> You can't win a war purely through air superiority and bombs. That's not a new lesson but it's one the administration failed to learn through history and is apparently now failing to learn through practice.
This is a lesson that conservative administrations have refused to learn for decades. I hope Curtis Lemay is experiencing a toasty afterlife for all of the suffering he has caused humanity due to a zealous conviction that aerial bombing campaigns win wars, and his lasting legacy in conservative war strategy.
The delusion is somewhat over a century old now. It originates from factions within the military community (vs. politicians) and there's nothing particularly conservative about it -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell#Post-war_advoca...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_Mafia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_hawk
Big picture, I'd categorize the problem as human nature and "sounds too good to be false".