacks has shifted, but the group has said that one aim was to compel the US' withdrawal from the Middle East. But Americans, rather than rising up against their country's overseas deployments as al-Qaeda leaders had hoped, rallied in support of invading Afghanistan and then Iraq.
Although each conflict is different, this pattern is not a coincidence, but is explained by the politics as well as the psychology of warfare. And both appear to apply in Russia's war in Ukraine.
Capital strikes intended to push a government toward conciliation or retreat instead do much to close off those options.
In practice, such attacks tell targeted leaders that they, and perhaps the very existence of their government, will not be secure until they eliminate the threat through outright victory. They will tend to escalate in response rather than back down as their attackers hope.
And a negotiated peace, like the one Putin has urged, becomes harder for those leaders to enter because it means accepting that the threat to the capital will remain.
The public will often reach the same calculus, coming to see the attacker as an implacable threat that can only be neutralised through defeat.
The stiffening resolve inspired by such strikes can be equal parts strategic and emotional.
German rocket and air attacks on British cities during World War II, known as the Blitz, aimed to degrade British production as well as public support for the war so that Britain would agree to withdraw from the conflict.
Instead, the attacks led to a drastic reduction in British support for peace talks with Germany, polls at the time found, raising pressure on British leaders to uphold the fight.
And German leaders had hoped that turning whole blocks of London into rubble would inspire Britons to turn against the leaders who insisted on staying in the war. But British approval of their government rose to near 90 per cent.
The United States has stumbled on this effect several times, but perhaps most powerfully in the Korean and Vietnam wars, when it sought to force back its Communist adversaries by bombing their towns and cities. Instead, the campaigns convinced those governments, as well as their populations, that they could only be safe by defeating the Americans for good, whatever the cost.
Washington was seeking to reproduce its victories in World War II, which came after laying waste to German and Japanese cities from the air. Although the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were once widely thought to have terrified Japan into surrender, some historians have since cast doubt on that view.
In Vietnam, US forces began bombing northern cities in 1966 with the explicit goals of "deterioration of popular morale" and to "put pressure on the Hanoi leadership to terminate the war," according to a 1972 congressional review of Pentagon documents.
Instead, the strikes helped lock Northern Vietnamese leaders into a strategy of expelling the Americans who were dropping bombs on their cities, Pentagon officials concluded privately.
The attacks also so angered North Vietnam's allies in Moscow and Beijing that those countries increased their military aid beyond what the bombers had destroyed, Pentagon analysts said.
And the more damage that the strikes caused, whether economic or human in toll, the deeper became the Northern Vietnamese public's commitment — to both the war and the Communist government.
A CIA report three years into the bombing campaign found "substantial evidence" that the Northern Vietnamese public "found the hardships of the war more tolerable when it faced daily dangers from the bombing than when this threat was removed."
Working to extinguish fires and search for missing people after a missile strike on a residential building in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. Photo / Nicole Tung, The New York Times
This may seem counterintuitive. But seeing a foreign enemy crater one's hometown or neighbourhood with airborne explosives can produce a rally-around-the-flag effect so profound as to offset even the exhaustion of living in daily peril.
Such attacks might even be said to radicalise the very populations they are meant to terrorise.
This played out during the Second Intifada, a conflict between the Israeli military and Palestinian groups in the 2000s. Terrorist bombings in Israeli cities were intended to pressure Israelis to ease or end their country's occupation of Palestinian territories.
But research conducted during the conflict found that each bombing instead increased votes for right-wing parties, which ran on militarily escalating the conflict, by 1.35 percentage points.
Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli cities — perhaps a closer parallel to Putin's strikes on Ukraine — were, in subsequent years, found to boost hard-line political candidates by as much as 6 percentage points.
The effect likely runs deeper than policy preferences. Psychological studies found that rocket and bomb attacks on Israeli cities made Jewish Israelis feel a greater sense of solidarity with one another — rallying not just around their flag, but their identity.
The strikes also made Jewish Israelis in those areas more willing to support harsher policies toward the Palestinians, preferring outright victory to accommodation or compromise.
There is another way that strikes like Putin's this week can heighten a country's military commitment and lessen its willingness to compromise.
When fighting is restricted to the front lines, a war might be experienced very differently by the general population than by soldiers and leaders.
This may be the case in Russia itself. Even as backlash to the war and fear of conscription visibly rise there, for much of the country, it is an abstraction experienced through sunny and selective state media reports. It might make a war easier to bear, but also to consider an unwelcome burden, particularly as economic tolls and other costs rise.
But attacks on residential districts erase distinctions between soldiers and civilians. Londoners in the Blitz described feeling deep solidarity with British soldiers overseas, leading many to organise in the war's support rather than asking their leaders to back down.
This sense of societywide solidarity can also deepen peoples' willingness to bear a long and costly struggle for victory, along with their belief that there may be no surer path to safety.
Ukrainian families afflicted by Russian bombs, which have brought the front lines to their very homes, have described feeling much the same.
Strikes like Putin's have backfired so consistently in modern warfare that some analysts have wondered whether his aims might be focused, at least in part, more at home: appeasing frustrated Russian hard-liners. But if history is any guide, those critics may find that their dissatisfaction with the war's progress is only deepened by Monday's attacks.
