In 1921, Italian military strategist Giulio Douhet published an essay titled “The Command of the Air,” which argued that planes would change the future of warfare, allowing armies to strike their enemies quickly and with great force, bypass traditional battlefields, attack the home front directly and destroy not just vital infrastructure, economies and homes but also the target’s morale and will to fight as civilian suffering and deaths mounted. In other words, the home front was the new war front.
This philosophy — clearly immoral in my eyes and now illegal according to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which classify civilians and civilian infrastructure as off-limits as legitimate military targets — was widely expressed for the first time in World War II, when air campaigns targeted cities. This century-old idea is also extremely fitting in order to understand today’s emerging cyber warfare, which allows states to bypass traditional physical fighting and air warfare and strike directly at their enemies’ infrastructure, economies and civilians. The emergence of cyber warfare takes Douhet’s philosophy to the next level.
