"How Effective Is Strategic Bombing?: Lessons Learned from World War II to Kosovo" by Gian P. Gentile

In this aggressively revisionist volume, Gian Gentile examines afresh this influential document to reveal how it reflected to its very foundation the American conceptual approach to strategic bombing. In the process, he exposes the survey as largely tautological and thereby throwing into question many of the central tenets of American air power philosophy and strategy.


In the wake of World War II, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and President Harry S. Truman established the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, to determine exactly how effectively strategic air power had been applied in the European theater and in the Pacific. The final study, consisting of over 330 separate reports and annexes, was staggering in its size and emphatic in its conclusions.
As such it has for decades been used as an objective primary source and a guiding text, a veritable Bible for historians of air power.

With a detailed chapter on the Gulf War and the resulting Gulf War Air Power Survey, and a concluding chapter on the lessons of the Kosovo air war, How Effective is Strategic Bombing? is the most comprehensive and important book on air power strategy in decades.

CONTENTS
acknowledgments
introduction
1. The Origins of the American Conceptual Approach to Strategic Bombing and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey
2. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey and the Future of the Air Force
3. The Evaluation of Strategic Bombing against Germany
4. The Survey Presents Its Findings from Europe and Develops an Alternate Strategic Bombing Plan for Japan
5. The Evaluation of Strategic Bombing against Japan
6. A-Bombs, Budgets, and the Dilemma of Defense
7. A Comparison of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey with the Gulf War Air Power Survey
afterword
notes
bibliography
index
about the author