To Douhet and Mitchell, quick wars meant reduced casualties. In becoming more terrible, warfare would actually become more humane. Better to decide a war by terrorizing the population with “a few gas bombs,” Mitchell wrote, than “the present methods of blowing people to bits by cannon projectiles or butchering them with bayonets.” Mitchell even suggested that future wars might be fought, not by large armies, but an elite cadre of aerial warriors, the modern equivalent of “the armored knights in the Middle Ages.” This, too, would save lives. And the very threat of total annihilation, he argued
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