Aviation proved useless against dispersed guerrilla forces in their early stages.

Evidence

Air power contains the seeds of our own destruction if we do not use it responsibly. We can lose this fight. … One of the favorite arms of the enemy army, supposed to be decisive in modern times, is aviation. Nevertheless, this has no use whatsoever during the period that guerrilla warfare is in its first stages, with small concentrations of men in rugged places. The utility of aviation lies in the systematic destruction of visible and organized defenses; and for this there must be large concentrations of men who construct these defenses, something that does not exist in this type of warfare. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 254

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Guevara’s guerrilla warfare doctrine and the broader tension between air-centric and ground-centric COIN theory.

Related

• Drones resolve the guerrilla problem by depriving insurgents of any target to attack. (similarity 0.81)
• Modern air power paradoxically makes ground infantry resemble pre-industrial guerrilla fighters (similarity 0.79)
• Counterinsurgency doctrine marginalized airpower for strategic rather than moral reasons. (similarity 0.79)
• Weapons constitute the essence of combatants, not mere instruments (similarity 0.79)
• Guerrilla power derives from the whole population, not weaponry (similarity 0.78)