In 1962, a British scientist named P.S.M. Blackett published a think-tanky treatise called Studies of War, Nuclear and Conventional. It was a revised compilation of assorted articles he wrote going back to the 1940s. Blackett was an interesting fellow, if somewhat obscure. I’m not sure you can call a Nobel Prize winner obscure, but I just did. He was another one of those fellows that thought that being good at math made him good at politics, and everything else for that matter. It’s a common affliction, especially these days. Truly smart people know that Mr. Spock is a fictional character, and the world runs like a carnival, not a Swiss watch.

Blackett coined a somewhat obscure term that’s quite useful. He called it the Jupiter Complex. He warned against imagining yourself as righteous gods, raining down thunderbolts on your evil enemies. It’s a practical as much as a moralistic warning.

“If a scientist may be forgiven for mixing his classical
metaphors, one might think of the earth-bound soldiers as
becoming beguiled by the sirens’ song of then airmen col-
leagues, who, spiritually intoxicated by flight at 50,000 feet
in a jet bomber with an H-bomb in the bomb bay, sang of the
ease with which they could keep erring mankind in order by
threatening them (as if they were Jove himself) with atomic
thunderbolts. This Jupiter complex of the airmen came to
dominate disastrously the military thinking of much of the
Western world and was an important factor in bringing
about the present Western inferiority in conventional
weapons.”

Blackett warned that on top of the kinds of destruction involved, especially with atomic weapons in the mix, the real problem was that it wouldn’t work. At first, the air force was just a part of the army. My father was in the USAAF, for instance. Army Air Force. But the air force fought for primacy, and what with rockets and bombs and missiles becoming so powerful, politicians stated to look on them as the primary source of military power.

“The rise in the West of the doctrine of winning wars
quickly and cheaply by air attack on the enemy’s war-making
capacity rather than against his armed forces arose out of the
long struggle of the early military airmen to break through
the military conservatism of the soldiers and sailors. This
struggle convinced them, probably at this time rightly, that
the air arm would remain backward technically if left under
the control of the army and navy. Air attack on the enemy’s
war-making capacity rather than his armed forces provided
a military role for air power which could be exercised in-
dependently of the two older services.”

It’s useful to crack a history book once in a while and look at the effectiveness of Jupiter Complex bombardments of military and civilian targets since the Second World War. Japan tried it at Pearl Harbor. It didn’t turn out the way they planned. Another example is the firebombing of Dresden, still remembered mostly because of Vonnegut’s high-school required reading book about it. Dresden was only one of many such raids which heaped destruction on Germany, but were essentially worthless to stop German war production, or even affect their will to fight on. America dropped atom bombs on Japan to close out the war, but Japan still had to be occupied. The firebombing raids that preceded Fat Man and Little Boy were just as devastating, but didn’t force a surrender. The US dropped a lot of ordnance while island-hopping in the Pacific, but they still needed amphibious landings with lots of casualties to win the war. Bombing alone couldn’t do it.

MacArthur surrendered to the siren song of the Jupiter Complex. He wanted to nuke North Korea to break their back in a single stroke. It wouldn’t have worked, and cooler heads prevailed. Vietnam was a textbook example of the Jupiter Complex. Lyndon Johnson was famous for micromanaging the targets, and even the total bomb weights for America’s bombing runs on the north. He literally wanted to be Jupiter. You can make similar comparisons to the soviet, and then the American adventures in Afghanistan. Throw in Black Hawk Down for good measure. The Ukraine keeps trying it on Russia, to little effect.

Blackett thought the Jupiter Complex was a simple case of not thinking a military exercise through. If you look at an attack, especially a pre-emptive attack, what happens tomorrow is never figured in to the equation. It’s just:

Step 1. Bomb

Step 2. ??????

Step 3. They surrender

He didn’t think that would happen, and explained at some length why that was the case. And unlike others, he wondered what would happen on Day 2:

“In my view, no real military theory of the ” exercise of
true air power,” as it later come to be called by some British
writers, was ever achieved: in effect, what passed for one
was a theory of the exercise of air superiority, that is, how
best to destroy the enemy’s war-making capacity when the
enemy could not destroy yours. No complete theory of such
an independent strategy was ever formulated because it could
not be kept within the air force’s own province : for it would
have been necessary to include in it the passive defence of
one’s own civilian population. This is so because it soon
became clear that air attack on the enemy’s war-making
capacity generally led to attack on cities and so on the civilian
population. If the usual military principle had been adopted,
that of preparing to be attacked with the same weapons with
which one is preparing to attack an enemy, then the huge
cost of an adequate civil defence system would have had to
be incurred.”

Of course, in today’s world, the “adequate civil defence system” is just a bunch of anti-missile missiles, of very dubious effectiveness, with astonishing price tags, followed by telling everyone to duck. It’s the Jupiter Syndrome, only Jupiter is wearing a hockey goalie outfit.

Good luck with that.