pvebber, don't mean to be snarky but were you alive during the embargo? You do know that they physically stopped shipping oil at any price.
We can start another thead to discuss the embargo if you want. As it pertains to the argument, whether I was alive or not is immaterial. They tried the embargo in 1967 to deter us from supporting Isreal in the 67 war. It was uncoordinated and inconsistently applied so it accomplished little.

I was wrong in describing the 73 embargo as "revenge" with no objective. Knee-jerk on my part I apologize for. It was imposed in retaliation for our aid to Isreal, as a cost-imposing strategy to cause us to end our support to Isreal. It failed to do that. It achieved an effect that we both remember well, but 'causing an effect' is not 'achieving an objective'.

OPEC did not end production, it raised the price and cut production in a series of increments. Wikipedia says a total of 70% in price and 25% in cut production. Oil, being a fungible commodity, can't be "cut off" by the supplier, it just gets redistributed by other customers once they take delivery. Stopping "direct shipments" doesn't mean much, except adding a "pass through tax" as the customer base redistributes what they get at a modest profit. There was a shortage, but not a "stoppage of shippin goil at any price".

The response was not a give in to the OPEC demands, but an INCREASE in aid to Isreal. So from the point of view of achieving a desired outcome, the embargo backfired. Warden might argue it failed because it used a physical CoG to affect the moral domain, and by not being sufficiently cost-imposing, allowed us to adapt and overcome it. It didn't 'break' anything, it just casued an incovenience that we were able to weather. Hence the issue with "bloodless war". It works on that darned, complex, "moral" term in the equation.

Back to the topic, I'll reiterate the problem with a focus on physical destruction:

The fundamental non sequitor is still there. To the extent Warden's theory is about bloodless war (desired!) it is not about airpower. To the extent it is about airpower, it is not about bloodless war (not desired!). To the extent that it is bloodless, it is not about the physical, but the moral (too hard!) and to the extent it is about breaking things and killing people (simple), it must drive that factor quickly to zero. That leads to the resentment and bad peace one is trying to avoid.

This seems to be a fundamental inconsistency in Warden's theory?