Air Power in the Second Nuclear Age
May 25, 2025
By: James Holmes
Results from today’s battlegrounds strongly suggest that drones, AI, and other novel technologies favor the defender, with nuclear weaponry supplying a backstop in some cases.
The lords of warfare have arranged a series of field trials for Admiral JC Wylie’s ideas about “sequential” and “cumulative” operations. Circumstances differ markedly from test case to test case. Russia and Ukraine have been at war for more than three years, both on land and in the Black Sea. The prolonged Russia-Ukraine war pits the world’s largest nuclear power against an adjacent nonnuclear opponent. The US Navy has been bombarding Yemen’s Houthi militants from the Red Sea in hopes of stemming missile and drone attacks on mercantile shipping. An oceangoing, nuclear-armed hegemon has striven to achieve decisive results against a substate antagonist without resorting to ground combat. A tenuous ceasefire is holding for the moment. And, most recently, India and Pakistan, two nuclear-weapon states that abut each other by land and sea, fought a brief but intense air, missile, and drone battle across their common frontier following last month’s terrorist attack against Indian tourists in the disputed Kashmir region. The combatants fashioned a ceasefire after a few days of fighting.
“Sequential” and “Cumulative” Military Operations
Air power, including its precision-guided missile contingent, played a key part in each conflict. Readers of these pixels know that Admiral Wylie postulated that military operations take two basic forms. “Sequential” operations take place in series, proceeding from tactical action A, to tactical action B, to tactical action C, and so forth, until a fighting force reaches its objective. A sequential endeavor is readily intelligible from a visual standpoint. Observers can plot it on a map or nautical chart using a vector or continuous curve leading to the objective. If any battle or engagement were to turn out differently, the operation as a whole would turn out differently, taking on a new pattern as the sequence shifted. Wylie regarded sequential operations—Sherman’s march through Georgia to the sea, to name one among countless examples—as the mode of warfare that promised decisive results.
Wylie pronounced “cumulative” operations useful if not necessary to the larger war effort, but insufficient on their own to deliver victory. This was a scattershot mode of warfare waged by unleashing a multitude of small-scale attacks unrelated to one another in time or geophysical space. Plotting a cumulative campaign on the map or chart creates a paint-splatter effect. Rather than hammer away at enemy forces in sequence to achieve a final goal, cumulative operations grind them down over time. No individual attack does the enemy grave harm on its own, but many minor attacks can add up to something big. Cumulative warfare is combat by statistics.
Air and naval warfare fall into the cumulative bin. The US Eighth Air Force combined bomber offensive against Nazi Germany during World War II was a classic cumulative effort, as was the US Navy’s submarine campaign against Japan. Again, Wylie contended that cumulative operations were indecisive in themselves. Air and sea power helped exhaust a foe, but they could not defeat it. By wearing down an antagonist, however, they could make the difference in a closely matched contest of arms—bolstering the sequential offensive’s prospects for success.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/air-power-in-the-second-nuclear-age
