Aerial Warfare and the Warlord's Ego

Given the aura of the capital cities of most countries, given the ways in which the capitals are made attractive and have high symbolic value, the warlord's ego is especially fixated on capturing/invading the capital cities, rather than the other cities, towns and villages of a enemy country. What has enabled the warlord to attack precisely the capitals of countries? The modern fighter airplane is an invention which makes the attacks on strategic points of a country possible, and hence, to satisfy the warlord's ego, aerial warfare is conducted to attack the capital, to enable the capture of the capital straight away. The traditional myth of the military-industrial complex posits that the technological gain dictates the warlord's capabilities in combat, but, the warlord's ego is very much still a force in determining what types of technology are made possible and what style of warfare can be conducted. The collective efforts of the industrial labor force that works on combat technology are not what causes war, neither is war perpetrated for "national interests," rather, war is still driven forward by the ego of the (often individual) warlord. The warlord pools together the vested interests, or may indeed fabricate the vested interests entirely, in order that his ego's war be possible. That the capital cities have been westernized at least in their outward appearance is a telling sign that what the warlord fights against is in a sense 'closer to home,' for his ego has been developed in rivalry with other western egos and he has no real knowledge of the realities of the non-western individuals on the ground where his war is conducted. His war is about directly attacking sentiments of peace and freedom at home via the attacks on an "other" abroad that happens to be the object of scrutiny of the western pacifists that he knows. 

Whereas the process of conducting war is left to the warlord's ego, the aftermath of the war demands a whole other kind of expertise entirely, an expertise which needs to somehow manage the gains of war and which needs to return the whole country back to a kind of stability. War has a strict fixed budget and a fixed plan. Often its most important moments are the capture of the capital and the other important cities, after that, war has to be considered over, partly over fears that the boosted ego of the warlord will not want to stop and will thus conduct war on other territories as well. After the successes, the country needs a different kind of external force to impact it, and it must be returned to peace, however short lived, to satisfy the vested interests that helped war go forward. The warlord has to be replaced as the authority over that territory by someone who can command and maintain peace at the same time.

There is a problem in the aftermath of an aerial warfare focused on capturing the capital of a country. The problem is that if the enemy country's government did not have a good handle on the tribal and/or rural regions of the country, then capturing just the capital will not translate to a real authority over the rest of the country.  Too often in modern conceptions of warfare, the capital is taken as the most strategically important point of a combat operation, but, the gains made in the capital may not indicate a command over the other regions of a country, given other leaders who may command these other regions. An airplane may fly one straight to the capital, but something about the logic of traditional war still endures: that the peripheral village/tribal regions must be attacked first, and only as strength and confidence is gathered, and the ego is boosted, should the warlord progress slowly, by making gains and conquering the rural, towards the capital, which is usually located at a central point of the territory. It is problematic that the warlord's ego is today boosted in training and education than it is in actual combat operations "on the ground." War has been conducted with sensation in mind: with spectacular gains made in the capital being more valuable than the slow invasion.