Empire Conquest-Chapter 861 - 100: New Military Science_2

In fact, this viewpoint emerged decades ago.

At that time, the Luosha Federation attempted to defeat the Tiaoman Empire through a blitzkrieg, and if it weren’t for the timely intervention of the Liangxia Empire, the Tiaoman Empire might have been doomed.

The Luosha Federation’s failure to swiftly defeat the Tiaoman Empire wasn’t due to a flaw in military theory but rather insufficient strength.

The military theory proposed by Ding Zhennan is vastly different from "blitzkrieg."

To put it bluntly, blitzkrieg is primarily a ground offensive strategy aimed at militarily occupying an enemy nation to achieve victory and end the war, which entails deploying large ground forces, consuming significant war materials, and enduring massive casualties and losses.

The key issue remains: it requires a massive amount of time!

Originally, the Luosha Federation planned to defeat the Tiaoman Empire within a year.

Even post-war, several strategic plans proposed by the West Continent Group set the time to capture East Luosha as one year.

This implies that it was impossible to achieve the strategic objective of the offensive before the Eastern Group completed its war mobilization.

Thus, blitzkrieg would inevitably evolve into a war of attrition!

As a result, after the first military reform, the Empire abandoned the "blitzkrieg" theory and began searching for new military doctrines.

The goal was singular: to resolve or avoid the "attrition warfare" trap.

The military doctrine proposed by Ding Zhennan is primarily reliant on strategic strikes.

In other words, it is somewhat similar to the strategic bombing used by the Empire against the Saiyi Imperial Kingdom and by the Newland Federation and Bulan Kingdom against the Tiaoman Empire during the last major war.

Through high-intensity strategic strikes, the aim is to completely destroy the enemy’s war foundation and achieve victory.

Actually, what Ding Zhennan engages in isn’t strategic bombing, at least there’s a significant difference from the strategic bombing during the last major war.

In the last major war, strategic bombing had a very prominent characteristic.

The bombing targets included not just military and industrial facilities but also civilian facilities, often directly targeting civilian objectives.

For example, during the bombing of the Saiyi Imperial Kingdom, the Empire’s Army Air Force repeatedly bombed residential areas.

Of course, this isn’t to say this method of bombing couldn’t achieve war objectives.

At least from the outcome of the last major war, large-scale strategic bombing proved to be an effective means to defeat the enemy and achieve victory.

Such indiscriminate large-scale bombing brings a very severe problem: it is overly costly.

When targeting large industrial cities, hundreds or even thousands of bombers are often needed, dropping thousands of tons of bombs in a single sortie to achieve limited objectives. Considering the fuel consumed and bombers shot down, it renders the cost-effectiveness ratio meaningless.

Moreover, personnel casualties have to be taken into account.

A bomber typically has a crew of several to a dozen members; if shot down, the probability of the crew surviving is extremely low.

Even if they successfully parachute out, they are likely to land in enemy-controlled areas and be captured.

Also, large-scale strategic bombing inevitably leads to significant civilian casualties, which brings unavoidable pressure from public opinion.

During the Boi War, the Empire’s Air Force faced strong international condemnation for bombing cities.

The resulting problem is that only during total war, after war mobilization has been completed, can such large-scale strategic bombing be implemented.

This was clearly demonstrated in the last major war.

For example, before completing war mobilization, the strategic bombing against the Saiyi Imperial Kingdom was actually minor in scale, primarily involving twin-engine medium bombers in the early stages, with heavy bombers only appearing later.

The same applied to the West Continent battlefield.

At that time, before officially joining the war, the assistance that the Newland Federation provided to the Bulan Kingdom was very limited, so the strategic bombing led by the Bulan Royal Air Force against the Tiaoman Empire was more like a retaliatory action to boost morale. Even when the Newland Federation joined the war, due to a shortage of heavy bombers, the bombing was not immediately intensified. It wasn’t until the Luosha Federation was on the brink of defeat that a thousand-bomber raid was launched against the Tiaoman Empire.

To put it simply, traditional strategic bombing requires the foundation of completed war mobilization to realize its potential value.

This is in stark contrast to the military doctrine proposed by Ding Zhennan.

If everything must be conducted based on completed mobilization, what meaning does Ding Zhennan’s doctrine hold?

Ding Zhennan’s military doctrine addresses this issue.

Regarding the West Continent Group, the strategic strikes should focus on precision bombing, aiming to destroy enemy military and para-military targets.

The main targets for the strikes are various industrial facilities.

As early as 2 years ago, Ding Zhennan, Bai Huawei, and Li Tianling jointly submitted a report, meticulously listing hundreds of categories of industrial targets and suggesting that the Military Intelligence Bureau intensify surveillance on these industrial targets during peacetime according to this report.

Destroying the enemy’s industrial production capability equates to defeating the enemy.

In modern warfare, a country that has lost industrial production capability will not only be defeated but its plight will be even worse than defeat.

This was particularly evident in the Saiyi Imperial Kingdom.

In the last major war, after the Saiyi Imperial Kingdom was bombed to collapse, a nationwide famine broke out. The survival of soldiers was not even guaranteed, let alone civilians. Even after the Liangxia Empire intervened and provided humanitarian aid, the situation in the Saiyi Imperial Kingdom did not significantly change, and the populace remained in hunger. The critical point is that in the following years, the Saiyi Imperial Kingdom continuously exported labor in exchange for necessary supplies for survival. According to unofficial statistics, during this war, at least 6 million Saiyi laborers died in foreign lands, with more than half unaccounted for, and the Saiyi Imperial Kingdom lost fewer than 5 million soldiers in action during the war.

Going back several decades, the idea of using bombing to destroy the industrial capability of a country, especially a major nation, was almost unimaginable.

In the last two years of the major war, the Liangxia Empire and the Tiaoman Empire amassed over ten thousand strategic bombers to heavily bombard Newland’s homeland, and after losing nearly 5,000 bombers and tens of thousands of crew members, and dropping 15 million tons of bombs, they were still unable to destroy the industrial production capability of the Newland Republic, eventually having to abandon the war against the Newland Republic and accept an outcome without victory. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

Arguably, the failure to achieve ultimate victory in the Second Global War, and the rapid divergence between the Liangxia Empire and the Tiaoman Empire after the war, were linked to the strategic bombing against the Newland Republic during the last two years. Tiaoman Empire believed it suffered greater losses, while Liangxia Empire felt that Tiaoman Empire did not fulfill its obligations, leading to irreconcilable conflicts over how to divide the spoils of victory.

According to the widely accepted view, the division of war expenses was the top reason for the post-war rift between the two traditional empires.

Fundamentally, it was the low cost-effectiveness of strategic bombing.

However, having developed to the present day, relying on precision-guided munitions that have increased strike efficiency by hundreds or even thousands of times, it is no longer a far-fetched dream to destroy a country’s industrial production capability through strategic bombing within a short period and force it to surrender.

In the annual war game exercises, Ding Zhennan and other young Turk officers have demonstrated the feasibility of this strategy with their results.

Yet the problem is, it is just a war game exercise.

After Iraq brazenly invaded and annexed Kuwait, the Empire decisively took action and appointed Ding Zhennan as the Combat Staff Advisor.

To put it bluntly, it was to use Iraq as a test ground and validate Ding Zhennan’s military doctrine through bombing Iraq.

Let Ding Zhennan prove through actual action whether a strategic bombing campaign mainly using precision munitions can destroy a country’s industry and completely extinguish its war potential in a short time, and even force it to surrender, achieving the highest level of objectives without engaging in ground warfare, or strictly controlling the scale of ground warfare, including deploying forces to occupy the hostile nation after the large-scale strikes.

From the results of over a month of previous combat, or rather, strikes, the results have been very promising!

Theoretically, defeating the West Continent Group is more challenging, but not insurmountable.

So, could this tactic be used against adversaries across the East Ocean?