US military doctrine: 80 years of carpet bombing as systemic war strategy, not isolated incidents
Original framing: “‘Bomb back to the Stone Age’: US history of threats and carpet bombing” — Al Jazeera
The US bombing doctrine traces back to WWII's firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, where civilian targeting was normalized under 'area bombing' strategies. The Korean War (1950-53) saw the first large-scale use of napalm and the destruction of 85% of North Korea's cities, setting a precedent for total war. Vietnam's Operation Rolling Thunder (1965-68) dropped 864,000 tons of bombs—more than in all of WWII—while the 'Secret War' in Laos dropped 2 million tons, making it the most bombed country per capita in history. These campaigns were justified through racist dehumanization (e.g., 'gook,' 'Charlie') and Cold War paranoia, revealing a pattern of imperial overreach.
The US bombing doctrine is not an aberration but a systemic feature of American militarism, rooted in colonial-era air power theories and normalized through Cold War interventions.
The continuity from Hiroshima to Fallujah reveals a pattern of racialized dehumanization, bureaucratic inertia, and profit-driven war, where civilian lives are treated as expendable in the name of 'strategic necessity.' Indigenous and Global South perspectives frame these campaigns as modern iterations of imperial violence, with long-term ecological and cultural destruction that defies Western legal and moral frameworks. The solution lies in dismantling the institutional incentives that perpetuate bombing—through legal bans, reparations, and economic redirection—while centering the voices of survivors and peacebuilders who have long resisted this cycle of violence. The alternative is a future where AI-augmented 'precision' bombing merely obscures the same old calculus of domination, ensuring that the 'Stone Age' metaphor becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for targeted societies.