Airpower, Ground Warfare, and the Limits of ‘Post-Heroic Warfare’

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The impact of airpower in the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran has come under considerable scrutiny regarding its effectiveness in subduing Tehran. Without deploying ground forces, it will be very difficult for the United States to overcome Iranian resistance and the chokehold Tehran maintains over the Strait of Hormuz. For many countries, especially the United States, the attractiveness of airpower to overwhelm and defeat an opponent is not new. Dating back to the Italian airpower theorist Giulio Douhet, theoretical expositions have suggested that airpower would trigger social collapse by breaking the enemy society's will, obviating a land engagement, and decisively overwhelming the adversary through its immense and lethal power. The historical record, however, belies this claim. Douhet's views on airpower are not necessarily the leitmotif for contemporary airpower enthusiasts. Yet airpower resonates because of its precision and, more importantly, the relatively low costs the attacker incurs, even as the defender—especially a weaker one—suffers considerably greater costs. It is also often the default option because it is an easy-to-use, blunt instrument that demonstrates resolve, is easy to deploy, and can inflict substantial damage. This significantly, if not entirely, explains why the Trump administration has relied overwhelmingly on airpower against Iran.

The "post-heroic syndrome" is at best a relative phenomenon and less applicable to non-Western states such as Russia and China. Even Western states, or more generally high-income, low-birth-rate societies, can transcend the constraints of the post-heroic age when the stakes are sufficiently high.

More fundamentally, the resort to force through the application of airpower reflects the social, institutional, and demographic conditions prevailing in Western democracies. As Edward Luttwak observed three decades ago, Western societies struggle with sustaining heavy casualties because they are high-income, low-birth-rate societies. Pre-industrial societies with higher birth rates had sufficient population for military recruitment and, with it, a tolerance for high battlefield casualties. Post-industrial societies, especially in the West, have shown far greater resistance to suffering casualties. More recently, Luttwak underscored that even non-Western societies such as Russia have found it difficult to sustain heavy casualties, cementing what he terms the age of "post-heroic warfare". Whether Russia has truly entered the age of post-heroic warfare remains debatable, as the analysis below will show.

The "post-heroic syndrome" is at best a relative phenomenon and less applicable to non-Western states such as Russia and China. Even Western states, or more generally high-income, low-birth-rate societies, can transcend the constraints of the post-heroic age when the stakes are sufficiently high. The subsequent analysis therefore offers some important qualifications to the post-heroic syndrome. A cursory look at birth rates, as shown in Table 1, reveals that all the countries listed have fertility rates well below the replacement level, with the exception of Israel and Iran. Even in Iran's case, the fertility rate is only marginally above the required level, and prior to 2025, Iran's fertility rate was below the replacement rate. Israel, as the analysis below will show, is the only Western-aligned entity that has demonstrated a high tolerance for casualties. Pakistan, despite having a high birth rate and low income, has not shown a high level of readiness to use ground forces for significant land operations against India in decades (Table 1). The last time it did so was in Kargil in 1999. Consequently, this was also the war in which India demonstrated any commitment to sustaining large casualties.

Table 1.

Source: Macrotrends Datasets, The Washington Post

Thus, resistance to ground warfare stems from its potential to cause high casualties. Ground warfare, the most arduous and demanding form of warfare, is not being waged to the extent necessary to produce decisive outcomes unless the stakes are very high—as is evident in the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Even if current hostilities remain deadlocked between Moscow and Kyiv and the conflict ends along existing territorial lines, it will have come after considerable attrition, with each side grinding the other into exhaustion. This exhaustion will have resulted from the extensive toll that land combat operations take on the belligerents.

For Western powers, by contrast, the prospect of incurring casualties has weighed heavily on the means they have chosen to militarily subdue their opponents. The first Gulf War of 1990-91, which led to a swift allied victory culminating in the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, was waged against an adversary that had been fairly isolated, with objectives very clearly defined by the Americans and their allies.

Airpower has become the easy, or default, option. The archetypal cases are the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Western powers led by the US resorted to airpower, refusing to subject their personnel to land operations in order to stanch the atrocities committed by the Bosnian Serbs. Their unwillingness to commit ground forces meant that they wound up prolonging the conflict, thereby exacerbating the humanitarian catastrophe. The same pattern occurred with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) air war of 1999 against Serbia over its atrocities in Kosovo. NATO's 78-day air campaign eventually ended only because the Clinton administration, which spearheaded the effort, began preparing for a ground invasion—the prospect of which, combined with sustained air pressure, compelled Slobodan Milosevic to accept NATO's terms and withdraw Serbian forces from Kosovo. A close look at casualty data among Western states since the Bosnia-Herzegovina war shows that US fatalities in particular have been quite limited.

Western Intervention in Iraq

Even when the stakes were high—as was the case following the September 11, 2001 attacks—the ground combat exposure of the US and its allies was against very weak opponents: al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Moreover, as the data shows, US allies were even more reluctant to expose their forces to high-casualty ground combat missions. In Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), American combat deaths totalled 2,456 between October 2001 and August 2021. The allied invasion of Iraq in 2003 was launched against an opponent whose capabilities had been significantly diminished through a prolonged regime of punitive sanctions preceding the war. For the US specifically, the invasion and post-invasion occupation for the period between March 2003 and August 2010 resulted in 4,432 deaths, averaging just over 590 per annum over seven and a half years. While deeply significant in human terms, these losses were considerably lower than those sustained in the Korean and Vietnam wars, where American deaths reached 36,000 and 58,220 respectively. The United States, the leading Western power today, has shown little willingness to sustain losses on that scale in the ongoing conflict with Iran. Among US allies, deaths in Afghanistan were considerably lower than American figures. The British suffered the second-highest number of fatalities, with 454 deaths, while the remaining allies each recorded fatalities in double digits over the course of twenty years.

Contrary to Luttwak's claims about Russia's aversion to suffering casualties, Moscow has, in fact, incurred more combat fatalities in Ukraine than it did during the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

Undoubtedly, declining birth rates do partly explain the resistance to incurring losses in high-casualty ground warfare, and this is especially true in the case of Western powers. Yet there is evidence to suggest that when significant interests are engaged and the stakes are high, states will readily absorb steep casualties—as the war between Russia and Ukraine demonstrates. Contrary to Luttwak's claims about Russia's aversion to suffering casualties, Moscow has, in fact, incurred more combat fatalities in Ukraine than it did during the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Russia has suffered roughly 350,000 deaths in four years of fighting in Ukraine, whereas during the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Soviets suffered 15,000 fatalities—approximately 4.3 percent of Russian casualties in the ongoing war. The reason is that Moscow has far greater stakes in Ukraine than it ever did in Afghanistan: Russia's religious and national identity was forged in what is Ukraine today. When religious and national identity are at stake, they serve to reinforce the imperative to absorb steep casualties. Indeed, questions of identity carry a compelling force that is both deeply felt and difficult to quantify. The willingness to sustain high casualties may therefore have less to do with birth rates, income levels, or a declining ethos of sacrifice than with the depth of the interests at stake.

On the other hand, in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, the stakes could not be higher for European members of NATO, given their geographic proximity to the conflict and Moscow's history of expansionism. Yet European countries have shown considerable resistance to exposing their forces to combat. The very fact that Ukraine has managed to hold its ground against Russia—despite enormous sacrifice—has given Europeans less reason to commit ground forces of their own. If anything, Ukraine's battlefield resilience has reduced the intensity of the threat to Europe. Unless Russia makes significant territorial gains in Ukraine and poses serious military threats to Poland, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltic states, it is difficult to envisage any European ground force deployments in Ukraine.

The willingness to sustain high casualties may therefore have less to do with birth rates, income levels, or a declining ethos of sacrifice than with the depth of the interests at stake.

Nevertheless, even a “Western outpost” such as Israel has shown considerable readiness to absorb fatalities when the stakes are high. Although there are several examples from the Israeli case, one is particularly instructive. In the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, Israel lost 119 soldiers in a month of fighting—a response triggered by Hezbollah's cross-border abduction of two Israeli soldiers. Israel's reaction was ferocious and disproportionate, but more importantly, it was a clear demonstration of its readiness to absorb significant casualties through land operations, even in response to the capture of two soldiers. The intensity of Israel's response may seem difficult to explain in purely proportionate terms, but it was also intended to send a coercive signal to Hezbollah to deter future attacks—a goal Israel succeeded in achieving for 17 years until the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. Unlike other Western powers, Israel broadly bucks the "post-heroic" syndrome.

Even a country such as India, as both of its major operations against Pakistan—the post-Pulwama Balakot air strikes and Operation Sindoor—demonstrate, has shown a marked reluctance to pursue high-casualty ground operations. This is equally true for Pakistan; despite being a high birth rate, low-income country, as Table 1 shows, it has refrained from launching large-scale land combat engagements with India. More broadly, the balance of interests tends to determine the balance of resolve and motivation, which in turn shapes the tolerance for high casualties. As the Russian example demonstrates, a high tolerance for fatalities can be rooted in national identity and nationalism, irrespective of birth rates.

Kartik Bommakanti is a Senior Fellow with the Strategic Studies Programme at the Observer Research Foundation.

• International Affairs
• Russia and Eurasia
• USA and Canada
• West Asia
• Airpower and ground warfare
• Airpower and ground warfare
• Casualty aversion
• Giulio Douhet airpower theory
• Ground combat operations
• NATO air campaign
• Post-heroic warfare
• Russia-Ukraine war
• Strait of Hormuz
• US-Iran conflict
• US-Iran conflict
• US-Iran conflict
• Western military strategy

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