Aerial Interdiction: Air Power and the Land Battle in Three American Wars

Washington, DC: Center for Air Force History, 1994. very good, very good. 432, illus., maps, charts, tables, footnotes, bibliography, index. This analytical work by Dr. Eduard Mark of the Center for Air Force History examines the practice of interdiction in three wars: World War II, the Korean War, and the war in Southeast Asia. It considers eleven important interdiction campaigns, all of them American or Anglo-American, for only the United States and Great Britain had the resources to conduct interdiction campaigns on a large scale in World War II. Dr. Mark proposes what he considers to be a realistic objective for interdiction: preventing men, equipment, and supplies from reaching the combat area when the enemy needs them and in the quantity he requires. As Mark notes, there has been little intensive scholarship on the subject of interdiction especially when contrasted with the work done on strategic bombardment.