A Theory of Air Power

I finished Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, “The Bomber Mafia”, in less than a day. Then I bought 10 more copies to hand out as Christmas presents.  It’s not a difficult book to read if you’ve spent four decades tied to the United States Air Force (USAF) with many of your formative years spent inside the Strategic Air Command (SAC).  During that time, I had the chance to personally weigh the morality of high-altitude bombing as an offensive first use weapon or better as part of the strategic triad of nuclear deterrence.   Sadly, due to Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait our country went kicking and screaming into the first Gulf War.  In those early days (circa 1991) we ushered in the first war-time use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and it’s timing to aide precision bombing (more on timing in a bit).  The mighty B-52 bomber, getting old at the time, still in noble service to our Country now another 30 years later.  In 1991 it became new again with the technology that enabled those new GPS guided munitions.  GPS brought about a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) for those who study such things.  The pinnacle of air power envisioned by the Bomber Mafia.

Beyond his great storytelling, if you are a military history buff (no pun intended) you should read other recorded military history--not Gladwell’s.  Gladwell doesn’t write for historians. He writes for a more general audience to learn a few things about the human condition.   The stories Gladwell tells in “The Bomber Mafia” have been told before in much more depth, in numerous books, and in many Hollywood movies.  The simple insight that Gladwell delivers on the human condition is that some military leaders are profoundly moral who strive to reduce the atrocities of war based on their decisions. Other leaders are great tacticians.  These tacticians can execute a plan of action and solve a set of complex military problems through operational art regardless of the technology focused primarily on effect. Finally, Gladwell also tells us, that some military leaders are just plan sadistic. In this manner Gladwell captures the richness of human behavior, our idiosyncrasies, and our strengths and weaknesses.  He doesn’t pass judgment.  He just puts it out there for you to consider the right and wrong of it all.

Anyone in the military should have studied WW II in great depth.    Anyone who considers themselves well-read should also know about the great works of fiction coming out of WW II.   Novels such as Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, and Catch 22 by Joseph Heller to name the best—in my opinion. Some recent histories include stories of courage and the many thousands of personalities of that infamous era.  For instance, the story of Louis Zamperini the Olympic athlete who’s his trials and tribulations with the B-24’s in the Pacific were told by Laura Hillenbrand in “Unbroken”.  WW II will continue to be studied by historians for the length of human existence. In time most will end up being a mere chapter in a high school history book.  That is, unless, great stories and anecdotes told by great authors and storytellers like Gladwell (and Hillenbrand) persist.  

As to the sheer horrors of war, Gladwell does more than just hint about them.  He discusses the development of napalm and it’s effective use against the dense, tinderbox homes in Japan where 100,000 died in a single firebombing raid on Tokyo.   He glosses over the firebombing of Dresden, Germany the topic of Vonnegut’s nightmare, attributing only 25,000 to that conflagration. Although the number who died in Dresden is disputed and arguably higher.  Japan is significant in that Curtis Le May did not stop with the firebombing of Tokyo.  He went on to firebomb as many as 67 additional Japanese cities each with a similar outcome.  Most of the population of each city was decimated.  A fact that gets whisked away in the days after the nuclear missions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In firebombing Gladwell tells the story of human babies igniting on the backs of their fleeing mothers as the hellish furnace of the conflagration consumed every life in its path.  In addition to the horrors of firebombing, in the nuclear conflagration the horrors of radiation sickness would soon materialize.  Like Vonnegut, you cannot not read these passages and find any nobility in war.  The book “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning”, written by Chris Hedges in 2002, is tells us perhaps, why humanity wages wars. Gladwell reminds us why we must continue to find ways to solve our differences peacefully even in the midst of wanting to strike out against those who oppose us, conquer us, or would lead us into tyranny.

To be sure Gladwell makes a few technical errors and errors of historical fact.  But that does not detract from the story of what happened.  This is not a revisionist history of WW II aerial bombing as some of military critics of his work have stated.  These men existed.  These bombing missions happened.  The results are historical fact, Germany was defeated.  Japan surrendered. Those who push revisionist, anything, really don’t understand what history books are trying to deliver to the future.  

Now a little more about the book.  The Bomber Mafia grew up in Maxwell AFB, Alabama, by military aviators believing several things.  First, they believed that air power could help bring wars to a close faster.  The method theorized was the precise aerial bombardment of strategic targets and choke points that could cripple an adversary's ability to wage war.  The doctrine of strategic bombardment to crush those critical nodes of production and transportation is sound provided effect can be delivered precisely.  That doesn’t preclude the use of boots on the ground or naval blockades or the coming requirement to own the high ground in space.  In the 1940’s space was the domain of HG Wells. And as for air power, it was a pipe dream back then.   Second, these air power theorists believed the use of area bombardment was morally obtuse. Decimating a country’s population to include the non-military, the civilians, the elderly as well children is a pretty evil enterprise no matter whose side you are on. As the 3rd Reich hit out at England during the Battle of Britain, many English, of course quickly overcame their squeamishness about bombing populations as they themselves were the target of the German evil.  You can almost hear the English pragmatism in doing unto the Germans which was being done unto them.  This is of course why leadership should always be sane and moral. You can’t let emotionalism govern a country.  

Gladwell is light on air power doctrine as it would take volumes to really dive into it.  Instead, he focused on those two competing methods of aerial bombardment through the eyes of Curtis LeMay and Haywood Hansell.  Where, may I ask, is Giulio Douhet, Billy Mitchell, or the modern-day John Boyd and John Warden?    Hansell was basing aerial bombardment on strategy and morality.  LeMay was getting the job done.  These are not mutually exclusive.  But it’s worth noting that in general, air power is an RMA, it just took 80+ years for air power to hit it’s stride after it’s invention at the start of the century.  Gladwell spends time on the technology of the Norden Bombsight.  A closely guarded secret.  The bombsight was a marvel of technology akin to the first maritime chronometer.  Essentially a highly accurate clock with a telescope.  Daytime was a must.  Straight an level flight at a precise altitude was a must.  Straight into the target was a must.  With all those in order, the bomber would look through the bomb sight and with many adjustments made for every variable Norden could think of, precisely drop the bombs at the right time.  The math worked, with this proper clock, the bomber could time the release of altitude to hit a pickle barrel on the ground.  Reality was something completely different.  In fact, bombers could still not hit the broad side of a barn, or many barns, or the farm or many farms.  For numerous reasons, the bomb sight simply didn't work as promised.  Theory would have to wait.

This is a lesson for the current technology mafia who believes with unwavering optimism that the RMA before us, has to do with software and networks.  That somehow the Internet is an RMA by itself.  The theory behind that RMA started 25 years ago with chorus of networks being the solution with network centric warfare (NCW) being the crowning achievement.  Since that RMA was never achieved it’s now been augmented with the refrain that faster agile software development will deliver the heretofore unachievable.  It’s now referred to as the kill-webs as opposed to NCW but at the end of the day, it’s still not an RMA.  You don’t achieve combat power with a network even with the faster software a network can enable.  There is no warfighting energy contained in a network no matter how many nodes exist.  Further, if you connect everything, apart from being supremely difficult, you introduce an information problem that still, no matter how many temporal increments of Moore’s law we advance through, the information problem will remain intractable or in the parlance of computational complexity, NP-Complete. Wait, Artificial Intelligence.  Wait, quantum computing. Keep waiting, and good luck.  Instead of waiting on magic, what’s fascinating in Gladwell’s pages is the way Curtis LeMay overcame the greatest technology of the day, that wasn’t working, to force a winning outcome.  All the technology in the world (at the time) and the B-29 couldn't overcome the lack of an accurate bombsight.  The bombsight that would enable precision, high altitude bombing, was in reality unobtanium. In essence, a unicorn.  In the presence of the unobtanium, LeMay moved away from precision, high altitude, daytime bombing of strategic choke points and completely changed the tactics.  Instead, he went with low altitude, area bombing, and introduced napalm because he knew that flammable tinderbox houses in densely populated areas of Japan would be the target.

What allowed this change was the flexibility in the operational art of war with LeMay not tied to one doctrine of aerial warfare, but rather a doctrine of solving problems faster than your adversary can react.  Flexibility is the key to Air Power (Douhet). React faster than your adversary (Boyd).  This is the insight that Gladwell is writing about.  Though it may be hard for the average reader to ferret out without deeper history.  There is more here, but I've written enough.  Read the book.  It's less than 200 pages.   I’m going to start with 5-Stars because I love this book.  I’m going to deduct 1-Star for several technical errors and 1-Star for missing the attribution of other great air power theorists.  I’m going to add back 1-Star for the part of history often glossed over, specifically, that LeMay bombed 67 Japanese cities in total.  Capitulation without the atomic bomb was at hand.   The argument for use of the atomic bomb was that boots-on-the-ground would be necessary for the win but cost an ungodly number of American lives in the assault.  It's not at all clear that would have had to happen. Air power might have succeeded without the nuclear boost…at this point we will never know. 4-Stars for Gladwell’s jaunt into air power for those who believe in a strong Air Force and air power theory. 

Shooting Craps with the Cosmos

 

When you think of classic science fiction you always start with HG Wells.  And then you can say Isaac Asimov,  or Arthur C. Clarke.  But you can’t go too much further without saying Ringworld.  You may not say Larry Niven directly--although you should---but you can’t, not, include the title Ringworld in the same breath when mentioning the greats.  When you pull science fiction apart, there is the improbable and the probable.  HG Well was always inside the probable.  Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, to some extent, try to be.   Larry Niven is so far outside the probable, as to be light years into the future and somewhat beyond that… Not only is a Ringworld itself so improbable, most of the concepts contained within Niven’s novel are also improbable and to be entirely accurate, physically impossible.  Even his notion of probably, the math he tries to imbue, not just the science, is wrong.  Let’s just completely forget about  physics, let’s forget science, let's forget math…and go for it. It is fiction after all… 

Thus Ringworld, and who wouldn’t want to live there, can’t be real.     A mere factional wedge (or belt)  of a Dyson sphere inside the Goldilocks zone circumscribed around its central star. Perfect is all it’s design detail.  Safe from anything that might threaten it.  Engineered to hold not the people of an overpopulated planet, but perhaps a universe full of people, millions of worlds.   From the tiny thread that holds the sun shades in orbit above the ring surface to the speeds necessary for the travelers in the story to get to Ringworld, Niven is completely wrong.   All of it.  To wit, Larry Niven pushes back against his critics and says to them with his own axioms, when Arthur C. Clarke tells us, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, Larry Niven says, bite me, rather more correctly, “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."  Niven breaks the paradigm and as the greatest novelist of all has told us, just for the fleeting instance we stretch our arms out further, and beat back against the current of the genre, Ringwold is magic.  Magic that is brought alive through Niven’s narrative. It is pure science fiction.  No wonder it won awards.  No wonder it still inspires me today.  No reason, necessarily, to read further into Niven series…and I never have.  What must follow in his series (pure speculation) can only be at best an improbable defense for the impossible or at worse an apologetic

Yet here we are with such a fantastic story, without much of the defining detail as to how? To me, to provide that defining detail would be crushing. It would  lose it’s fantastic nature.  Even millions of years into the future.  There is no physics that could possibly support any of it. So don’t try.  This scale rivals the scale of human comprehension.  It is massive and beyond understanding. And the result is breathtaking.   Three  million times the surface of the earth--with walls around the edges stretching 1000 miles high. A lifetime just to walk across it’s 100,000 mile width laterally, let alone head out toward the base of the arch…an the mirage of the ring, disappearing behind the horizon and reappearing as the ring itself.  I don’t know what Niven was thinking…but we are so much richer for him having created it.  A book shelf needs bookends…Ring World is my book end for science fiction. 

When I read Ringworld in my teens it was real.  Not the reason I became an engineer…but certainly an  influencer.  Reading it again in my 50’s it’s so physically wrong as to be laughable but so fantastically right with regard to what science fiction ought to be.  Too many writers are trying to stay within the realm of physics as they know it…not courageous enough to take their potential detractors head on.  Again, bite me, it’s fiction.  It’s a magnificent flight of fancy.  If you want exactly the engineering required and accept no possibility of magic go read Weir, only The Martian, however. Artemus sucks, although, admittingly technologically accurate.    Despite the many criticisms, Niven’s awards are absolutely  justified and the book itself will always stand the test of time.  It will always be millions of years in the future…at the time when spooky magic at a distance is understood and magic becomes ubiquitous.  But there is so much more beyond technology inside it's cover.

Niven also dealt with several sticky social aspects of multiple alien species living together, super advanced life forms (Nessus the puppeteer), a warlike species that look like giant cats (Speaker to Animals a Kzin, and of course the humans (Wu and Teela -- who are on a life extension program).  Niven has been criticized, probably by the woke generation, for being somewhat bleak in his portrayal of women.  Given that he wrote this in the 60’s can’t we give that a pass?  His characters are all somewhat of a stereotype.  Turns out stereotypes exist for a reason.  Wake-up woke people and chill the hell out. Yes cats eat meat.  Carnivores eat meat. Get over it.

Yet despite his somewhat old fashioned view of women and despite the  colossal  story and engineering behind the existence of the Ringworld itself,  the actual story being told, and the hero of the story is the female human, Teela Brown.  The story actually isn’t about technology, Niven just needed a backdrop for what he calls the luck of Teela Brown. The real story is about what Einstein calls, shooting craps with the cosmos.  Does God roll the dice?  Can it happen? Does it happen? What happens when it happens?   Beyond the gift of Ringworld, Niven has given us the gift of Teela Brown.  Whereas Teela never became the messiah, it’s not too far of a stretch to understand that’s where Niven might have headed had he not gotten caught up in the debate over the technology.  Particularly if the Teela Brown character would have been slightly more appealing.  Had he written her character today, and dressed her in prose to resemble a smarter character, a Lizbeth Salander for example, he might have given us a Christ like figure. What we do have instead is from the Marvel series is the Domino super hero.  Cute…and powerful…but not the messiah.  Marvel gave us Domino in 1991.  Twenty years after Niven gave us Teela Brown as the savior of Ringworld. Niven’s aspirations for her must have been incredible.  And certainly the math he chooses to use/or ignore, is just as fantastic.  He does state early on that random flips of a coin have no memory. He must have hated that…or couldn’t understand it.  To review basic probability,  one flip of a coin is 50/50 heads or tails.  Another flip is 50/50 just the same.  Just because the more recent flip was 50/50 there is no bearing on the subsequent one. The next flip is again, 50/50.  And so it goes, as Kurt Vonagut might say.   If you are looking for a heads-up coin flip  every time, Teela Brown is that coin flip.   The problem here is that Niven, while examining the material, never quite understood what was going on…and couldn’t explain it sufficiently.  Had he argued the math, only slightly better, he might have been considered a theoretical genius in the area of statistics.  He might have handed the  mathematicians of the world a conjecture with consideration.

So here’s exactly what’s happening with Teela Brown…that Nevin couldn't prove, but surely wanted to prove.  I’ll call it the Niven conjecture.  He might not have understood what he was saying either.  Teela Brown is not  flipping the coin repeatedly and landing on heads.  She’s switching her choice back and forth as the coin is being flipped, seemingly without memory, and choosing heads or tails each time.  But in her case, she’s always right. She always makes the right choice.   The first time you flip, it’s heads or tails. Then you flip it again and you have heads, or tails, but also the branch of what might have been.  Then you flip it again, and you have heads or tails and what might have been and what might have also been.  Then you flip it again and have heads or tails and what might have been and what might have been and what also might have been.  This goes on forever.  Everybody’s life plays out according to one of those paths. Teela’s life plays out precisely because she is always on the path that is correct as to the flip of the coin. The longer the flips go on…the longer the sequence.  Those with an infinite mindset know that there are an infinite number of paths and thus if an infinite number of monkeys were seated at a typewriter and were allowed to hit the keys continuously, one of those monkeys would type out the novel “War and Peace”.  Well I can’t find the number of letters in that novel by Tolstoy but he put 587, 287 words into “War and Peace”…so loosely multiple the number of words by  five to account for spaces and punctuation so maybe three million individual characters.  This is the number of unique characters a monkey would have to tap out all in exactly the right sequence all in order to create the book.  So if that were the case it would not take an infinite number of monkeys…that number also is finite and knowable…it’s just very big.  It would take 3 million factorial x 26 plus a few special characters.  (3,000,000! X ~26)  That’s 3,000,000 x 2,999,999 x 2,999,998 x 2,999,997… all the way to 1.  It’s a big big  number, a really really big number…but it’s not infinite.  

But that’s also not what’s happening with Teela Brown either.  Day to day, minute to minute, we don’t have to make a life and death decision.  Evolution has seen most of already through over the past six billion years. We already have much of the luck of Teela Brown behind us.   Thus the remainder of our life isn’t random monkeys typing “War and Peace”.   We live perhaps for 35,000 days.  We don’t even make a life or death decision every day…if we would do that, a lot more of us would be dead.  The question correctly posed, is how many near death experiences befall us throughout  our lifetime.  That is for sure, a much smaller set.  Thus, the number of monkeys required to sit at the keyboard and type our life is a lot closer to the book “Goodnight Moon”.  There are 131 words in Goodnight Moon.  So let’s go with 131 characters that a smaller set of random monkeys would have to strike the keys on a typewriter to randomly write the story of Teela Brown's life so 131! X 26 or 2.2 x 10 raised to the 223rd power.  The question is can you find such a person living…and if they found that person in Teela Brown?    To be sure the number would need to be much smaller…the number would need to be on the order of no more than 15 life or death decisions…and you actually could find such a person…given that about a trillion people were your sample size.  1 x 10 raised to the 12th power. 

Anyway, that’s not the conjecture.  The Niven conjecture isn’t about doing the actual math.  Because as we’ve learned, math from statistics will not work here.  It’s wrong. Statistically Teela Brown will not win. She will lose, and lose quickly.  As she begins flipping the coin will lose, if not at 15 flips, shortly thereafter.   Beyond that the numbers move toward infinity, or as close to infinite as the human mind can comprehend.  That must not be what’s happening statistically.  If we are to believe there is math behind it, something else must be going on.  I can’t figure it out.  But someone, somewhere might.   The conjecture therefore  is more about whether or not  something mathematically magical is happening on the way to this  infinity.  And the answer is, yes.  It must.  Why? Because we are all here to observe the outcome of this math.  Every single life form on planet earth, animal, insect, plant, has survived though time to be living and breathing the atmosphere of our Earth.  Everything, to exist today, has been done with the Luck of Teela Brown. Is this magic?  Is this deterministic?  Is this proof of God?  That’s what Niven was really talking about when he wrote Ringwold.  And beyond the technology we have the math behind his magical thinking.  I like that Niven is a magical thinker.

I give Niven 5 full stars for Ring World.  It’s just what science fiction should be…extra-ordinary science (and probability) wrapped up in brazen, unapologetic  fiction!