Italian army officer Giulio Douhet formulated some of the earliest concepts on the use of military aircraft, establishing himself as the first great airpower theorist. Douhet believed that airplanes were the ultimate offensive weapon, capable of winning wars by destroying enemy populations, industrial complexes, and transportation centers.
Born in Caserta on May 30, 1869, Douhet followed his family’s tradition by attending the Italian military academy, where he graduated at the top of his class and earned an artillery commission in 1892. Early in his career, Douhet focused on the mecha¬nization of the Italian army and commanded an experimental motorcycle battalion. In 1909 he met the American Wilbur Wright during the aviation pioneer’s visit to Italy and immediately became an enthusiastic advocate of military airpower.
During the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-12, Douhet com¬manded Italy’s first aviation battalion and the world’s first aerial- bombardment unit. Based on his experiences, Douhet published the first air-combat doctrinal manual, Rules of the Use of Airplanes in War, in 1913.
At the outbreak of World War I, Douhet was the Chief of Staff of an infantry division but soon became the head of the army’s avi¬ation division. He urged widespread saturation bombing but made few advances before being court-martialed and imprisoned for crit¬icizing his superiors’ handling of the war.
Douhet used his time in confinement to refine his theories about airpower and to continue his writing. A few months after the disastrous defeat of the Italian forces at Caporetto in November 1917, which validated his criticism of the military leadership, Douhet found himself released, reinstated, and head of the newly created Central Aeronautical Bureau.
In 1921, Douhet published his vanguard The Command of the Air and briefly served in Mussolini’s Fascist government before his retirement as a major general in 1922. He died in Rome on February 15, 1930, at age sixty.
During his entire career, Douhet was prolific in writing articles and books on the military potential of airpower. Most of his fame and influence, however, rests with The Command of the Air, in which he advocated aircraft as the single, ultimate battlefield weapon. He argued for an air force wholly separate from the army and navy and the creation of a “battle plane” that combined the capabilities of both a fighter and a bomber.
Douhet expressed such confidence in airpower that he proposed that ground and sea forces be defensive only, leaving the air force to handle all offensive operations. He believed that planes alone could destroy enemy ground units and equipment, industrial support, and civilian will to fight. According to Douhet, massive air attacks by themselves were enough to achieve victory. He said that airpower would “inflict the greatest damage in the shortest possible time.”
Douhet also included in his writings the cost efficiency of a Giulio Douhet military designed around aircraft. He envisioned combat planes adapted from civilian passenger and freight liners which would revert to their prewar use after victory. Pilots would come from the ranks of commercial air companies and require little additional training.
Despite his visionary concepts of the future of airpower, Douhet had no great immediate effect on the Italian army, nor did Italy attempt to form a dominant air force. The Italian economy could not support the building and equipping of an air fleet of the size proposed by Douhet, and Mussolini personally favored ground and sea power.
Both the French and Germans studied and hody debated Douhet’s theories prior to World War II, but neither adopted his theories. Although an English translation of The Command of the Air did not appear until 1942, Hugh Trenchard, Britain’s air com¬mander, and America’s air force advocate Billy Mitchell were both familiar with his books.
World War II provided the laboratory to test Douhet’s theories. The United States and Britain employed massive strategic bombing, validating the importance of airpower but also disproving several of Douhet’s central ideas. No one successfully devised an aircraft capable of both bombing and fighter missions, and sustained air strikes did not break the will of an enemy or substantially reduce their war-production capabilities. Conflicts since World War II have continued to demonstrate the flaws in Douhet’s concept that airpower alone could overcome an enemy. No country has yet won a war without its infantry occupying the enemy’s territory on the ground.
Douhet’s writings have had neither the impact nor the longevity of the works of other “art of war” masters, such as SUN Tzu, KARL VON CLAUSEWITZ , ANTOINE HENRI JOMINI, or JOHN FREDERICK CHARLES FULLER. While much of what he advocated proved unfeasible, Douhet was nevertheless the first to envision and write about the possibilities of military airpower. To prepare for war,* he wrote, “demands, then, the exercise of the imagination.”
Douhet’s greatest influence results not so much from his the-oretical content but from his insights generations ago that military leaders must include air as well as sea and ground forces in the planning of war.