The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Epochs #217 ｜ Air Power

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome back to Epochs. After the long series about Henry V, I thought it'd be time for

00:00:22.000 something completely different. I'll just do a one-off bit of a palette cleanser this time. So

00:00:27.500 I thought I wanted to talk a little bit about something I'd meant to talk about for a while,

00:00:32.240 but hadn't really found the exact opportunity during the train of Epochs episodes. Talk about

00:00:39.020 a bit of modern war. Talk about air power specifically. And with what's gone on recently,

00:00:47.100 you may be watching this months or years from now, but in recent times, in the summer of 2025,

00:00:52.660 there was a big amount of bombings on Iran or Iran and Israel bombing each other and the Americans

00:00:59.640 getting involved. And it's just something I've wanted to talk about for a while, the history

00:01:02.940 of air power. I've sort of touched on it once or twice here or there. I did an interview with

00:01:07.820 Tim Davis, the ex RAF fast jet pilot. But that was talking more about the aeropause where I want to

00:01:15.420 talk a bit about the politics, even the morality of air power. And I think one of the first things

00:01:22.340 to say is how relatively new the whole thing is, right? Men have been fighting wars on the ground,

00:01:30.040 land armies, for thousands of years and even naval warfare for thousands of years. But we've only

00:01:37.020 been taken to the skies in powered flights since 1903, right? And it's only really since World War I

00:01:42.120 that any large amount of air combat has ever taken place. So it's a 20th century thing. So it was all

00:01:50.000 quite new. And I want to talk about really how we got to where we are today, where you've got something

00:01:55.880 like the B-2 bomber, the B-2 stealth bomber, dropping giant munitions, 30,000 pound specialised

00:02:03.840 munitions. How did we end up there? Well, the idea of every concept that Israel and Iran might just 0.97

00:02:10.580 launch rockets more or less indiscriminately, certainly on the Iranian part, more or less

00:02:14.620 indiscriminately on cities full of civilians. So yeah, I want to talk all about that.

00:02:20.840 One of the first things I'd like to talk about to frame the whole thing is something to do,

00:02:25.280 because we are talking about death and destruction and misery and mutilations and maimings,

00:02:31.960 very often of completely innocent people, women and children and animals and everything.

00:02:36.960 So something I want to talk about was the so-called trolley problem or the trolley dilemma.

00:02:42.860 That is a sort of a thought experiment where if you imagine a trolley or a train on railroad tracks

00:02:49.300 and there's five people tied to the railroad tracks and the train cannot be stopped, but you're standing

00:02:54.720 there with a lever in your hand and you can divert the train at the last minute to miss the five

00:03:00.420 people. They'll be diverted onto another bit of track where there's one person also tied down.

00:03:05.540 You know, do you do it? Do you pull the lever? One person will still have to die, but you'll save

00:03:10.700 five. I mean, the obvious answer is yes, of course you do. It's no question. But you know, what if

00:03:15.940 though that one person is your son or daughter or your mother or father and you have to watch them

00:03:23.480 get squashed and cut to pieces and the other five people you don't know and you never see them get

00:03:29.920 killed anyway? What then? Would you still do it then? And if you say no, let the five people die.

00:03:36.540 Well, what if it was 10 people? What if it was 20? What if it was 200? How many before you say,

00:03:42.280 okay, no, I'll kill someone I love to save those people? What if it was 20,000? What if it was 20 0.87

00:03:48.660 million? You know, so that's a sort of a thought experiment, but that sort of thing does and has

00:03:55.660 absolutely come into play. So the question, another way of putting it is when does a murder

00:04:02.780 or an atrocity, many, many murders or a war crime, when does a war crime become justified

00:04:10.420 to prevent an even worse war crime? And this isn't just purely hypothetical. This is what has played 0.67

00:04:17.080 out many, many times and I'm sure it will do in the future again. Do you order the incineration of

00:04:24.120 80,000 civilians in a single flash in order to save millions of your soldiers? Again, it's easy to sit

00:04:33.560 there in your armchair and just say yes to that. But then what if it's not so cut and dry? What if

00:04:39.220 it's, we'll kill hundreds of thousands of people and maybe it saves millions of people or we'll kill 0.93

00:04:47.540 hundreds of thousands of people and maybe it saves about the same number. What then? Or if the numbers 0.96

00:04:54.360 are less, we'll kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people to save just a few thousand or a few hundred 0.73

00:05:00.280 people on our side, trading the lives of enemy civilians for your soldiers. You know, it's a

00:05:07.040 difficult dilemma, one that certainly many leaders and military planners have had to face and as I say,

00:05:12.640 probably will do again, almost certainly will do again. The podcaster Dan Carlin once put it,

00:05:17.680 imagine it's 1939, just before World War II starts and there's one nuke in the world and it belongs to

00:05:24.020 Britain and you're the leader of Britain. There's one nuke in the world and you can nuke Berlin 0.52

00:05:28.980 on day one of World War II and it wipes out Berlin, kills everyone in Berlin, but stops World War II,

00:05:36.520 or at least in Europe, where, you know, many, many, many more people than would have been killed in

00:05:41.980 that nuclear blast would die. But they haven't yet. Would you do it? Not just the morality or ethical

00:05:47.920 question, would you have the guts, the balls to pull the trigger on that thing, so to speak? You know, 0.99

00:05:53.720 there's many such thought experiments. So to talk about the history of it, going back to the very

00:05:57.680 beginning, I'd like to go back to sort of the 18th century and balloons, men first leaving the surface

00:06:03.940 of the earth in balloons. I mean, now it seems to us, doesn't it, completely obvious that whoever

00:06:12.060 controls the skies, whoever's got air dominance, has not only got a massive advantage over any

00:06:18.640 opponent in war, but it's sort of over already. That's sort of the whole ball game. If you control

00:06:24.600 the skies and your enemy can't stop you, then it will probably just be a matter of time. That seems

00:06:30.640 sort of completely obvious to us now, but it wasn't obvious straight away. I mean, I even saw Pete

00:06:37.100 Hegseth say, peace through strength. I saw him say it a couple of times. Now that's a blast from the past.

00:06:44.740 A blast, a pun unintended. They used to say that a lot during the Cold War, that we'll keep the peace

00:06:51.960 by being extremely strong. Not just the Americans, all sorts of people said that, or variants on it

00:06:58.560 have been said for much longer than before the Cold War. But to hear that trotted out, I haven't heard

00:07:04.780 that in quite a while, peace through strength, is that, you know, we'll bomb you flat to keep the peace.

00:07:12.620 It was quite remarkable when I heard Hegseth say that. When we look at various things that have

00:07:16.920 happened during the 20th century, probably, obviously, there's the atomic bombing of Japan,

00:07:22.380 but then the massive bombings in North Korea or Vietnam, the fire bombings of Germany and Japan

00:07:28.440 during World War II. You know, how did we get there? Because when air power first started,

00:07:34.860 nearly all the great powers in the world were aghast to think that something like that might

00:07:40.240 lay in the future and that they wouldn't do it even before World War II, even between World War I and

00:07:45.040 World War II. Lots of countries, even the United States, said that they absolutely didn't want to

00:07:50.920 kill loads of civilians unnecessarily. But, you know, that's what ended up happening.

00:07:56.220 So how did we get there? Well, let's go back to the very beginning of it. It was the French that 1.00

00:08:02.200 first built, in the very late 18th century, first built, effectively, a hot air balloon and were able

00:08:08.020 to leave the earth. And some people, far-seeing people, saw immediately that something like this

00:08:15.620 or a future version of this invention, this discovery, could be used for war. Benjamin Franklin,

00:08:22.900 a very, very clever man, a genius, really, a polymath, he saw right away that, well, you could

00:08:28.500 maybe drop grenades or bombs from this thing, fly over your enemy's cities and drop bombs out of it.

00:08:35.180 He saw that right away. I think it's Benjamin Franklin who even said, imagine if you built dozens or

00:08:40.520 hundreds of these and you filled them with soldiers. Back in those days, you should only get a small number

00:08:45.460 of men in each balloon or the basket beneath the balloon. But still, imagine building hundreds of

00:08:51.560 them, maybe thousands, who knows? It's just, again, just a thought experiment at that time.

00:08:56.980 But imagine you build a whole fleet of these, fill them with soldiers as much as possible,

00:09:01.460 then they can sort of abseil down in, like, way behind enemy lines, way behind enemy infantry divisions

00:09:08.700 or anything, maybe at night, maybe a secret attack, and you can abseil them down wherever you want in

00:09:15.580 your enemy's territory. And, you know, he said something, I can't remember the exact words,

00:09:20.460 but he said something like, no king or leader or general has ever had to deal with such a thing.

00:09:26.780 It would be a game changer. And well, he sort of, you can see there, the first colonel's first idea of

00:09:32.540 paratroops. It's basically describing paratroops, isn't it? And he's not wrong, you know, it took 150

00:09:39.020 plus years before that became a reality, but there you go. Like a lot of inventions, perhaps I think

00:09:47.260 maybe like AI these days or drones, the military application is only just beginning to be dreamt of

00:09:55.500 and it could go a crazy way. Like it's often the way with inventions or technology, but the first tiny

00:10:03.340 thing that the first kernel of the invention, you could barely imagine how it would go from there,

00:10:09.820 right? So you've got the first French air balloons in the late 18th century, fast forward,

00:10:15.260 and you've got the B2, fast forward, and you've got like an F-22 Raptor, right? Where men have taken

00:10:22.540 it to sort of crazy lengths. I think maybe of the first piston, like the Newcomen engine or

00:10:28.620 something that James Watt built. Fast forward, you've got like a dragster, a top fuel dragster

00:10:35.420 engine. Or you've got like a tiny little V8 that's like only a few inches across. You know,

00:10:41.100 could James Watt have ever imagined that his first engine, his first piston could possibly become that?

00:10:48.220 Okay. So balloons, still before the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk ever took off in 1903,

00:10:55.820 it still had quite a few decades of hot air balloons or dirigibles, as they would often call them,

00:11:02.300 or zeppelins. And they'd been used, they'd been used in the military sense, not to really

00:11:08.060 drop bombs very often, but usually for reconnaissance. So instead of using light cavalry to

00:11:15.100 reconnoiter where the enemy is on the ground, you just send up a balloon with a man in it,

00:11:20.940 single man often, and you could just see where the enemy is from miles and miles and miles away.

00:11:26.380 They did that in the US Civil War in the 1860s, right? So by the late 19th century or the very,

00:11:35.020 very early 20th century, they've taken the idea of zeppelins, dirigibles quite far.

00:11:40.700 You know, they can actually do military things and drop bombs from them. It might even have been

00:11:47.020 possible to make it a gun platform, shoot a gun, even a heavy gun from one of them.

00:11:53.340 Science fiction writers had made a great deal out of this. Both Jules Verne and H.G. Wells had written

00:12:00.700 about the possible application of dirigibles in a military context. H.G. Wells wrote a book called

00:12:08.060 War in the Air, where the German air fleet sends hundreds and hundreds of zeppelins

00:12:14.940 over the Atlantic secretly in a sneak attack, Pearl Harbor style, and bombs New York. And it takes the

00:12:22.220 Americans by surprise so utterly. And it's so sort of terrifying and completely, they're completely 1.00

00:12:27.660 defenseless that they give in. The United States give in and Germany conquer the United States that 0.93

00:12:34.780 way. Of course, nothing like that ever happened. It's pure science fiction. But nonetheless,

00:12:38.380 you can see how people knew that there was this thing coming, power in the air. And of course,

00:12:44.220 once there were the actual powered flight, then that really is a game changer. Because just to finish

00:12:49.580 up on balloons, zeppelins, it became quite clear by World War I that they weren't all that good. Of

00:12:56.540 course, you've got the Hindenburg disaster. So filling them with hydrogen or any sort of flammable

00:13:02.220 gas means that they're sort of ridiculously vulnerable. Who would have thought that they'd

00:13:07.980 be ridiculously vulnerable? And certainly once the enemies of specifically Germany deliberately made

00:13:15.180 anti-Zeppelin baffles and measures, then it was seen they were no good, really. I mean,

00:13:21.020 the Germans did use zeppelins to fly over Paris at the beginning, towards the beginning of World War

00:13:26.300 One, drop a few bombs, just handheld bombs really, kill very, very few people or fly them over Paris

00:13:32.700 and drop pamphlets saying, give up. You can't possibly beat Imperial Germany. You must give up. 0.99

00:13:36.940 So use them for things like that and still use them for reconnaissance. At one point in 1915,

00:13:43.500 the Germans flew some zeppelins over London and I think they dropped a few bombs, but it didn't really

00:13:49.660 do anything. It panicked people, but the casualties were extremely minimal. So, you know, it's not really

00:13:56.220 a war-winning tool. And even once you replaced the flammable gas with non-flammable gas, it's still,

00:14:04.140 you know, it's not going to change the course of a war, that sort of thing. But nonetheless,

00:14:08.780 even before the Wright brothers actually took off, people knew that we would be close. In the few years

00:14:15.660 before 1903, everyone sort of knew that mankind, civilization, was close to powered flight. It

00:14:22.780 wouldn't be long. We sort of knew we would be able to do it. And so even by 1899, there was a Hague 0.99

00:14:31.580 convention, something like an earlier Geneva convention where the great powers of the world

00:14:36.700 got together and tried to agree on rules of conduct during war. It nearly all goes out of the window when

00:14:43.100 World War One kicks off. But nonetheless, try and limit each other's, come to an agreement, 0.95

00:14:48.300 sort of limit the size of navies, things like this. And the Tsar, the Russian Tsar in 1899 said,

00:14:55.740 let's maybe not have any air component to our armies. Why can't we all agree? It's so terrifying.

00:15:03.420 There's such a change in dynamic that it would ruin the entire balance of power in the whole world.

00:15:08.780 And why don't we all agree to just not do that? And it's not as crazy as it might sound straight

00:15:15.420 off the bat because such things have been done before. Not exactly that, but equivalent.

00:15:21.420 Today, we've got all sorts of arms agreements about how many nukes the biggest countries can

00:15:26.860 have and all that sort of thing. Or some countries can't have any. So it is possible for the global

00:15:31.980 community to sit down and agree such things. Although you can imagine this one was a bit of

00:15:36.860 a stretch and it was obviously too much, but the Tsar didn't want it because it would be expensive and

00:15:42.860 other people probably already have the drop on them in technology. The British were kind of up for it 1.00

00:15:49.260 because we were the world's greatest navy and an island and our greatest navy protected our island.

00:15:55.740 And any sort of large air wing can just fly over the channel and ignore the Royal Navy.

00:16:03.500 So it's in our interest, the British interest to perhaps limit or even completely ban air warfare.

00:16:10.540 The French were up for it because arguably they were the greatest land force in the world,

00:16:16.780 certainly in Europe. Well, no, in the world. So again, that would sort of ruin them. It could

00:16:21.980 potentially even ruin them in all sorts of ways if one of the other countries, Germany,

00:16:27.740 got a drop on them in terms of air capabilities. So some of the very, very biggest players were not

00:16:34.860 completely deaf to the idea of, you know, completely banning air forces. In fact, even between the wars,

00:16:41.820 between World War I and World War II, when there was the League of Nations, again, the idea was floated.

00:16:46.940 Why don't we all have either none or an extremely limited air capability? And, you know, perhaps

00:16:53.500 the League of Nations can have a monopoly on aircraft of war. If anyone's going to have them,

00:16:59.260 maybe just the League of Nations can have them when they have to step in to prevent wars. That was the

00:17:04.380 idea in all sorts of ways, but like the UN is supposed to be a peacekeeping force for the whole world.

00:17:08.940 Maybe if they have got a monopoly on it, maybe that would work. And, you know, because it's impossible,

00:17:14.140 very, very difficult to stop progress, you know, to entirely stop men from designing things. 0.71

00:17:21.100 It's very, very difficult. So maybe at least we could let the League of Nations have a monopoly on

00:17:25.580 it. And once again, the Brits, the French, the Russians, even the Americans thought it wasn't,

00:17:32.700 some of them anyway, thought it wasn't such a ridiculous idea. But of course, it never happened.

00:17:37.740 One of the things is once you realise that you're in a total war, you know, and the gloves are off,

00:17:43.500 you're not likely to agree to such reasonable things like that. So during World War One,

00:17:50.060 the advancement of aeroplanes exploded. Again, pun not intended. If you look at the aeroplanes,

00:17:57.580 the first things to fly in 1903, 04, 05, and you look at where they were in 1913, 1914,

00:18:06.140 at the beginning of World War One, they've advanced quite a long way, but not a crazy long way.

00:18:13.020 Those very, very early World War One planes are extremely rickety. I mean, I consider them like

00:18:18.220 death traps. I wouldn't want to get in one. Extremely flimsy and rickety and primitive,

00:18:25.980 basically. But by 1918, only four years later, but you know, a world war, a skull crushing,

00:18:32.940 all or nothing world war in between. It's crazy. By the end of 1918, the amount that aerial technology

00:18:40.220 had come on is massive, absolutely massive. Because you know, a lot of the biggest powers

00:18:45.660 are prepared to throw as much money and energy at it as they can.

00:18:49.980 And maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but you know, lots of money and energy,

00:18:54.460 research and development is put into it. So by the end of World War One, you know,

00:18:59.660 you've got much, much better fighter planes. They can do aerobatics and things.

00:19:04.940 You've got big, relatively big bombers. And the Hadley Page bomber springs to mind.

00:19:11.500 We're still nothing as big as what came quite soon after, but still for the time, giant aircraft.

00:19:18.460 When the Hadley Page bombers first came out to the war in the east against the Ottomans,

00:19:23.420 people couldn't believe their eyes. It was insane to them. How could such a thing possibly fly?

00:19:29.420 It was so massive and heavy. But nonetheless, a lot of people knew that the end of World War One may

00:19:35.980 well be, may well prove to just be something like a hiatus before there was another giant world

00:19:43.980 conflagration. I mean, people were literally calling it in 1919 after the signing of the Versailles Treaty.

00:19:50.140 There's literally like punch cartoons saying, or by the late 30s or by 1940, it'll all kick off again.

00:19:57.580 And certainly by the late 20s or certainly by the mid 30s, everyone knew there was going to be,

00:20:03.260 almost certainly be some sort of giant war again. And so people knew that air power would be an

00:20:10.380 important part in this next big war. If you would like to see the full version of this premium video,

00:20:15.580 please head over to lotuseaters.com and subscribe to gain full access to all of our premium content.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - June 29, 2025

PREVIEW： Epochs #217 ｜ Air Power

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