The spectacle of Merkava tanks rumbling into the Gaza Strip last weekend served as complete proof that the massive Israeli onslaught from the air, killing hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children, utterly failed in its objective of crippling Hamas. I simply do not believe Ehud Barak's claim that Israel always planned a ground invasion as a necessary second stage of the offensive against Hamas. Those tanks so conspicuously parked along the borders of the Gaza Strip were simply intended to put extra psychological pressure on Hamas. Now they have been deployed in earnest - and the invaders have taken casualties.

The failure of the air onslaught to cow Hamas into surrender signifies that the Israeli leadership (including Mr Barak, a soldier who ought to know better) have yet again been deluded by the seductive fallacy that airpower (especially air power in today's hi-tech form) can win wars all on its own, and at no cost to those flying the bombers or directing the drones on TV from remote “PlayStations”.

The extra seduction of PlayStation warfare (as pioneered by the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan) lies in hitting the enemy without the slightest risk to yourself. That time and again innocent families are massacred along with the targeted al-Qaeda, Taleban or Hamas leaders, comes conveniently under the heading “collateral damage”.

Instead of putting their faith in the F16 bomber and the drone, the Israeli leadership would have done better to study the history of airpower, from the Anglo-American strategic air offensive against Germany in the Second World War to Israel's own abortive attempt in 2006 to defeat Hezbollah in the Lebanon. The history clearly shows that air power alone cannot win wars. It only works as an extra dimension to land or sea warfare.

In the Second World War the Luftwaffe (a tactical air force) served as a key component of the German blitzkrieg offensives against Poland, France and in the Balkans in

1939-41, but the victories were nevertheless won by the German panzer divisions.

Later, from 1942 to 1945, the Anglo-American tactical air forces similarly gave the Allied armies in Italy, Normandy and northwest Europe a huge advantage over German armies now denuded of air cover by the destruction of the Luftwaffe. But once again, the campaigns were won on the ground, not in the air.

Meanwhile the Anglo-American strategic air offensive against Germany in 1943-45, though inflicting enormous damage, failed to fulfil the promise of the air chiefs that bombing alone could win the war without the need for a ground invasion of Hitler's Europe, costly in allied casualties. So a land campaign it had to be.

In the Korean War of 1950-53 and the Vietnam War in 1967 and after, the Americans relied on air power as a war-winner. Yet in both cases air power failed in the event to decide the issue. Vietnam especially marked a spectacular failure, with a heavier weight of bombs dropped than in the whole Second World War, and yet in the end an enemy victory.

The First Gulf War in 1991 was an exception, being really like the Battle of Omdurman updated - we had the Gatling gun (meaning mastery of the air) and they did not. But the success of the aerial onslaught on the Iraqi field army has to be balanced against the complete failure of the attacks on targets like Baghdad to decide the war. In any case, it was the allied ground forces which had to turf Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.

Perhaps the most important, though largely forgotten, recent failure of air power to win a war on its own was in Yugoslavia in 1999, when the Anglo-Americans led by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair illegally intervened (ie, without UN sanction) in a domestic conflict between the Yugoslav Government and the insurgents of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army.

Mr Clinton and Mr Blair believed that three days of massive airstrikes against the Yugoslav army in Kosovo would break the nerve of Slobodan Milosevic and his colleagues. In fact, the air onslaught went on for 78 days, and yet was still barren of decisive result - even though extended to targets throughout Yugoslavia, many of them purely civilian, such as bridges, power stations, and even the main TV studios in Belgrade.

Why did the Anglo-Americans resort to such extreme means? It was because of the total failure of the initial tactical bombing in Kosovo itself, and the consequent allied desperation. But even the “total war” bombing of Belgrade and other cities failed to break the nerve of the Yugoslav (really the Serb) people.

There is another lesson here that the Israelis would have done well to learn before their onslaught on Lebanon in 2006 and certainly before their onslaught on Gaza in 2008-9. The lesson is that savage air attack by a foreign enemy does not break the nerve of a civilian population, but instead only stiffens its resolve not to give in. As a schoolboy in London during the 1940-41 blitz and the flying-bomb and V2 rocket attacks of 1945, I saw this for myself.

So why did the Anglo-American leadership so grossly miscalculate the likely moral effect on the Yugoslavs of their cruise missiles and bombs? And why has the Israeli leadership just made a similar gross miscalculation despite all the earlier lessons of history?

In the case of the Israelis, it may be because (according to Israel's own official spokesmen) the morale of the population in southern Israel has been shaken by Hamas's sporadic hits with mini-rockets inflicting only minor damage and relatively few casualties. Surely then the population of Gaza would buckle under the IDF's deluge of American-supplied hi-tech ordnance? Well actually, no. So instead it had to be a ground war.

In the case of Kosovo in 1999, the Anglo-Americans had no land forces available in the Balkans capable of evicting the Yugoslav army. Clinton's and Blair's adventure was on the verge of catastrophic failure. It was only the Russians, by telling Milosevic that they would not back him in an all-out war, that compelled him to order the Yugoslav army to evacuate Kosovo. And it was only this Russian intervention that got Clinton and Blair off the hook - and saved Blair's premiership.

In the case of Gaza today, there has been no outsider to rescue the Israelis from the consequences of the failure of their air power. So the task of rescue falls to Israel's own ground troops - conducting a messy struggle with hate-fuelled guerrillas amid close-packed slums.

Correlli Barnett is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and author of The Collapse of British Power (Pan Books)

Times Recommends

• Five golden rules for regulating banks
• Uighurs’ cry echoes round the world
• It is not just democracy that is illegal