Bombing Civilians Doesn't Win Wars
Why the president's strategy is militarily unsound
President Trump’s announcement that he intends to have the U.S. military bomb power plants and bridges tomorrow is troubling on many fronts.
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.1
First, it sounds more like the shouted insults in a street brawl than a presidential announcement. And the out-of-control tone is troubling when you consider that this man has sole authority to launch U.S. nuclear weapons.
This announcement, in combination with his earlier comment that he intends to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages” suggests he plans a significant bombing campaign in Iran beginning tomorrow (April 7).2 If the intention of the campaign is to cause widespread harm to Iran’s civilians with some notion that they will “rise up” and force their government to quit, or that the Iranian government will be so shocked and appalled by the harm done to its citizens that it will surrender without civil unrest or pressure, the plan is certain to fail.
Punishing civilian populations doesn’t win wars.
If Mr. Trump believes he can win the war in Iran by pulverizing Iran’s cities, killing civilians, and making the lives of those who survive miserable, he is making the same mistake that Vladimir Putin is making in Ukraine. Not only is bombing civilians immoral and appalling, it is an ineffective way of fighting a war. They is no evidence that bombing Iranian civilians will lead to the war’s termination.
There was a popular phrase, often said in the 1990s that soldiers were supposed to “kill people and break things.” This is exactly wrong. Wars are not about killing people. At least, they are not about just killing anyone. Wars are won by killing the other side’s soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Wars are won by defeating the other side’s military, not by killing, starving, de-housing, or immiserating civilians.
The reason harming civilians is such an ineffective strategy is that in wartime civilians DO NOT MATTER.
If you don’t believe me, name all the wars that have been won just by killing civilians.3 Go ahead. I’ll wait. Can’t think of any? Really? Well, it’s not surprising.
I’ve spent twenty-seven years researching the question and can’t find one. Ancient European history, wars in ancient Asia, Medieval history, colonial wars, modern wars — not a single one. I’ve never read about a leader bursting into tears and saying, “Oh my God, so many civilians being killed! I’m sorry gentlemen, but we’re going to have to surrender. I cannot allow more civilians to be killed.”4
Which is not surprising. Because if a nation still has military forces in being and those forces are armed, able to fight, and motivated to fight, it doesn’t matter how many civilians you kill. The war will go on. What makes it possible to fight is not live civilians, but armed, capable and motivated military forces in being.
And killing civilians may be psychologically unproductive. If you kill grandma or little Billy back home, and a soldier at the front hears about it, will that make that soldier want to surrender? Or will it inflame him (or her) with anger and determination to find one of those sons of bitches who killed little Billy and show them what real killing is? Killing civilians almost always motivates soldiers to fight harder, not give in.
(By the way, despite what they claim, people who think killing civilians can win wars are not realists.)
History of killing civilians
One way to see the part that civilians play in wartime is to look at history. The Mongols slaughtered civilians in appalling numbers throughout their conquest of the Khwarazmian Empire, which covered modern Iran, Afghanistan and parts of four other countries (1219-12210). As many as six cities (and their occupants) were completely obliterated and many more cities were devastated — with large proportions of the civilians killed. Estimates of the casualties start at a million and go up from there. Yet the war didn’t end as a result of these brutal city annihilations. It was only after the last army was defeated on the banks of the Indus in 1221 that the war came to a close.
When Catholic forces under Count Tilly burned Magdeburg to the ground and killed tens of thousands of civilians in 1631, it didn’t bring the Thirty Years War to a screeching halt. The war went on for another 17 years. In fact, what happened at Magdeburg actually increased Protestant contributions to the war effort and brought more Protestant soldiers into the war.
Churchill did not surrender when London was bombed or Coventry was flattened. Hitler didn’t surrender when Hamburg was burned or Dresden was utterly destroyed. Germany ultimately suffered something like 400,000 civilian casualties from bombing without surrendering. It wasn’t until boots on the ground marched int Berlin that the war came to an end.
Stalin allowed an estimated one million civilians to starve to death while Leningrad was encircled for 872 days by German troops. Rather than use precious military resources to break the siege, Stalin used those military forces to defend Moscow, launch a winter offensive against the German center, and encircle and wipe out the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Only when those military forces could be “spared” from more important military priorities was the siege lifted.
Military contests are determined by military outcomes. Killing civilians has never been a path to military victory.5
Modern mistakes
The decision by Russia’s leaders to attack Ukraine’s power plants during the cold of this year’s exceedingly harsh winter certainly killed Ukrainian civilians and caused untold suffering for those who lived. But it was never going to force Ukraine to give up the fight. As long at Ukraine’s military forces were supplied and motivated, Ukraine was going to fight on.
President Trump appears to be making the same mistake. Killing Iranian civilians by bombing their cities will never force Iran’s leaders or the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) to end the war. Iranian military leaders are concerned with preserving their ground troops and building up their drone supplies so they can maintain a stranglehold on the Straits of Hormuz. Civilian deaths may be heartbreaking or enraging, but they are essentially irrelevant to the military calculations that govern war.
Want to know what civilian leaders say to each other when their cities are being bombed? Here is historian Herbert Box writing about the U.S. bombing campaign against Japan in the summer of 1945 in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan:
…no less a person than retired foreign minister Shidehara Kijuro, once the very symbol of cooperation with Britain and the United States, gave expression to a feeling that was widely held by Japan’s ruling elites at this time: namely, Japan had to be patient and resist surrender no matter what. Shidehara had earlier advised Foreign Minister Shigemitsu that the people would gradually get used to being bombed daily. In time their unity and resolve would grow stronger, and this would allow the diplomats “room to devise plans for saving the country in this time of unprecedented crisis.”
Now, on March 20, 1945, Shidehara wrote to his close friend Odaira Komatsuchi, the former vice president of the South Manchurian Railway Company, that, “[i]f we continue to fight back bravely, even if hundreds of thousands of noncombatants are killed, injured, or starved, even if millions of buildings are destroyed or burned,” there would be room to produce a more advantageous international situation for Japan. With the country facing imminent absolute defeat, Shidehara still saw advantages in turning all of Japan into a battlefield, for then the enemy’s lines of supply would become longer, making it more difficult for them to continue the war and giving diplomats room to maneuver. This was the mindset of ... Shidehara; it was probably shared by [Emperor] Hirohito.”6
And keep in mind that Shidehara was a moderate.
Useful bombing
If you want to know how to use bombing to win a war, pay attention to the intelligent use that Ukraine has put its own drones and missiles to. Although initially they did try some long-range attacks on targets in cities (these may have been attempts to target and kill leaders, however), their recent efforts have been carefully and intelligently aimed at degrading Russia’s military strength. (Wars are won by destroying your adversary’s military.)
The first spectacularly successful attacks were made by unmanned boats that sank Russia’s largest battleship and whose continued use ultimately drove the Russian navy out of the Black Sea.
Their second success was even more stunning. They smuggled drones into Russia and then launched them near Russian airbases. The target? The crown jewels of Russia’s Air Force — the long range bombers used for both launching cruise missiles into Ukraine and for delivering nuclear weapons to intercontinental targets in the event of a nuclear war. Using drones that targeted five air bases, somewhere between 10 and 41 bombers were destroyed. Ukraine’s clever attack struck and damaged one of the key elements of Russia’s strategic deterrent.
The third attack was no less intelligently designed: strikes against the primary Russian oil refineries and export terminals. Major damage was done to facilities at Ust-Luga, Primorsk, and Kirishi. These attacks are estimated to have reduced Russian oil export capacity by 20%.7 Given that Russia depends on oil sales for much of its income, this was an effective way to degrade some of the overall strength of the Russian state.
How to bomb
Bombing can be effective in aiding a war effort. But it must be applied for military purposes. Using bombing to destroy military targets or vital economic targets may aid in winning wars. It is, at least, a justifiable military strategy. Using military resources to kill civilians is, by and large, a waste of effort.
Killing civilians may be satisfying to the bloody-minded, but it does not win wars.
(By the way, it is not realism to waste military resources on emotionally satisfying targets that do not contribute to winning the military contest.)
“Iran War Live Updates: Trump Escalates Threat to Hit Iranian Power Plants,” The New York Times, April 5, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04/05/world/iran-war-trump-news
“Trump Says U.S. Will Be Out of Iran Within Two to Three Weeks” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/us/politics/trump-says-us-will-be-out-of-iran-within-two-to-three-weeks.html
“Trump: U.S. will bomb Iran “back to the stone ages” over next 2-3 weeks,” Axios, https://www.axios.com/2026/04/02/trump-bomb-iran-stone-ages-power-plants
I’m talking about wars between states here. There is some evidence that killing civilians in large numbers sometimes helps to win civil wars, defeat rebellions, or end guerrilla wars. I’m not talking about those wars. And I’m not talking about wars of choice where there is no intensity to the fighting, no real existential risk to either side. You might be able to find a war where neither side cared too much about the outcome and as a result killing some civilians caused one side or the other to back off. (Although I never have found such a war.)
If you know of a war between states where the risks were existential that has been won solely by killing civilians please let me know. I’ve been searching for decades.
Sometimes people cite the German surrender at the end of World War I as a time when civil unrest forced surrender. And there was starvation and rioting on the home front. But it wasn’t until soldiers at the front starting surrendering en masse and the sailors at Kiel rebelled — refusing the take their ships out to fight in the North Sea — that the Kaiser stepped down. It was the military’s unwillingness to fight that brought about Germany’s surrender. Similarly with the Russian revolution during World War I — it was the fact that Russian armies dissolved that made Russia’s withdrawal from the war essential. When civilians rise up in rebellion but the military remains committed to the war, the outcome is entirely different. The draft riots in New York City around the time of the battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War demonstrate the point. The crowds took over much of lower Manhattan and for a day or two, had control of the city. But Lincoln dispatched soldiers (some fresh from the battlefield at Gettysburg) who marched into lower Manhattan, confronted the crowds, shouldered their guns, fired, and the civilian unrest melted away. Governments have a monopoly on the means of violence. This makes it very difficult for it to be coerced by unarmed civilians.
Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 492.
Just a note. I didn't do a great job drafting the final paragraph. The term "vital economic targets" could be misinterpreted to mean, for example, power stations. Destroying power stations primarily harms civilians, so the argument here that harming civilians is not only immoral but a waste of effort would apply to those kinds of targets. What I meant to say was economic targets that were vital to the war effort. So, for example, missile manufacturing facilities, warehouses storing drone parts waiting to be assembled, ammo dumps, and so on.
Yep. I have been waiting on the clear presentation this most obvious of facts about war, obvious to the knowledgable and open minded who have examined the history of war -- or to those who have been listening to Ward through the years! No one has studied this so closely, exposed it more clearly, or shouted it with more determination in the face of simplistic assumptions. In fact the assumptions are not held only by the ignorant, the foolish, and the obstinate. Too many who refuse to give up what seems natural and inevitable to them, and these are the professionals and the leaders -- of almost every nation. Just keep preaching it. We need for them to hear your insights when push is coming to shove.