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Comment by saati | Hacker News Reader

The V1 is the ancestor of all cruise missiles, pretty far from no military value.

It was an ancestor of things with military value, but it had little to none itself. You need a guidance system for a useful cruise missile, and the V1 had essentially none. No points for "military utility" as a "research program" when you're actively launching them at civilians; whatever it is, that's not a research usage anymore.

The German strategy was to pressure the British civilians into pressuring their government for an end to hostilities against Germany. They were demoralizing the British, and to that end the weapon was actually effective though the government did not capitulate.

Additionally, reports of damage to the British capital city was very morale-raising for the Germans who saw mostly the destruction of their own cities. That also has military value.

V1 launches begin in June 1944. One week after Overlord ("D-Day") and prompted by it. The obvious release for the London public's fear of these weapons was to destroy the capability not capitulate to Germany, and by October of the same year V1 launches against Britain were no longer possible because Allied forces controlled all the launch sites in range.

> though the government did not capitulate.

Weirdly, that's how it almost always works out. Didn't work in England, didn't work in Germany, not working in Ukraine. Kinda makes that "though" look silly in retrospect. That's why today we consider bombing civilians to have no military utility.

Yet you ignore some very well known successful recent bombing campaigns:

- NATO in Libya in 2011

- Operation Iraqi Freedom

- Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan)

- US and coalition campaign against ISIS

- Saudi bombing in Yemen have pretty much stalled the Houthis.

- Russia in Syria for the last decade

- France in the Sahel

- The Turks in Iraq and Syria, been going on for almost a decade.

- Israel against Hezbollah in summer of 2006, didn't get the captured soldiers back but did stall the rockets against Northern Israel. And in Gaza in 2014, similar result in stopping the rocket attacks.

- Kosovo in 1999

That's all off the top of my head, though I did have to Google the names a bit. And it's all within recent memory, I remember every one of those conflicts. I'm sure some old timers here will mention quite a few more, spanning further back in time and further geographically.

Did they specifically work by making the citizens push the government to capitulate? For that matter, could any of them have been successfully carried out with V1's? I'm not familiar with all of those, but I would wager no, in which case they're irrelevant to my point.

No one sane is disputing that bombing can have value, but modern military bombing is done with (relatively) precise strikes against militarily useful targets, not indiscriminate attacks on civilians. When Israel bombs a civilian building, it's at least because they think there are Hamas fighters or weapons there.

  > Did they specifically work by making the citizens push the government to capitulate?

That's a good question, I really don't know. I'll try to read a bit this weekend, thank you.

You have added a long list. Yet it would be worth noting that, Afghanistan didn't really work very well, in that the said government just waited for the occupation to leave. ISIS didn't have any civilian leadership/structure in the first place, that can be asked by a civilian population to stop. Yemen is still controlled by Houthis and the less said about the bombing the better.

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