Robert Pape, who has been giving lots of interviews in the first month-plus of the Iran War, is an authority on the history of aerial bombing. In his 2014 book Bombing To Win, he writes about bombing in the Gulf War, i.e, the war of 1990-1991 in which the US intervened under legitimate and specific United Nations authority to push Iraq’s armies under Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, which Iraq had illegally occupied. (There was no formal Congressional declaration of war, of course.)
The goals of bombing
Pape uses the conventional distinction between tactical and strategic bombing. Tactical bombing employed in direct support of land and/or sea forces. Strategic bombing is used to attack civilian and military infrastructure such as factories or key transportation facilities, which are often found in urban areas far from the front lines. There is a long-standing controversy going back to the First World War as to whether it is legitimate to deliberately target civilian areas for the purpose of undermining civilian morale. The latter even in its most sanitized expressions, sounds awfully like a sanitized excuse, i.e., we’re not trying to bomb civilians to kill them, only to kill their war morale.
What was once called “morale bombing” is now more often referred to as “punishment campaigns.” Although that term can also be used (a bit fuzzily) to include targeting infrastructure to convince the other side to give up or come to terms. Some confusion comes in here derived from classical 19th century military concepts, especially those identified with Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), which stressed that the real political goal of any war was to destroy the enemy’s will to fight. This is sometimes taken as a deep psychological insight. But what it really means is convincing the enemy side that they no longer consider continuing the fight to be less onerous than making a peace agreement.
When combined with the notion of “total war” that has developed since the Napoleonic wars, which stressed that notion that wars are between whole societies, not just the formal armed forces, we wind up with the notion that undermining the civilian public’s “war morale.” The idea that such a goal can be achieved by bombing cities and driving civilian into mass panic and even a revolution (“regime change”) against their own government. The First World War experience of both Britain and Germany showed clearly that this assumption was wrong.
And the experience has been repeated many times since then, most recently by the Iranian people’s unwillingness to overthrow their own government on behalf of a two hostile powers, the US and Israel, which are bombing their country in a war of aggression and killing large numbers of civilians. But the fact that such expectations have been disappointed for over a century won’t stop a meathead like white Christian nationalist Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth from praying to God to help him inflict death on the heathen hordes as send them all to Hell for eternity.
Decapitation strategies
The concept of “decapitation” can refer to both targeted assassinations of senior leaders and to the effort to interference with the enemy country’s military command and control functions.
Times have changed since the Gulf War, because back then public acknowledgment that assassination of leaders was a deliberate goal was considered at least bad form, even among Republicans. The Bush Senior Administration actually fired a general who spoke too bluntly in public about what Bush and his Defense Secretary Dick Cheney were planning to do. Time magazine adopted a diplomatic tone in describing what happened:
Last week [in November 1990] Cheney fired the highly decorated Air Force Chief of Staff, General Michael Dugan, for “poor judgment at a sensitive time” in speaking indiscreetly on secret and diplomatically touchy issues relating to the gulf crisis. Dugan was the first member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to be dismissed since President Harry Truman in 1949 sacked Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Louis Denfeld and the first military commander to be dismissed since Truman ousted General Douglas MacArthur in 1951.The New York Times was a bit more clear:
Cheney blew up after reading on-the-record comments that Dugan, in office only 79 days, made to Washington Post and Los Angeles Times correspondents accompanying him on a week-long trip through the Middle East. Dugan, a West Point graduate, talked in considerable detail about classified operational plans, including the use of Saudi bases for American B-52 flights in wartime and training routines for the supersecret F-117A Stealth fighters. In comments deeply distressing to America’s allies, Dugan advocated bombing Iraqi cities –including downtown Baghdad – and said, “I don’t expect to be concerned” about political constraints. [my emphasis] (1)
General Dugan, in articles published on Sunday by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, said the Joint Chiefs of Staff had concluded that the only effective military option for driving Iraqi forces out of Kuwait was heavy bombing of Baghdad to “decapitate“ the senior Iraqi leadership, making President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, his family and senior commanders primary targets.Back then, it was too much even for Dick Cheney that a US general would describe war plans so bluntly! He was the first senior general at that level to be fired since Douglas MacArthur in 1951. Four decades later, it was still considered a big deal. Today “War” Secretary Pete Hegseth firs generals if they seem to be too little sympathetic to his Christian nationalist Crusader mentality.
“The cutting edge would be in downtown Baghdad," General Dugan was quoted by The Post as saying. “If I want to hurt you, it would be at home, not out in the woods someplace.“ (2)
Michael Dugan
The Gulf War decapitation plan was in line with a goal of introducing what its proponents called strategic paralysis. That term probably had slightly more nuance than “killing a bunch of senior officials and hope everything falls apart.” But that was the core idea.
Robert Pape was blunt in a 1997 assessment: “a strategic bombing strategy, designed by [John] Warden and aimed at decapitating the Iraqi leadership, was executed during the opening days of the air war against Iraq, and failed completely.” (3)
Pape also wrote:
The decapitation campaign, known as Instant Thunder, pursued victory solely through strategic bombing of a small number of political and economic targets in the hope of isolating Saddam Hussein's regime from its political and military control structures, thus leading to its overthrow or strategic paralysis, either of which would force Iraq to abandon Kuwait. (4)Pape emphasizes that air power was critical to pushing back the Iraqi army in the Gulf War because of its tactical role: “Air power did succeed in coercing Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, but it did so by undermining its ability to defend against the Coalition's ground threat.” (p. 212) He refers to this as the use of “theater air power” (a similar concept to tactical air power). He also points out that the Gulf War saw “the first major use of strategic bombing to decapitate an opponent's leadership in order to achieve victory by changing or paralyzing the enemy government.” He also takes it as an example showing that tactical air power has become even more effective compared to “strategic air campaigns against an enemy’s political and economic centers,” i.e., strategic bombing.
Robert Farley in 2021 also speculated on what might have happened had the initial decapitation strike in Iraq had succeeded:
In the early days of the air campaign of the 1991 Gulf War, the United States undertook a concerted effort to track and strike Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The effort was predicated on the belief that eliminating Saddam Hussein would have two effects; it would throw the Iraqi military hierarchy into chaos, and it would make the surviving Iraqi leadership more amenable to a negotiated solution.Notes:
The effort to kill Hussein was only one episode in the U.S. pursuit of “decapitation” as a politico-military strategy. In the post-Cold War era, the United States has faced a variety of tyrants and terrorists. U.S. leaders reasoned that steps to crush the head of the snake might make it unnecessary to kill the entire body, thus sparing much destruction and civilian death.
The 1991 decapitation attacks, and similar attacks launched in 2003, failed. [my emphasis] (5)
(1) Ready, Aim, Fired. Time 10/01/1990. <https://time.com/archive/6716028/ready-aim-fired/> (Accessed: 2026-04-04).
(2) Schmitt, Eric (1990): Confrontation in the Gulf: Air Force Chief Is Dismissed for Remarks on Gulf Plan: Cheney Cites Bad Judgment. New York Times 09/18/2026.
(3) Pape, Robert (1997): The Air Force Strikes Back: A Reply to Barry Watts and John Warden. Security Studies 7:2, 213. <https://doi.org/10.1080/09636419708429346>
(4) Pape, Robert (2014): Bombing To Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, 211-214. Ithica and London: Cornell University Press.
(5) Farley, Robert (2021): Counterfactual: What If Saddam Hussein Had Died in the First Gulf War? The National Interest 11/14/2021. <https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/counterfactual-what-if-saddam-hussein-had-died-first-gulf-war-196220> (Accessed: 2026-04-04).
(6) Naegele, Tobias (2022): Chiefs, Part 10: The Invisible Chief’. Air & Space Forces Magazine 11/09/2022. <https://www.airandspaceforces.com/chiefs-part-10-dugan-the-invisible-chief/> (Accessed: 2026-10-04).
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