Air Power Meets Clausewitz: Military Coercion as Limited War

This article presents a critical evaluation of the study of military coercion, a field that has gained growing prominence since the end of the Cold War. Its purpose is to analyze what may be the most representative work to come out of this line of research: Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, by Robert A. Pape (1996). It will interrogate the underlying premise of the work – one shared by the remainder of the substantial literature in this area – according to which military coercion is fundamentally different from war. This interrogation takes into account the contrast between Pa...