Air power no matter who does it is not surgical and the collateral damage is too frequently very bad. Air power relies on good intelligence, and in an unstable nation it is too common for sources to have multiple agendas. The other main area I have commented to on his blog, and that is that when a city that has been taken by a military force is retaken, what you have retaken is a city that has been at war twice, bombed twice, had its citizenry killed or displaced twice, and therefore the civic management personnel largely changed twice, no reconstruction made throughout, and a long string of refugees headed anywhere but home that act to destabilize areas on the periphery. You have a 1943 Stalingrad reduced to ruins, over which the front lines of war continue to move back and forth, and no large, well funded , cohesive population to come back in in force and begin to rebuild, even that under a Stalin. You have widening destabilization even after a victory has been declared and a city "won back'.
Air power no matter who does it is not surgical and the collateral damage is too frequently very bad. Air power relies on good intelligence, and in an unstable nation it is too common for sources to have multiple agendas. The other main area I have commented to on his blog, and that is that when a city that has been taken by a military force is retaken, what you have retaken is a city that has been at war twice, bombed twice, had its citizenry killed or displaced twice, and therefore the civic management personnel largely changed twice, no reconstruction made throughout, and a long string of refugees headed anywhere but home that act to destabilize areas on the periphery. You have a 1943 Stalingrad reduced to ruins, over which the front lines of war continue to move back and forth, and no large, well funded , cohesive population to come back in in force and begin to rebuild, even that under a Stalin. You have widening destabilization even after a victory has been declared and a city "won back'.