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Bombs Without Boots: The Limits of Airpower By Anthony M. Schinella Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2019 391 pages $44.99
A product of a Federal Executive Fellowship at the Brookings Institution, Bombs Without Boots is a thorough analysis of the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of both airpower and Landpower in twentieth-century foreign military interventions. The author, a career intelligence officer who participated in all of the case studies analyzed, is well positioned to provide analytical and qualitative assessments of a dominant approach to the Western use of power since the end of the Cold War-the use of airpower to intervene in military conflicts for strategic effect.
Schinella conducted his analysis through the examination of five case studies tailored to survey the results of a military intervention when it relied upon airpower and various levels of indigenous proxy ground forces. The interventions Schinella assesses include Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Israel/Lebanon in 2006, and Libya in 2011. Each case study is analyzed in its own chapter, involving different formulations of airpower and proxy forces, but each supporting the overall thesis that "dropping bombs from the skies without committing boots on the ground-at best may result in an outcome in which interveners have little influence over the post-conflict environment and at worst may lead to open-ended commitment without having resolved the fundamental problem" (2).
The first case study, Bosnia, assesses a military intervention that...