Bombing to Provoke

The rapid proliferation and growing sophistication of aerospace weapons--rockets, missiles, and drones--have altered the landscape of warfare. The influence of these weapons on the battlefield is felt profoundly, yet the mechanism of coercion by which these weapons alter the will of the adversary is poorly understood. In Bombing to Provoke, Jaganath Sankaran argues that it is not what these aerospace weapons physically do but what they prompt the target state to do in response that matters for understanding their coercive effect. By threatening a chemical, biological, or nuclear strike or demonstrating the ability to bombard the target's economic and political core repeatedly, aerospace weapons coerce by weaponizing fear and triggering a sense of defenselessness. Sankaran provides a series of historical and current case studies to show how these fears amplify the political vulnerabilities of the target state, coercing it to divert substantial military resources away from other vital missions to redress the threat. This scenario is playing out in real time right now in both the Russo-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza theaters, both of which are seeing barrages of cross-border missile and rocket fire aimed at weakening the target's resolve. For anyone seeking to understand why states at war in the age of aerospace weapon warfare operate and react in the ways that they do, this book's methodical dissection of the strategic rationale behind these weapons makes it necessary reading.

Jaganath Sankaran is Assistant Professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin and a nonresident fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. He spent the first four years of his career as a defense scientist with the Indian Missile R&D establishment, and has held fellowships at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and the RAND Corporation. He has held visiting positions at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies (SAASS) at the U.S. Air University, Tsinghua University, and the National Institute for Defense Studies.