\ \ Chapter IT INPLICATIONS FOR MILTTARY POLICY By Bernard Brodie s = = a e? cs Under conditions existing before the atomic Bead,if/was possible to con~ template methods of air defense keeping pace with and perhaps even outdistancing the means of offense. Long-range rockets baffled the defense, but they were extremely expensive per unit for inaccurate, single-blow weapons. Against bomb- ing aircraft, on the other hand, fighter planes and antiaircraft guns could be extremely effective. Progress in speed and altituce performance of all types of aircraft, which on the whole tends to favor the attacker, was more or less offset by technological progress in other ficlds where the net result tends to favor the defender (e.g., radar search and tracking, proximity fused projectiles, etc.). At any rate, a future war between great powers could be visualized as one in which the decisive cffects of stratetic bombing would be contingent upon the cumulative effect of prolovigcd bombardmont efforts, which woulc in turn be govcerned by acrial battles and even whole campaigns for master; of the air. lMean- while--if the recent war can sorve as a pattern--the older forms of warfare on land and sea would exercise a telling cffect not only on the ultimate decision but on the cffectiveness of the strategic bombing itsclf. Conversely, the strategic bombing would, as was certainly truc against Germany, influence or detormine the dccision mainly through its effects-on the ground campaigns, The atomic bomb seems, however, to crase the pattern described above, first of all because its cnormous destructive potency is bound vastly to reduce the time necessary to achieve the results which accruc from strategic bombing-~and there can no longer be any dispute about the decisiveness of strategic bombing. In fact, the cssential change introduced b:r the atomic bomb is not primarily that it will make war more violent--a city can be as effectively destroyed with TNT || and incendiaries--but that it will concentrate the violence in terms of tire, ~57L2.