Counterinsurgency doctrine marginalized airpower for strategic rather than moral reasons.

Evidence

Up until very recently, in what used to be called the “imperialist camp,” strategists of counterinsurgency warfare subscribed to Guevara’s opinion. Against bunches of furtive combatants, as skilled at hiding in the mazes of the landscape as in the recesses of society, aerial weapons were considered totally impotent or—worse still—counterproductive. In the absence of concentrations of troops detectable from the sky, bombing inevitably implied a bloodbath among the civilian population. But in reality the reasons for rejecting this doctrine were less moral than strategic: while the declared objective of counterinsurgency warfare was to rally the civilian population, the use of blind violence was likely to have the opposite effect, driving civilians into the arms of the enemy. Hence the theoretical marginalization of aerial weaponry in this form of strategy. As late as 2006, the American army’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual devoted no more than a few pages to aerial weaponry, relegating them to an appendix. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 256

Categorization

• XREF: Builds toward the core reading purpose: how drone technology overturned the established COIN paradigm and its moral bounds. — connects to: Air Force strategists redefined counterinsurgency around airpower and drones. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 257; Modern air power paradoxically makes ground infantry resemble pre-industrial guerrilla fighters — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 345; Counterinsurgency doctrine requires soldiers to serve as nation builders and warriors simultaneously — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 423

Related

• Air Force strategists redefined counterinsurgency around airpower and drones. (similarity 0.91)
• Drone doctrine replaces counterinsurgency’s population politics with terror-and-eradication yield (similarity 0.84)
• Counterinsurgency is politico-military while antiterrorism is policing-oriented. (similarity 0.82)
• Modern air power paradoxically makes ground infantry resemble pre-industrial guerrilla fighters (similarity 0.81)
• Counterinsurgency doctrine requires soldiers to serve as nation builders and warriors simultaneously (similarity 0.81)
• Air Force pilots were drones’ most virulent early critics, not pacifists. (similarity 0.81)
• Aviation proved useless against dispersed guerrilla forces in their early stages. (similarity 0.79)
• Drone strikes amount tactically to the state’s version of insurgent bomb attacks. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Air Force strategists redefined counterinsurgency around airpower and drones. #contradicts (0.50) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 257
• Counterinsurgency doctrine requires soldiers to serve as nation builders and warriors simultaneously #expands (0.35) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 423
• Modern air power paradoxically makes ground infantry resemble pre-industrial guerrilla fighters #qualifies (0.30) — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 345