Interwar RAF air control already failed by permanently alienating frontier tribes.

Evidence

Air force strategists are well aware of the objections that theorists of the “historical channel” of counterinsurgency never fail to raise. What the latter urge, in so many words, is to remember the lessons of the past: what is being presented as a new strategy has already been tried out, with remarkably disastrous results. The doctrine of “air control” is no different from that behind the Royal Air Force (RAF) air raids used after World War I to “disrupt and destroy villages to force the local populace to adhere to British mandates.” … That policy ended in bitter failure. An assessment made by a British officer in 1923 describes perverse effects strangely similar to those seen today, three generations later, in the same regions of the world: “By driving the inhabitants of the bombarded area from their homes in a state of exasperation, dispersing them among neighboring clans and tribes, with hatred in their hearts at what they consider ‘unfair’ methods of warfare, these attacks bring about the exact political results which it is so important, in our own interests, to avoid, viz. the permanent embitterment and alienation of the frontier tribes.” — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 262

Categorization

• XREF: Builds on the reader’s interest in impunity and the precedent that drone strikes on civilians may be self-defeating.

Related

• Air Force strategists redefined counterinsurgency around airpower and drones. (similarity 0.78)