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The aim of this pocket-size and shorter version of Military Airpower: A Revised Digest of Airpower Opinions and Thoughts is to supply Airmen with useful thoughts that might help them meet their known responsibilities and the unknown challenges their service will bring.
This handbook implements AFPD 36-22, Air Force Military Training. Information in this handbook is primarily from Air Force publications and contains a compilation of policies, procedures, and standards that guide Airmen's actions within the Profession of Arms. This handbook applies to the Regular Air Force, Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard. This handbook contains the basic information Airmen need to understand the professionalism required within the Profession of Arms. Attachment 1 contains references and supporting information used in this publication. This handbook is the sole source reference for the development of study guides to support the enlisted promotion system. Enlisted Airmen will use these study guide to prepare for their Promotion Fitness Examination (PFE) or United States Air Force Supervisory Examination (USAFSE).
Airpower is not widely understood. Even though it has come to play an increasingly important role in both peace and war, the basic concepts that define and govern airpower remain obscure to many people, even to professional military officers. This fact is largely due to fundamental differences of opinion as to whether or not the aircraft has altered the strategies of war or merely its tactics. If the former, then one can see airpower as a revolutionary leap along the continuum of war; but if the latter, then airpower is simply another weapon that joins the arsenal along with the rifle, machine gun, tank, submarine, and radio. This book implicitly assumes that airpower has brought about a revolution in war. It has altered virtually all aspects of war: how it is fought, by whom, against whom, and with what weapons. Flowing from those factors have been changes in training, organization, administration, command and control, and doctrine. War has been fundamentally transformed by the advent of the airplane.
At the end of the Reagan era, many in the U.S. Air Force began to express their concerns about the health of their institution. They questioned whether the Air Force had lost its sense of direction, its confidence, its values, even its future. For some, these concerns reflected nothing more than the maturation of the most youthful of America's military institutions. For others it was a crisis of spirit that threatened the hard-won independence of the Air Force. Although the diagnoses for this malaise are as numerous as its symptoms, The Icarus Syndrome points a finger at the abandonment of air power theory sometime in the late 1950s to early 1960s as the single, taproot cause of the problems. That provocative diagnosis is followed by an equally provocative prescription the Air Force must follow to regain its institutional health. Author Carl H. Builder begins with an overview of this crisis of values within the Air Force, along with a litany of concerns about what seems to have gone wrong within that institution. The history of the U.S. Air Force, along with the role played in it by air power theory, is explored and is used to support Builder's thesis. The remainder of the book is an analysis of what went wrong and when, how these wrongs might be corrected, and the challenges for Air Force leadership in the future. Now available in paperback, The Icarus Syndrome will be of great interest to U.S. Air Force professionals, military and aviation historians, and institutional psychologists.
In the pantheon of air power spokesmen, Giulio Douhet holds center stage. His writings, more often cited than perhaps actually read, appear as excerpts and aphorisms in the writings of numerous other air power spokesmen, advocates-and critics. Though a highly controversial figure, the very controversy that surrounds him offers to us a testimonial of the value and depth of his work, and the need for airmen today to become familiar with his thought. The progressive development of air power to the point where, today, it is more correct to refer to aerospace power has not outdated the notions of Douhet in the slightest In fact, in many ways, the kinds of technological capabilities that we enjoy as a global air power provider attest to the breadth of his vision. Douhet, together with Hugh “Boom” Trenchard of Great Britain and William “Billy” Mitchell of the United States, is justly recognized as one of the three great spokesmen of the early air power era. This reprint is offered in the spirit of continuing the dialogue that Douhet himself so perceptively began with the first edition of this book, published in 1921. Readers may well find much that they disagree with in this book, but also much that is of enduring value. The vital necessity of Douhet’s central vision-that command of the air is all important in modern warfare-has been proven throughout the history of wars in this century, from the fighting over the Somme to the air war over Kuwait and Iraq.
In 1950, when he commissioned the first edition of The Armed Forces Officer, Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall told its author, S.L.A. Marshall, that "American military officers, of whatever service, should share common ground ethically and morally." In this new edition, the authors methodically explore that common ground, reflecting on the basics of the Profession of Arms, and the officer's special place and distinctive obligations within that profession and especially to the Constitution.
This collection of essays reflects the proceedings of a 1991 conference on "The United States Air Force: Aerospace Challenges and Missions in the 1990s," sponsored by the USAF and Tufts University. The 20 contributors comment on the pivotal role of airpower in the war with Iraq and address issues and choices facing the USAF, such as the factors that are reshaping strategies and missions, the future role and structure of airpower as an element of US power projection, and the aerospace industry's views on what the Air Force of the future will set as its acquisition priorities and strategies. The authors agree that aerospace forces will be an essential and formidable tool in US security policies into the next century. The contributors include academics, high-level military leaders, government officials, journalists, and top executives from aerospace and defense contractors.
An essential part of the Air War College curriculum consists of the study of military history and specific campaigns. Part 1 of this manuscript presents an attempt to clarify the relationship between air power and maneuver warfare since 1939, a subject that derives its importance from the fact that maneuver warfare has been the U.S. Army's official doctrine since the early eighties and remains so to the present day. Part 2 contains the collective wisdom of the military doctrine analysis of the Air University on the same subjects, as well as the way in which we have presented them.
For nearly two decades the United States Air Force (USAF) oriented the bulk of its thinking, acquisition, planning, and training on the threat of a Soviet blitzkrieg across the inter German border. The Air Force fielded a powerful conventional arm well rehearsed in the tactics required to operate over a central European battlefield. Then, in a matter of days, the 1990 invasion of Kuwait altered key assumptions that had been developed over the previous decade and a half. The USAF faced a different foe employing a different military doctrine in an unexpected environment. Instead of disrupting a fast paced land offensive, the combat wings of the United States Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF) were ordered to attack a large, well fortified, and dispersed Iraqi ground force. The heart of that ground force was the Republican Guard Forces Command (RGFC). CENTAF's mission dictated the need to develop an unfamiliar repertoire of tactics and procedures to meet theater objectives. How effectively did CENTAF adjust air operations against the Republican Guard to the changing realities of combat? Answering that question is central to this study, and the answer resides in evaluation of the innovations developed by CENTAF to improve its operational and tactical performance against the Republican Guard. Effectiveness and timeliness are the primary criteria used for evaluating innovations.