A Case for Habsburg Airpower

This, from Christopher Clarke’s Sleepwalkers, is an interesting passage:

Mobilization schedules, political dissension, the progress of the Sarajevo police enquiry, the need to secure German support – these were excellent reasons for delaying a military action against Serbia. Not even Conrad was able to offer a credible alternative to his civilian colleagues. And yet, throughout the July Crisis the Austrians would be haunted by the suspicion that it might actually have been better simply to strike at Belgrade without full mobilization and without a declaration of war, in what would universally have been seen as a reflex response to a grave provocation. Why didn’t Austria-Hungary simply attack Serbia straight away and be done with it, asked Prime Minister Ion Brătianu of Romania on 24 July, as the crisis entered its critical phase.

The practice of punishing recalcitrant states through direct naval action was common in the nineteenth century. Don’t pay your debts? Get ready for a Royal Navy gunboat lobbing a few shells at the government buildings in your capitol city. States generally understood such operations (along with raids, their land/amphibious equivalent) to fall short of war, even if they killed people and involved extra-territorial use of force.

Naval punishment was not possible in the Serbo-Austrian relationship, and a raid launched without full mobilization was too risky (Serbia remained partially mobilized from the Balkan Wars, making a poorly prepared Austrian invasion a perilous prospect). Austria needed to mobilize in order to punish, and mobilization changed the calculi of the rest of the European great powers. In effect, it was difficult for Austria to punish Serbia without also threatening the existence of Serbia, which would have upset the Balkan balance-of-power.

But imagine if the assassination had taken place a decade later, when (perhaps) Austria-Hungary might have operated a few squadrons of Gotha bombers. Could Vienna have undertaken appropriate “punishment” of Belgrade without triggering a systemic war? There’s surely an argument here that airpower could have provided Austrian policymakers with flexible options for dealing with the crisis. Assuming that Austria’s intent was simply to punish and not to unilaterally introduce a new Balkan order, a series of airstrikes combined with economic pressure and marginal territorial moves might have sufficed to satisfy Habsburg honor, without forcing Russian intervention.

But then again, we have more than a few examples of air campaigns that escalated well beyond the control of their planners.  It’s quite possible that even such a measured response would have irrevocably committed Austria to a path that led to war with Russia, which would have triggered the broader conflict.

Thoughts?