Air University

AIR FORCE RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Understanding Airpower

Bonfire of the Fallacies

Colin S. Gray

Research Paper 2009-3

Air Force Research Institute

Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama 36112-6026

March 2009
ii

Disclaimer

Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied within are solely those of the 

author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Air Force Research Institute, Air University, the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any other US Government 

agency. Cleared for public release: distribution unlimited.

Air Force Research Institute (AFRI) papers and Air University monographs are occasional studies written by Air 

Force researchers at large and military defense analysts 

assigned to the Air Force Research Institute at Air University and beyond. The purpose of the AFRI papers is to 

provide useful ideas and independent analysis of issues 

of current or potential importance to Air Force commanders and their staffs. This monograph and others in 

the series are also available electronically at the Air University Research Web site at https://research.maxwell

.af.mil/ and the Air and Space Power Journal Web site at 

http://www.airpower.au.af.mil.
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Contents

Page

DISCLAIMER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii

FOREWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

UNDERSTANDING AIRPOWER: BONFIRE OF

THE FALLACIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

The Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Fallacies to the Left of Them, Fallacies

to the Right of Them . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

The Fallacies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

America, the Air Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

v

Foreword

Dr. Colin Gray recognizes that there will always be defense 

debates. He also believes that some of the “frequently contested 

debating terrain” can and need to be clarified and settled. In 

this study, this noted strategic scholar addresses assumptions 

and conventionally held ideas about airpower that are wrong.

Professor Gray identifies and discusses nine fallacies that: 

(1) the USAF should abandon large-scale regular warfare; (2) 

airpower is inherently a strategic weapon; (3) airpower is driven 

by technology rather than ideas; (4) airpower is about targeting; (5) airpower must be subordinate to land power; (6) the 

theory of strategic airpower is flawed; (7) an independent USAF 

interferes with an effective joint force structure; (8) airpower is 

a minor player in counterinsurgency (COIN); and finally, a longstanding issue, (9) the twenty-first century is about missiles, 

space, and cyber power and airpower is yesterday’s revolution.

The discussion of these “fallacies” should stimulate the appetite of most thoughtful Airmen, but also serious advocates of 

all services and everyone interested in national defense.

JOHN A. SHAUD

General, USAF, Retired, PhD

Director, Air Force Research Institute

vii

About the Author

Dr. Colin S. Gray is Professor of International Politics and 

Strategic Studies at the University of Reading in England. He is 

a dual US-UK citizen and has served as an adviser in Washington, DC, and London. He was educated in England at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford. Dr. Gray has taught at universities in Britain, Canada, and the United States, has been 

assistant director of the International Institute for Strategic 

Studies (London), and worked with Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute before founding the National Institute for Public 

Policy. From 1982 until 1987, he held a presidential appointment on the President’s Advisory Committee on Arms Control 

and Disarmament.

Dr. Gray’s work has addressed a wide range of subjects on 

national security. For example, he has written extensively on 

nuclear strategy, maritime strategy, space strategy, special operations, geopolitics, airpower, arms control, and strategic theory. He is the author of 23 books, including Another Bloody 

Century: Future Warfare (Phoenix, 2006); Strategy and History: 

Essays on Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2006); War, Peace 

and International Relations: An Introduction to Strategic History

(Routledge, 2007); and Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, 

Peace, and Strategy (Praeger Security International, 2007). In 

2009 he will publish National Security Dilemmas: Challenges 

and Opportunities (Potomac Books). Most recently he has completed The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice.

ix

Introduction

The general purpose of this monograph is to help prevent or 

reduce error in debates over all aspects of airpower. Since we 

humans, our institutions and procedures, and our behavior 

are friction prone and apt to err, it is sensible to try to diminish 

the pile of assumptions, beliefs, attitudes, and opinions that 

are plainly wrong. Much of the eternal debate on defense issues cannot usefully be approached with a view to locating error. But, large swathes of frequently contested debating terrain 

can be cleared definitively. As a scholar it is my duty to “recognize and eliminate the weeds” of falsehood to which Clausewitz 

referred in one of the epigraphs to this text.

This study examines and exposes nine fallacies. The fallacies 

and conclusions about them are as follows:

Fallacy One: The era of conventional warfare between great 

states and coalitions has passed. The USAF needs to abandon the paradigm of large-scale regular warfare.

Judgment: Future strategic history will be marred by 

the occurrence of regular-style conventional warfare between states, sometimes conducted on a very large scale. 

Obviously, the danger of escalation to nuclear use by the 

losing belligerent will be acute.

Fallacy Two: Airpower is an inherently strategic instrument.

Judgment: All of our geographically specialized military instruments, including airpower, are inherently 

strategic in the effect that they have upon the course 

of history. It makes no more sense to talk about strategic airpower, than it does to discuss strategic land 

power, sea power, space power, or cyber power. It is 

the consequences of military behavior that are strategic, not the forces themselves.

Fallacy Three: The development of airpower is driven by 

technology not ideas.

Judgment: Airpower has never been driven forward 

by a strategic and militarily mindless technological 
x

momentum. Ideas, theory, and doctrine have always 

been in the cockpit (whether or not the aerial vehicle 

was ready to fly).

Fallacy Four: Airpower is about targeting.

Judgment: The very nature of airpower ensures that 

targeting for kinetic effect has to be of prime importance among the instrument’s ways to contribute strategically to a conflict. But airpower is not only about 

targeting, as anyone who recognizes the variety of essential roles performed by aircraft in warfare should 

hardly be able to fail to appreciate.

Fallacy Five: Airpower must always be subordinate to land 

power.

Judgment: Whether airpower is subordinate to land 

power, or vice versa, must depend upon the war’s 

overall military-strategic context. If the character of 

that context is largely regular, then today and tomorrow airpower should be the supported force. The reverse has to be true in war with a largely irregular 

military character. These key points granted, it is really more sensible not to contrast land power and airpower, but rather to consider them as inherently complementary dimensions of variable relative significance 

within a single military, strategic, and political effort.

Fallacy Six: The theory of strategic airpower is fundamentally flawed.

Judgment: The theory of strategic airpower is only 

flawed if one elects to identify it strictly with the overstated claims of some classical writers on airpower. 

Sensibly crafted instead, the theory of strategic airpower is entirely sound. It should state that airpower, 

employed either as a weapon independent of land- or 

sea-focused forces, or as an enabling agent for, perhaps, even component of, land power and sea power, 

generates strategic effect on a conflict. By and large, 
xi

airpower used independently is not able to deliver decisive military and strategic victories. However, it has 

demonstrated the ability to decide which combatant 

will win. It should be noted that there is no reason in 

principle why airpower can never aspire to secure a 

decisive victory by its own unaided effort.

Fallacy Seven: The institutional independence of the USAF is a 

major hindrance to the development of a truly joint, coherently 

integrated, American theory of, and doctrine for, warfare.

Judgment: The institutional independence of the 

USAF, in the context of a legally and politically superior 

Department of Defense, is best described as a regrettable necessity. It is regrettable that the essential unity 

of war cannot be matched with a similar unity of military power. The fact is that the skills necessary for warfare vary with geography. It is true that air-minded 

people are inclined to register military and strategic 

claims for airpower’s potency that may seem to exceed 

the bounds of plausibility to those of a nonair persuasion. However, the undoubted costs of service partiality 

fade from sight when they are compared with the price 

likely to be paid for the misuse of airpower by nonairminded military cultures. Given the primacy of America’s aerial tools among its military instruments, there 

is no prudent alternative to ensuring retention of the 

US airpower advantage through sustainment of a dedicated air force.

Fallacy Eight: Airpower can never be other than a minor 

player in the conduct of counterinsurgency warfare (COIN).

Judgment: COIN is inherently land-, indeed, groundcentric in nature. But this geostrategic and tactical fact 

does not mean that the varieties of airpower that support the ground effort can accurately or helpfully be described as being only of minor importance. In COIN today, airpower cannot be the leading edge to the military 

dimension, but it will always be quite literally essential.
xii

Fallacy Nine: The twenty-first century is the missile, space, and 

cyberspace age(s); airpower is one of yesterday’s revolutions.

Judgment: The twenty-first century continues the air 

age that began in December 1903. The serial appearance of ballistic missiles, spacecraft, and computerdriven cyber power has not and does not threaten to 

oblige us to retire the airplane. The new century plainly 

will be one friendly to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), 

but this condition does not mean that manned aircraft 

are facing, or will face, bloc obsolescence as yesterday’s 

technology. The manned aircraft simply is too useful, 

too adaptable and flexible, to be abandoned. The future 

of manned aircraft is completely secure, even though 

some of its roles in some political and military contexts 

increasingly will be assumed by UAVs.


Understanding Airpower

Bonfire of the Fallacies

Air power may be defined as the ability to do something in the air. It consists of transporting all sorts of 

things by aircraft from one place to another, and as air 

covers the whole world there is no place that is immune 

from influence by aircraft.

William Mitchell, 1925

Faith matters so much to a soldier, in the stress of war, 

that military training inculcates a habit of unquestioning obedience which in turn fosters an unquestioning 

acceptance of the prevailing doctrine. While fighting is 

a most practical test of theory, it is a small part of soldiering; and there is far more in soldiering that tends to 

make men the slaves of theory.

B. H. Liddell Hart, 1972

Theory should cast a steady light on all phenomena so 

that we can more easily recognize and eliminate the 

weeds that always spring from ignorance; it should 

show how one thing is related to another, and keep the 

important and the unimportant separate.

Carl von Clausewitz, 1832

Yet the only empirical data we have about how people 

conduct war and behave under its stresses is our experience with it in the past, however much we have to 

make adjustments for subsequent changes in conditions.

Bernard Brodie, 1976

This study rests upon two vital assumptions, both of them 

anathema to postmodern minds. First, it believes that historical truth can be found, or at least approached. Second, it believes in the utility of ambitious theory. The discussion here 
flatly rejects the proposition that “history” simply comprises 

competing “fables” told by historians with interests and attitudes.1 Similarly, it dismisses almost out of hand the belief 

that one theory is worth about as much as any other, which is 

not very much. This analysis seeks to find plausibly verifiable 

truth and, as a consequence, to identify error, the “fallacies” in 

the secondary title. To understand airpower, most especially 

American airpower, is a task imbued with high significance for 

national and international security. But, this task is harassed 

and frequently frustrated by both unsound history and incompetent theorizing. The problem is that those who debate airpower typically seek the history that they can use to advantage, 

not the history that strives honestly to be true. As for the theory 

of airpower, it never did take off safely; it continues to fly in 

contested skies or to taxi indecisively on the runway. No single 

short study can aspire to correct for 90 years of poor history 

and shoddy theory, but it can at least make a start.

The hunter who seeks to find and slay fallacies about airpower finds himself in a target rich environment. Paradoxically 

and ironically, airpower’s most forceful advocates, from the 

time of “Billy” Mitchell (1920s) to the present, also have served 

as its worst enemies. The prime loser has been US national 

security. A good story overstated rapidly becomes unpersuasive to those yet uncommitted. Moreover, generic critics of airpower have been delighted to hold the aerial arm to unrealistic 

standards for successful performance as specified or certainly 

implied by its own spokespeople. This is frustrating because 

theory useful for education and ultimately for guidance in action falls victim to unsafe historical judgments and insecure 

concepts. Alas, this is just the way things are. Parochial analysis and counteranalysis is a fact of life in the extended defense 

community. Exhortations for greater objectivity are entirely futile, no matter how sincerely they are meant. Like Caesar’s 

Gaul, the military instrument is divided by geographical focus 

into three main parts, land, sea, and air with space and cyberspace in addition pressing ever more insistently for status, attention, understanding, and funding. We may deter and, if need 

be, fight one war, but we must fight it in its separate albeit 

fairly interdependent military geographies. Every community 

on earth develops a protective ethos, invents a self-defining 
doctrine, and struggles to assert its material and spiritual interests.2 Obviously, military communities can be no different 

from the norm. In other words, interservice rivalry is just an 

eternal fact of life. History and theory are prime weapons in 

this ongoing contest. Mythology matters. Legends have a lasting currency. Fallacies need to be exposed insofar as this is 

possible, if only in order to provide some policing discipline in 

a defense debate that can stray into the dysfunctional zone. An 

open market for ideas and evidence based historical judgment 

is essential. Key to the quality of the historical and theoretical/

doctrinal production offered in this market is a fearless commitment to burn such important fallacies as can be located 

and targeted. The hunt is on.

The Approach

The general purpose of this monograph is to help reduce the 

reducible error in debates over all aspects of airpower. Since we 

humans, our institutions and procedures, and our behavior 

are friction prone and apt to err, it is sensible to try to diminish 

the pile of assumptions, beliefs, attitudes, and opinions that 

are plainly wrong. Much of the eternal debate on defense issues cannot usefully be approached with a view to locating error. But large swathes of frequently contested debating terrain 

can be cleared definitively. As a scholar it is my duty to recognize and eliminate the weeds of falsehood to which Clausewitz 

referred in one of the epigraphs to this text.3

This is a two-step inquiry. First, the varied character of the 

challenge posed by major fallacies is identified and outlined. Not 

all fallacies are stamped from the same mold. Some are sincerely 

held, others are merely expedient beliefs, but most either are, or 

become, both. The human ability to adhere to that which serves 

what we believe to be our interests is all but infinite.

The second step is to find and expose major fallacies about 

airpower. Nine were selected for trial by critical analysis and 

empirical verification. Phillip S. Meilinger has already made a 

most useful contribution to the necessary mission, and this 

study is in his debt. His Airpower: Myths and Facts provides 

exemplary proof of what can be achieved by precision bombardment with a host of checkable facts.4 My work here can be 
viewed as an attempt, at least, to continue on from Meilinger’s 

excellent history albeit from a higher altitude. Deliberately this 

study strives to find and destroy beliefs that have extensive leverage over practical matters of doctrine, posture, and operational behavior. My nine broad fallacies are not as obviously 

empirically refutable as were Meilinger’s massacred fourteen, 

but appearances to the contrary possibly notwithstanding, they 

are no less vulnerable to evisceration.

Fallacies to Left of Them, Fallacies to Right of 

Them, Volleyed and Thundered

I must apologize to the memory of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 

whose immortal poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade (at Balaclava in 1854 in the Crimean War), is the inspiration behind 

the title to this section. Following Sun-tzu, we must begin by 

knowing the enemy.5 Also in the Chinese tradition, we need to 

bear in mind the heavy salience of deception. Arguments apparently about airpower often conceal other agendas. Readers 

may choose to compose their own list, but this study is content 

to get a grip upon its subject by means of recognizing, being 

alert to, no fewer than seven types of error or fallacy: (1) sincere 

error or (2) insincere error; (3) factual error; (4) logical error or 

(5) error of conception (wrong question, wrong answer); (6) refutable error or (7) irrefutable error.

Purposely, these seven nonexclusive analytical scalpels do 

not comprise a uniform tool set, but they do tend to cluster. 

Each of the fallacies exposed in the main section of this study 

can be categorized by (a) motive, (b) character, (c) logic, and (d) 

evidence. Specifically, the fallacies come with the following 

qualities: sincerity or insincerity; fact, logic, or conception; and 

refutability. It may be needless to add that a fallacy may comprise a compound product made of factual, logical, and fundamental conceptual error—a triple whammy!—as well as being 

either sincerely held or not, and more or less refutable. For example the long revered dictum that “airpower is an inherently 

strategic instrument” has been held with near religious conviction by many airminded persons, but is so flawed in conception 

that it promotes acceptance of massive errors of fact and logic. 
In practice, many advocates of airpower have done their cause 

few favors by so misunderstanding the nature of war and of 

strategy that inadvertently they have presented easy targets to 

airpower’s generic critics. The law of unintended consequences 

ensures that when airpower theorists, for the case in point, 

commit gross errors of fact, logic, and conception, they arm 

their enemies in debate. 

This text generally chooses to dignify the historical reality of 

argument about roles, missions, policies, strategies, weapons, 

and budgets with the word “debate.” But it has to be understood, should there be doubt in anyone’s mind, that ideas, 

claims, and counterclaims may be employed simply as the currency of contention, not always as true substance. It can help 

to own a sound argument expressing plausible ideas, but this 

is only an advantage, not a guarantee of victory in the political 

realm. The policies, strategies, postures, and budgets that enable them are always, repeat always, negotiated outcomes.6

Strategic intellectual debate is important, but it is only one 

strand to what we know, without overmuch affection, as “the 

policy process.” This process is political by any definition which 

means it is about relative power. US national security policy 

and strategy emerge typically with characteristically bland and 

even banal content from a protracted, indeed endless, political 

struggle among a small set of stakeholders. Because policy and 

strategy are of necessity intensely political in nature, they are 

all about “who gets what, when, how,”7 and what is done with 

what is won. There is no “Great Objective Strategic Person” as 

a stakeholder. Although ever higher levels of political authority 

should equate to ever more objectivity vis-á-vis the contending 

parochialisms at lower levels—among the services or among 

military functions—one soon realizes that every player in the 

grandly complex policy- and strategy-making process has their 

own interests. And those distinctive interests paint strategically unique pictures of reality for their players.

Because operational strategy has to be a “come as you are” 

project with the military establishment extant, it can be understood in good part with reference to the capabilities upon which 

it can call. But those capabilities and that strategy are so much 

the product of the workings of a domestic political context, that 

a defense professional such as this author can be driven to de-
spair by the lack of strategic reason and rationality in public 

policy. This discussion may appear somewhat tangential to the 

inquiry, but alas it is not. Defense professionals, military and 

civilian, must ply their trade as best they are able within parameters that usually could not withstand a strategic audit. 

Congress, the arbiter of defense’s fiscal fate, does not really 

debate strategy, or even strategically. Its honorable members 

understand money, not strategy, so that is how they exercise 

their measure of control over the national security. Since national security debate is about politics, is conducted politically, 

and has a course trackable by money, it is not unreasonable to 

question the importance of ideas, of theory, or of history. Overall, even if it is conceded to be discoverable, how can strategic 

truth possibly matter in the context of a policy- and a strategymaking process that apparently is so indifferent to it?

The basic answer to the skeptical, cynical question posed immediately above, is that the United States can be well or ill 

prepared along a spectrum of the strategic challenges it will 

face. The content of the choices made on military posture and 

strategy matter deeply, whether or not it is the product of careful strategic analysis. Moreover, practicably viewed the US government is no more, nor less, peopled by “Rational Strategic 

Persons” than is the world at large. Every polity, no matter 

what its culture, makes strategic decisions through a political 

process. Furthermore, even though important tracts of national 

security country can be cleared of some, at least, major fallacies, much that is key to our future safety is inherently unknowable and therefore must be contestable.

Those defense professionals whose main area of concern encompasses the whole of the national security are obliged to try to 

seek strategic truth and fight for its recognition as such. This is 

a political duty, a moral imperative, and a matter of professional 

pride. We know that both good history and competent theory are 

achievable, yet frequently do not prevail in debate. So be it. At 

the very least, we are obligated to harass the purveyors of fallacy, embarrass them, and limit their ability to cause harm. Although it is all too easy to be pessimistic over the prospects for 

strategic understanding, it is a fact that better ideas succeed 

against worse ideas more often than might be expected. While 

there is much to criticise about US defense policy, strategy, pos-
ture, and behavior, there also is much to praise. One important 

reason why there is so much to praise is because a small body 

of defense professionals is committed to the pursuit and dissemination of reliable history and effective theory and doctrine. 

In addition, the US armed forces demonstrate an unrivalled willingness and ability to learn from their mistakes. In 1968 and in 

2007–2008, America’s military made huge course corrections in 

the context of ongoing warfare. Many countries’ militaries could 

not have effected such radical changes.

In the fine arts, as in love, beauty may reside in the eye of the 

beholder though there are some standards for objective judgment. But in strategic matters there is always the possibility, 

sometimes the certainty, of a truly objective test of relative 

merit. The test, of course, is experience. We can have no evidence from the future, which is especially unfortunate since 

the future must be the focus of our security concern, but we do 

have 2,500 years of history from which to try to discover what 

tends to work, when, why, and how and what does not. Recall 

the epigraph to this study provided by Bernard Brodie.8 It asserts, unarguably, that history provides the only evidence available to us as the basis upon which we can found strategic comprehension. Whatever the character or characters of error in 

the fallacies discussed below, they are all demonstrably challengeable empirically. Material reality has the final say, even 

when an error is conceptual.

Those readers with continental, maritime, space, or cyberspace mindsets and worldviews, may believe that their mostfavored military-strategic instrument is unfairly treated in this 

analysis. Two claims must be recorded promptly. First, the 

purpose of this study is to tell the truth about contemporary 

airpower, not to promote the aerial instrument as an end in itself. I believe strongly that this “bonfire of the fallacies” will 

serve to advantage both the airpower stakeholder in US national security, and the rest of us. After all, it is our airpower 

that is the focus of this assessment. Second, airpower is not 

the only military instrument whose true value is menaced by 

the popularity of significant fallacies. One could, and probably 

should, serve the national security by exposing fallacies about 

the other American military instruments. In a previous publication for the Airpower Research Institute, I argued that al-
though airpower theory is weak and contested, so also are the 

general theories with which we seek to explain land power, sea 

power, space power, and cyber power.9

Airpersons may be unhappy with an item or two among these 

fallacies. The analysis takes serious issue with some service 

beliefs of such longstanding and historical authority that they 

are akin to being sacred. Doctrine, after all, is not only about 

what is believed to be the best military practice, sometimes 

preeminently it amounts to a credo. To overreach in what is 

believed to be a good cause is all too human. What can be 

termed the “friendly fallacies,” those prompted by airpower’s 

advocates, are apt to be more damaging than the “unfriendly 

fallacies” disseminated by airpower’s foes.

The Fallacies

This analysis of major fallacies needs to be prefaced by five 

aids to proper understanding. If readers judge these points to 

be reasonable, they should be able to approach the candidate 

great fallacies much as does this author.

First, the fallacies are not presented as quotations. One can 

locate quotations to support just about any belief about defense matters. Sometimes it is useful to illustrate a claim with 

a single verifiable quotation, but as often it is not. I contend 

that each of the fallacies discussed below is both widely believed and carries implications important for national security. 

The precise wording of each fallacy is driven by a determination 

to present the erroneous statement as clearly as possible, always consistent with truth in reporting, of course. The fallacies 

are not straw targets; they are all too real as persisting beliefs 

and attitudes. Some of the fallacies are fundamentally so hostile to airpower that they are rarely stated as unambiguously as 

they are recorded here.

Second, we have to be careful to guard the integrity of distinctive, albeit linked, levels of analysis. With thanks to the 

useful concept of “mission creep,” we should be alert to the 

danger of “analysis creep.” Tactical, operational, strategic, and 

political verities must not be permitted to slide promiscuously 

from level to level of analysis. For example, John Boyd’s famed 

OODA (observation, orientation, decision, action), loop may 
have tactical and even possibly operational merit, but it is far 

less plausible when it is presented as the strategist’s “theory of 

everything,” including, of course, the strategic and the political. 

One has to be alert to the temptation to apply a good looking 

conceptual key to every intellectual lock in sight.10

Third, reluctant though many debaters are to admit it, frequently within a fallacy there is a truth struggling for recognition. Hardly ever, indeed probably never, is a significant belief 

about a strategic issue utterly bereft of all merit. In the heat of 

defense debate, it is not difficult to persuade oneself that one’s 

debating rivals are not only somewhat ignorant and misguided, 

but they are knaves and fools as well. They may well be such 

people, but it is never safe to assume that this is so. If we neglect 

to seek honestly to understand an unfavored argument, and 

probe it for merit, we both invite intellectual ambush in debate 

and ensure that our position is not as robust as it should be.

Fourth, fallacies can be situational. However, defense debate 

is not entirely innocent of “flat earthers” who insist upon ideas 

that seem to have zero value. Actually, such ideas can have 

negative value because they may be sufficiently popular that a 

great deal of scarce time and energy has to be expended countering them. Antisatellite (ASAT) arms control is an example of 

an idea, really a set of ideas, that has absolutely no merit.11

That which cannot be reliably defined cannot be controlled. To 

be blunt, were the United States so ill advised as to sign up to 

a regime of ASAT constraint, it would not, indeed could not, 

know what it would be controlling. The number and variety of 

effects and their agents that can damage space systems in one 

or more of their three “segments” (ground, up/down links, orbiting vehicles), is so great that no effort at control could be 

monitored and verified. This is a matter of fact, not opinion. At 

least the ASAT control question is easily answerable firmly in 

the negative. It cannot be done and therefore we should not try 

to do it, let alone pretend to do it. But, many strategic beliefs 

are neither valid nor invalid in general terms. For example, unremarkably, airpower has always been highly effective tactically and operationally over desert terrain. Provided one enjoys 

air superiority, an enemy’s army in the desert has no place to 

hide, so it must rely upon the contributions of camouflage, 

sheer space, and air defense weaponry. Beliefs about the qual-
10

ity of threat to land power posed by a superior enemy air force 

are shaped by experience in particular geographical and military contexts. In the spring and early summer of 1944, highly 

competent German generals disagreed about the practical implications of the Western Allies’ aerial dominance. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, trained by experience in adversity in North 

Africa, was far more respectful of his enemies’ air menace than 

were the field marshals and generals who had practiced their 

trade in Russia. Both were correct—in specific contexts.

Fifth and finally, in the absence of thoroughly incorruptible 

and totally competent professional analytical policemen, any 

well trained defense theorist and analyst is able to produce the 

answer that he wants, and with which he began, by means of 

the simple method of selecting the question, or at least the 

wording of the question, friendly to his purpose. This seemingly 

banal point alas is all too relevant to the history of airpower up 

to and including the present day. For example, it is not especially difficult to demonstrate with overwhelming empirical 

plausibility that “airpower has failed”—provided one is allowed 

to construct the test that sets the “pass” mark.12 More often 

than not, airpower’s more vociferous generic advocates have 

cooperated in their own intellectual destruction by themselves 

setting out airpower’s stall with improbably heroic claims. To 

risk stating what should be hugely obvious, if one wants to be 

sure that the answers will be “right,” one has to be careful in 

drafting the correct questions. Since even honest and competent analysts can err greatly in defense analysis, it is scarcely 

surprising that the less honest and the not fully competent are 

able to thrive in an extended defense community as large as 

ours. And this is why we need to attend most assiduously to 

the necessary task of exposing fallacies. Antulio J. Echevarria 

makes this same point when, in his skewering of “transformation’s clichés,” he argues persuasively that “[t]he only truly essential key to transforming successfully is the capacity for critical analysis.”13

The fallacies deployed and exposed here are none of them the 

inventions of this author. However, they are crafted in the form 

selected not for the purpose of impaling particular people and 

institutions—though that might be considered “bonus dam-
11

age”—or even directly to win debates, but rather to serve as keys 

to unlock rooms currently cluttered with misunderstandings.

Fallacy One

The era of conventional warfare between great states and coalitions has passed. The US Air Force needs to abandon the paradigm of large-scale regular warfare.

Large-scale regular-conventional warfare between states is 

obsolete, at least obsolescent, so the story goes. Along with the 

autonomy of the sovereign states that have waged it over the 

past 400–500 years, such warfare does not lie in our future. As 

with every other fallacy in this collection of errors, this claim 

registers along a spectrum of strength of assertion. The belief 

that major interstate warfare is now “history” has been heralded 

for nearly 20 years. Gen Sir Rupert Smith of the British Army 

has offered a particularly forthright statement of this view. He 

argues that over the past several decades “a paradigm shift in 

war has undoubtedly occurred: from armies with comparable 

forces doing battle on a field to strategic confrontation between 

a range of combatants, not all of which are armies, and using 

different types of weapons, often improvised. The old paradigm 

was that of interstate industrial war. The new one is the paradigm of war amongst the people.”14 The general writes with exemplary clarity. He explains that

War no longer exists. Confrontation, conflict and combat undoubtedly 

exist all round the world—most noticeably, but not only, in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Palestinian 

Territories—and states still have armed forces which they use as a symbol of power. None the less, war as cognitively known to most non-combatants, war as battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a 

massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs: such war 

no longer exists.15

Nearly 20 years ago, Israeli historian and strategic theorist, 

Martin van Creveld, wrote brilliantly, if contestably, about an 

alleged Transformation of War,

16 while a band of scholars came 

to popularize the notion that the 1990s were witnessing “new 

wars” of ethnicity and identity in contrast to “old wars” about 

state power, wealth, and honor.17 With the still-to-be concluded 

Wars of Yugoslavian Succession dominating the challenges to 
12

international security in the 1990s, and the “long war” against 

terror with its Afghan and Iraqi consequences driving US policy 

and strategy after 11 September 2001 (9/11),18 it is scarcely 

surprising that large-scale regular warfare today is regarded 

widely, and deeply, as yesterday’s paradigm. The trouble is that 

the case for consigning regular-interstate warfare to the scrapheap of history falls far short of compelling.

Not for the last time in this study, we must record the belief 

that the primary source of a significant error is undue “presentism.” Irregular warfare of many kinds, complex insurgencies, failed states and local warlords, interethnic hostility, inherently transnational violent Islamist extremism, and so forth, 

has indeed dominated the post-Cold War global landscape up 

to and including the present. The claim of this first fallacy is 

that history is substantially linear which means that it has 

moved, at least is moving, on from the era of interstate industrialage conflict to a new period defined strategically by “war amongst 

the people” as its most notable characteristic. This view is not 

merely the opinion of a handful of armchair experts and other 

pundits. Rather it is close to being the dominant mainstream 

opinion among security and defense professionals, civilian and 

military, on both sides of the Atlantic.

What does this view mean and what are its practical implications? If one were to sign on for a strict, perhaps we should say 

extreme, variant of this fallacy, one would be agreeing to the proposition that never again will the United States wage interstate 

warfare against a regional-, great-, or superpower enemy. Such 

interstate combat as might need to be conducted would only be in 

order to enforce access for an intervention or to punish for some 

grave affront to US interests. Given the high popularity of this 

opinion today, it is interesting to note how few followers of strategic fashion have the postural courage of their convictions. Since 

military capability should express national military strategy, 

strategy should be crafted to support policy, and policy should be 

designed to cope with the ever-dynamic realities of local, regional, 

and global insecurity. US defense preparation ought, on the logic 

of this fallacy, to be showing signs of a seismic shift. If we are convinced, truly convinced, that our future enemies will be nonstate 

political entities obliged to fight irregularly, and occasionally a local failing polity or a regional rogue, it must make little sense for 
13

us to invest in the ability to wage heavy conventional combat on 

the greatest of scales.

As “revolution in military affairs” and “transformation,” yesterday’s buzzwords, are succeeded by the eminently more tangible and expensive realm of “recapitalization,” it becomes obvious why guesswork about the political and strategic contexts of 

tomorrow is a matter of the highest importance. Not to mince 

words, we could be in peril of preparing for the wrong wars. 

What we decide to buy today assuredly will not determine what 

wars we fight nor even, just possibly, how we will attempt to 

fight them. But the broad and detailed choices we make on 

doctrine, organization, training, and equipment certainly will 

determine, at least influence heavily, how well we fight. As General Smith observes: “Indeed, armies do not prepare for the last 

war, they frequently prepare for the wrong one—if for no other 

reason than that governments will usually fund only against 

the anticipated primary threat as opposed to risk, and the adversary will usually play to his opponents’ weakness rather 

than strength.”19

We do not need to reach for help from Clausewitz in order to 

understand that the US airpower most “fit for purpose” against 

enemies in Taliban and other militia forms, would not be most 

suitable were it to be charged with the task of establishing and 

maintaining air superiority against a state or coalition foe of 

the first or even second international rank.

So, what is wrong with the view that America’s future should 

be assumed to contain only conflict against irregular or distinctly minor state enemies?

Because by definition the future has yet to happen and no one 

can prove anything about it. However, we do have two and a half 

millennia of strategic history upon which to draw for our education. It is true to claim that tomorrow must come from today, but 

also it is true that tomorrow need not follow today in a linear 

fashion. The ingredients, the trends, that eventually must make 

our ever-changing future security contexts are, of course, evident today, but, these trends will interact and could produce 

“tomorrows” radically different from the current global security 

environment. Sometimes the course of history serves up “tipping 

points,” brief episodes or even single events that effect and signal a drastic change in context and the current of happenings. 
14

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression comprised such a break point between relatively benign 1920s and a 1930s that was near certain to conclude with 

a more or less mighty war. The much under-expected fall of the 

USSR was another such radical break in history, an event with 

consequences that have yet to be fully worked through. More 

recent still, it can be argued with fair plausibility, that 9/11 was, 

and flagged, a tipping point with momentous implications.

Change, even very radical and abrupt change, happens. History is not linear. But to see, even to see clearly—as if one could 

be sure—the ingredients from which tomorrow’s contexts for US 

security will be made, is not to know what outcome will be produced. History is too complex to allow for detailed prediction. 

However, we observe that the past and present exhibit many 

great continuities and that although the details of human behavior constantly change, broad motives do not. This is the reason why one can draft general theories of war and of strategy 

that should be valid for all periods, all belligerents, and all technologies.20 In parallel, one can draft secondary, dependent theories explaining particular wars and how to conduct them that 

account fully for the uniqueness of each historical case.

Warfare is both cyclically and linearly arrow like. It is cyclical 

in that tactical advantage swings between offense and defense, 

while it is linear in that military science does advance towards 

ever-greater unilateral lethality. One cannot quite say effectiveness because always there is need to consider the blunting of 

potential military effectiveness by the intelligent measures 

taken by active enemies. War, as Clausewitz reminds us, is 

“nothing but a duel on a larger scale.”21 The claim that largescale regular-conventional warfare between states does not lie 

in our future rests upon three principal assumptions, each of 

which is unsound.

First, a skilled strategic theorist can argue that military science finally has all but abolished large-scale regular-conventional warfare. The more powerful states of the twenty-first 

century, it is claimed correctly, will all either be nuclear armed 

or easily could become so. One can argue that contemporary, 

let alone future, information-led conventional forces would 

rapidly secure a decision in regular combat. The loss rates 

would be entirely unsustainable. Equipment of most kinds, 
15

certainly the principal platforms in all geographical environments, could not be replaced rapidly if at all. Since conventional

battlefield decision should be secured rapidly, the losing belligerent would have no option other than to accept defeat or 

escalate to nuclear use. It is improbable that a super or great 

power or even a regionally dominant power would tolerate defeat without bidding to recoup its losses with a nuclear initiative. The logic of this strategic context is that large-scale future 

conventional war means nuclear war, and that ought to be a 

conclusively deterring prospect for states of any character. 

Readers will note the qualifying “shoulds” and “ought to be’s” 

in this argument.

There is nothing much wrong with the strategic logic just 

recounted. But moving from abstract theory to potential practice, this argument is fraught with error. It is true that nuclear 

weapons discourage, even deter, the employment of conventional force. However, they cannot prohibit it. America’s nucleararmed foes in the future—say, China, Iran, and possibly Russia—may be discouraged from escalation by the US nuclear 

posture by way of extended deterrence, or they may need to be 

defeated in their escalation. By means of offensive and defensive counterforce, the United States should be capable of defeating nearly all scales of military menace, as well as the nuclear. The proposition that nuclear armament has to be a 

conclusive show preventer or stopper for large-scale conventional warfare is true neither in theory nor plausibly in practice. It could be true were the political stakes at issue to be 

grossly unequal and weighted heavily in favor of America’s 

enemy, but it is not a general verity.

Second, it is fashionable to believe that interstate warfare is 

in rapid decline because its authors, states, are in rapid decline as variably sovereign political entities.22 As the inexorable 

forces of globalization proceed to bind societies ever more intimately, so the relevance of state-centric structures to security 

in its several dimensions must diminish. In short, states, as 

the building blocks around which the architecture of global 

politics and nearly all else beside is organized, are coming to 

matter less and less. The problem with this belief or assumption is that it is not true. Perhaps it would be more accurate to 

claim simply that it is nowhere near true enough to serve as a 
16

principal guiding light for our general approach to security and 

to military defense specifically. Again, let me be very direct. As 

greater states, China, Russia, Japan, India, and—yes—the 

United States, are in no significant way becoming more conflict- and even war-proof in their mutual relations than they 

have been of recent decades. There is no “grand narrative,” no 

“meta discourse” of global politics that is sidelining the great 

states, let alone the relevance of that shifty relative quantity 

and quality, power. Such indications of a shift towards coherent global attitudes and behaviors, as contrasted with national 

behaviors, say Chinese or American, are too faint and ambiguous 

to be of much interest to this analysis. States, especially very 

great states, are here to stay. Moreover, these mighty political 

entities, actually and prospectively, behave as Thucydides’ 

Athenians in 432 BCE. They adopt, advance, and defend policies motivated by “fear, honor, and interest.”23

Third and finally, the demise of large-scale regular-conventional warfare, and hence the alleged need for the demise of a 

US airpower geared to wage it, is predicated upon the sincere 

belief that the security challenges of the twenty-first century 

will be largely nonmilitary/strategic in kind. Listings of future 

security challenges typically include religiously motivated terrorism, but the threats in the new century are identified as 

climate change; resource shortages (food, water, energy); demographic catastrophe and mass migration; pandemics; identity, 

ethnicity, and cultural insecurities; and the erosion of respect 

for political authority (i.e., states that “fail”). To this short list, 

one could add the asteroid menace. It so happens both that the 

asteroid threat is indeed a real one, and that we could do a 

great deal to protect against it—at least with respect to objects 

of modest size. As a plausible “extinction” threat, it is high time 

that the spacefaring states of the world took their responsibility 

for global defense far more seriously.

The nonmilitary threats to future security cited above are 

only nonmilitary when one refuses or fails to recognize them for 

what they truly could be—triggers for traditional looking conflict. We do need to worry about adverse, and especially abrupt 

climate change, overpopulation, and resource shortages, but 

these are all plausible sources of conflict which would be certain to have a major strategic dimension. Again, to be blunt, a 
17

deteriorating global climate, unsustainable population growth, 

and shortages of food, water, and energy, are all, especially in 

malign combination—perils tend to come in “bunches”—potential 

causes or triggers for war.24

It has to follow from this admittedly rather grim analysis that 

the twenty-first century will lack neither greater powers behaving as such powers always have behaved—for the same mix of 

Thucydidean reasons—nor a military/strategic context that 

could be exploited in pursuit of meaningful victory, nuclear 

danger notwithstanding. For a “Parthian shot,” even if the argument provided here as a critique of this alleged fallacy is 

judged only inconclusively damning, dare any of the greater 

powers, most especially the United States, take the risk that 

this proposition is true?

Fallacy Two

Airpower is an inherently strategic instrument.

It has long been doctrine, formal and informal, even canon 

law equivalent among airpersons, to claim that airpower (written 

as a single word, not as “air power,” the standard pre-1940 usage),25 is uniquely “strategic.” As best one can tell from history 

and logic, this assertion rested upon the belief that airpower 

alone among the geographically distinctive military instruments 

could be independently decisive in war or as a deterrent in peace 

and crisis. This is a relatively sophisticated version of the strategic rationale. Less functional reasoning simply insisted that airpower is, or can be, strategic because it is long range or somehow very important. The somehow was rendered helpfully 

specific, indeed to the point of transcending grounds for contention, with the advent of the nuclear age. In the late 1940s and 

early in the 1950s, it was commonplace for speakers and authors to associate “atomic” and airpower so closely that adjective 

and noun all but fused in a single grand conception.

Although rarely stated explicitly, the claim that airpower is 

inherently strategic implies strongly that land power and sea 

power (and now space power and cyber power) are not. Plainly, 

if every kind of military power is strategic, this doctrinal assertion must lose any meaning. The claim matters enormously 

because it carries the message that airpower, being uniquely 
18

strategic, matters most. The implications of what we shall demonstrate to be a fallacy could hardly be more serious for, dare 

one say, strategic understanding and, of course, for budgetary 

shares and their postural, career, and industrial consequences. 

It is well worth noting that despite its traditional adherence to 

belief in airpower’s uniquely strategic quality, adaptive practice 

by the Air Force persistently has belied the tenet. Nonetheless 

it is clear from the historical record why airpersons registered 

the claim for a uniquely strategic status. 

Two reasons were dominant. The first was no deeper than a 

genuine lack of conceptual grasp of the proper meaning of 

strategy, and hence of “strategic.” The second reason, much 

aided by the conceptual disorder of the first, was perceived necessary as a firm basis for institutional autonomy—even independent service coequality or better. If airpower could deliver 

victory in war essentially unaided by the older services, its claim 

for independence should be undeniable. The arrival and then 

proliferation of atomic, succeeded by hydrogen, weapons seemed 

to close off any merit in further debate. After all, what could be 

more strategic than the capability to obliterate the USSR and 

China in a matter of hours? The tenet that nuclear-armed airpower is uniquely strategic appeared to be self-evidently true. It 

was both the deterrent and, if necessary, the instrument of Armageddon for the Evil Empire. Alas, such a commonsense view 

was seriously in error. Moreover, it was seriously erroneous in 

ways that have effected lasting damage to sound appreciation of 

airpower’s potency. In other words, the claim for inherently strategic status is both fallacious and gratuitously self-harmful. 

What do we mean by this?

To explain this fallacy and correct for it, one must begin by 

clarifying the meaning of strategy and strategic, and by explaining why it is vital to take care to adhere strictly to this meaning. 

Stated at the most basic of levels: policy provides political goals 

to be secured, military strategy provides ways to secure them, 

and tactics do the actual securing. If one confuses these three 

fundamental distinctions, one enters a world of theoretical, doctrinal, and, especially of note, practical grief. The critical difference between the strategic and the tactical is the quality of instrumentality. Strategic effect is distinctive in kind or quality 

from tactical effect, not in quantity. For example, a bigger bang 
19

is not strategic because it is bigger than a much lesser bang, 

which instinctively we choose to term tactical. A vehicle does not 

become strategic because it is intercontinental in range rather 

than merely intraregional or even intracontinental. A weapon, a 

capability, or a project is strategic only in its consequences.26

Yes, US airpower inherently has strategic meaning, as does US 

land power, sea power, space power, and cyber power. The most 

crucial relevant concept is strategic effect. By this we mean the 

consequences of (tactical) actual military behavior for the course 

and outcome of a conflict. It is conceptual and practical nonsense to assert that some weapons and behaviors are strategic 

while others are merely tactical, perhaps operational. 

Let us consider the hardest of hard cases for my argument, the 

erstwhile Strategic Air Command (SAC). How could long-range 

nuclear-armed air-and-missile power conceivably be anything 

other than quintessentially strategic? The answer, contrasuggestive to some among us though it may be, is that even SAC in its 

heyday should not have been regarded as a hermetically closed 

system, embracing both instrument and achievement. If SAC 

truly was strategic, then how could one distinguish between the 

doing of nuclear damage and the consequences of that action? 

To pull back our argument a little, assignment of the strategic 

title to SAC, the legatee of the mighty armadas of B-17s, B-24s, 

and B-29s, of World War II, all but definitively discouraged rigorous investigation into the possible/probable effects of US nuclear targeting plans in action. A military instrument deemed inherently strategic is difficult to question strategically. What one 

has done is to fuse the tactical and the strategic categories of 

thought and behavior, with the inevitable result that the intangible utility of strategic values and their political effects all too 

readily evade attention. Not to dodge the bullet, one is likely to 

produce a context wherein military action, in this case nuclear 

destruction on the largest scale, is divorced from intelligent political direction—via strategy—and political assessment—again 

via strategic review. The strategist must always pose the question, “so what?” Belief that there is inherently strategic military 

behavior is apt terminally to foreclose upon the insistent levelling of this challenge. However, as claimed here, there can be no 

inherently strategic forces, whether or not one is strategically 

educated. At issue here is not an arcane academic point of theory, 
20

possible appearances to the contrary admitted. It is a fact that 

there is, and has always been, a fundamental distinction between behavior and its consequences.

With exemplary flexibility, the historical exercise of airpower 

by the US Air Force time and again has demonstrated the nonsense of the traditional tactical/strategic distinction. From Arc 

Light missions over Vietnam, through close air support (!) for 

the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001, the venerable 

B-52, the material icon of a strategic weapon, has performed 

splendid “tactical service.”27 “Strategic” is not a function of 

choice of target or character of weapon—it is all, repeat all, 

about the consequences of military behavior.

The damage to American airpower wrought by this fallacious 

seizure of the strategic ascription takes several forms. First, it 

all but obliged US air planners, strategists to seek independent 

decision through airpower because of their assertion of the 

uniquely strategic quality of their instrument. Since such independent decision is only very rarely achievable and because of 

the complexity and variety of wars and warfare, airpersons are 

setting themselves up for demonstrable failure. Increasingly in 

regular-conventional warfare, superior airpower decides which 

belligerent will win, though it will be unable to deliver conclusive victory unaided.28 This was the case in both Gulf Wars. 

The quest for independently decisive airpower is pursuit of a 

chimera. The United States would like to have such a capability, reliably, but that is not possible. So, it should be more than 

content to settle for an airpower that will “decide” who wins its 

regular-conventional conflicts, and that delivers literally critical support when land power or sea power truly must be the 

leading executive agent of military decision.

The second damaging impact of the misuse and genuine misunderstanding of “strategic” is that it encourages underappreciation of airpower’s nonkinetic impact upon the course of strategic history. Most people recognize that airpower is a concept 

and material descriptor that embraces everything that flies, rotary and fixed (and adjustable “swing”) wings, but the abuse of 

“strategic” leads to undervaluation of airpower’s many nonkinetic roles. In counterinsurgency warfare (COIN), for a very 

current example, while airpower provides essential firepower 

support, it also enables high tactical mobility to friendly forces—
21

insertion and timely extraction, reconnaissance, search and 

rescue, medivac, resupply, and humanitarian relief—to cite but 

some among airpower’s roles and missions.29 The point is that 

every one of the duties just cited, kinetic and definitely nonkinetic, will have more, or less, strategic effect upon the course of 

a COIN campaign. The proper appreciation of airpower’s strategic value requires final abandonment of the old dogma that it is 

inherently a strategic instrument. Soundly viewed, all of America’s armed forces are strategic agents.

Inadvertently, of course, many writers of military doctrine 

have fallen unknowingly into a deadly conceptual trap that 

can have dire real-world consequences. They have favored 

the idea that military theory divides war into strategic, operational, and tactical levels. This expedient and plausible 

three-way split has much to recommend it, save only, alas, 

for one deadly error. The three “levels” are appropriately associated primarily with battles (tactical), campaigns (operational), war as a whole (strategic) and sensible things are 

said about the connections among them. Unfortunately, 

even generally sophisticated US doctrinal writing has been 

prone to commit the error of failing to distinguish clearly between the application of force and the political consequences 

of that application. This lethal conceptual error is easily obscured by the drafting of doctrine which both talks sensibly about the ascending significance of the three levels from 

tactical, through operational, to strategic and speaks wisely 

about the contributions of each level to the others. But, what 

is absent is the all-important distinction, so clear in Clausewitz’s theory, between the use of force and its meaning in 

the currency of politics. As recently as 1992, for a historical 

example, Air Force Manual 1-1, Basic Aerospace Doctrine of 

the United States Air Force volume 2, makes it quite plain 

that the strategic level of war is about the direct and indirect 

applications of military and other resources.30 For the strategist, any and all applications of airpower can have meaning 

only in their results. If this fundamental (Clausewitzian) distinction is neglected or not understood, airpower is unlikely 

to be employed as effectively as it should be.
22

Fallacy Three

The development of airpower is driven by technology not ideas.

It is commonplace to believe that airpower not only is technology, but also, pathologically, is about technology. This belief, which we shall demonstrate to be fallacious, holds that 

airpower is an ever-dynamic product of “the ripening plum” 

syndrome. The fable insists that technologies engineered into 

aerial vehicles mature more or less for reason of sheer technical momentum and cumulative, and sometimes radical, innovation. The roles of political context for policy, of strategic demand, and of operational and tactical requirements are judged 

historically to have been distinctly secondary. Technology, duly 

reified in this view, moved on for not much better reason than 

that it could do so. It is probably true to claim that a majority 

of commentators upon airpower history have subscribed to this 

erroneous opinion. In a previous publication, I deployed contrasting statements on the relationship between ideas and 

technology for airpower.31 In effect, the fallacy claims that airpower can be likened to Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, continuing mindlessly to go on doing what is being done currently, 

regardless of consequences. Technological advance is its own 

rationale. At ever-greater expense, so the argument proceeds, 

technology as airpower advances to nowhere in particular for 

no good political or strategic reasons. Technology is the pilot—

served by policy, strategy, operations, tactics, and logistics.

This assertion can appear to fit historical facts. Airpower flies 

ever upwards in its technical specifications and performances, 

whether or not the performances enable net military, strategic, 

and political achievement that is useful. Why is this argument 

important? It taints the necessarily technological product that is 

airpower with the strong suspicion, or worse, of costly stupidity. 

Air forces generally purchase ever more sophisticated, which is 

to say ever more expensive, aerial vehicles even though strategic, operational, and tactical ideas for their employment persistently have lagged behind. Restated, the claim is to the effect 

that the history of airpower has been the story of a supply-led, 

not demand-led, instrument.

To endorse this belief, in a major or minor key, is to risk 

seduction by the attractions of technophobia. Because people 
23

matter most and it is characteristically American to place faith 

in technology, it is tempting to cite the technologist, even a 

reified technology, as villain. Somehow, the material servant 

has replaced the political and strategic master. The principal 

reason why this fallacy is so significant is that technology continues to be the source of marked competitive benefit to the 

United States and its foreign security dependents. The country can ill afford a generic, frequently uninformed, suspicion 

of technology, when technical achievement is America’s leading asymmetrical advantage over foes of all kinds. If Americans 

are apt to employ technology, especially as firepower, that can 

prove counterproductive, the problem lies with culture, theory, 

and doctrine, not with the machines themselves. Theory and 

doctrine for airpower has left much to be desired, but it makes 

no sense to seek improvement by demeaning technology.32 Airpower is as airpower does, and what airpower is allowed to do is 

a matter of human discretion, guided by ideas. This third major fallacy implies that a mighty abstraction, airpower, somehow has developed while, and perhaps by, evading political, 

strategic, and military control. The confusion of technological 

instrument with human agency promotes the conviction that 

airpower typically has failed in war after war. Time after time, 

so the tale is told, it did not deliver upon its promise, explicit 

and implicit.33

The view just expressed is a fallacy, not so much because it 

depends upon an unsafe conceptual architecture, though that 

is the case, but rather because it is historically inaccurate. 

From the nineteenth century until today, ideas, strategic, and 

other theory, generally have led technical achievements. The 

whole historical saga of airpower has been peopled by scientists and engineers who have striven to solve technical problems so that flying machines could perform as political, military, and commercial clients required or desired.

Airminded people like aircraft and industry needs to develop, 

build, and sell aircraft. Here we find a robust marriage between 

demand and supply, or is it often the promise of supply and a 

consequential demand? In truth, the history of airpower is not 

a simple narrative of technical attainment for the love of discovery, commercial incentive, or perceived military needs to 

solve tactical crises or for high strategic purposes. Rather it is 
24

the complex story of all of the above. Just because an air force 

did not ask for a particular aerial capability, does not mean 

that it would have no use for it. The challenge throughout history, from earliest times to the present, was partially explained 

by Winston Churchill in a memorandum, “Mechanical Power 

ibn the Offense,” 9 November 1916. “A hiatus exists between 

inventors who know what they could invent, if they only knew 

what was wanted, and the soldiers who know, or ought to know, 

what they want, and would ask for it if they only knew how 

much science could do for them. You have never really bridged 

that gap yet.”34

Airpower in all its shapes and forms has always been the 

product of a specific vision, or visions, of utility. One quality 

in particular, never in short supply among the airminded, is 

a notion, clear or fuzzy, of the value of aircraft that currently 

are over the technical horizon. In historical practice there has 

been an air community comprising inventors, manufacturers, 

and prospective commercial and military people who have conducted a constant dialog. Sometimes the aircraft and ancillary 

industry(ies) have invested speculatively in technical innovation in the hope that military or commercial customers will 

be unable to resist the new performance plausibly on offer. 

However, even when industry and its engineers move ahead 

of explicit military demand, it is nearly always the case that 

a need to achieve a definite capability guides the enterprise. 

Technology does not advance as it were mindlessly bereft of 

purpose beyond curiosity and profit. Rather it must be driven 

and shaped by goals that make sense to, and can be defended 

by, the intended customers.35

Of course there is a momentum to the advance in aircraft 

technologies. Since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, technical innovation has been routinized as historians insist convincingly. But, has there been a “mad momentum” to technological history? What is the evidence? Long-range airpower, 

for example, was not first developed in the 1930s and 1940s 

by an aircraft industry that was out of strategically motivated 

control. The quest for transcontinental and eventually transoceanic reach stemmed from pressing commercial and military 

demand. Ideas about global geostrategy explain the appearance 

of the B-17, B-24, B-29, B-36, B-47, and B-52. Mountaineers 
25

try to explain their strange obsession with the existential quip, 

“because they (mountains) are there.” But, societies as security 

communities do not develop and procure long-range bomber, 

transport, and reconnaissance aircraft just because these 

highly sophisticated machines can be built. There is method 

and purpose in the madness, if madness it be.

The relationship between military demand and industrial supply is not unidirectional. Manufacturers do conceive of vehicles, 

qualities in performance, and even of missions that potential 

clients did not know they needed before they were educated, 

which is to say “sold,” by intending suppliers. In practice to 

date, armed forces have wanted more performance than aerial 

technology could provide. In large part, though, this situation 

now has been so altered that the “transformation of American 

airpower” described and assessed so convincingly by air analyst and pilot, Benjamin S. Lambeth, nearly ten years ago now, 

is approaching perfection.36 The problems are no longer with 

a technically flawed military instrument, but rather with the 

nature of warfare as a duel. Uncooperative enemies have been 

sufficiently disobliging as to devise tactics intended to deny US 

airpower the targets it could certainly destroy were it able to 

locate them reliably. The potential perfection of American airpower, certainly as a kinetic tool for dealing out firepower, must 

remain only potential, albeit excellent, because its enemies will 

be motivated and to some degree able to find ways to offset the 

prospectively conclusive US military advantage in the air.

The airpower that we buy is the result of ongoing negotiation 

among many stakeholders, civilian and military. It expresses 

the balance of political power within the policy-budgetary process, the public political mood vis-á-vis security, the state of 

the art in weapons and other technologies relevant to airpower, 

and, last but not always least, systems of belief about air tactics, operations, and strategy. Would-be innovators, individuals 

and teams, will offer the Air Force dazzling prospects of military 

performance and value for what currently may only be glints 

in the eye. But, officials and politicians are not in the habit of 

buying into visions they do not share. Ideas as theory are not 

all that matters in the grand historical narrative of airpower, 

but they do matter most and they always have. Even available technology will not be acquired and applied if it does not 
26

fit settled military doctrine. For example, fuel drop tanks to 

extend the range of escort fighters, most specifically the P-51

(the P-47 was too short legged, even with extra fuel tanks), 

were a vital enabler for the United States Army Air Forces’ daylight blitz deep into Germany. But, even though the technology 

for the mission had been available in 1942, then current air 

doctrine insisted that B-17s and B-24s, in correct formation, 

were sufficiently self-protecting and fighter escorts were expensively superfluous. This was not correct. Eventually, belatedly, 

bloody education at the hands of the Luftwaffe home-defense 

fighter force produced a radical change in doctrine for strategic 

bombing. In 1944–1945 in Europe and the Pacific, contrary to 

standard practice in 1942–1943, US long-range bombers all 

but invariably were accompanied by a fighter escort.37

Throughout its history, US military airpower has expressed 

strategic, operational, and tactical beliefs. These are reflected in 

the evolving state of the technical art at the time of procurement 

and subsequently when inservice midlife upgrades would be effected. The latter point is simply a necessary truth; it does not 

mean that as a rule technology has led ideas on military utility. 

Not infrequently, though certainly not invariably, a country is 

obliged to fight with a basket of air and air-related technologies 

that are either more or less technically inadequate for their tasks 

or that express what prove by events to be the expression of 

faulty technical choices. This last point does not always refer to 

technologies that did not perform as expected, but rather to 

those that provided a military-air posture ill suited to the war it 

had to wage. A classic historical example of this mismatch includes the Third Reich’s Luftwaffe which was a very powerful 

short-range force compelled by unanticipated circumstances to 

conduct warfare over great distances. Also, we can cite the case 

of US airpower in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. Following its doctrine, and obedient to the strategic logic of national policy, the 

US Air Force in the 1960s was equipped and trained near exclusively for the waging of a short nuclear war with the USSR. Instead, it had to adapt its prowess as best it could to the tasks of 

coercing North Vietnam and supporting the effort to defeat a 

countrywide insurgency in South Vietnam. US airpower had to 

learn in real time how to perform to survive in dogfights, then a 
27

near-lost art, and how to use aircraft designed for nuclear delivery in quite different roles.

Finally, the “transformation of American airpower” achieved 

since the first Gulf War (1991) has been a cumulative achievement—visible over Bosnia in 1995, Iraq in 1998, Kosovo in 1999, 

and then over Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s—expressing 

strategic, at least military, theory as well as what technology 

can do. The latter has not in some deterministic fashion produced the former. US airpower today is very much the airpower 

desired by American ideas. There is always room for technical 

and doctrinal improvement, but that is a different story.

Fallacy Four

Airpower is about targeting.

No, it is not. What airpower is about includes the military, 

strategic, and political consequences of its targeting. The greatest of all air theorists, Italian general Giulio Douhet, claimed 

that “as a matter of fact the selection of objectives, the grouping 

of zones, and determining the order in which they are to be 

destroyed is the most difficult and delicate task in aerial warfare, constituting what may be defined as aerial strategy.”38

A little later, Douhet reemphasizes the point that “[t]he choice 

of enemy targets. . . . is the most delicate operation of aerial 

warfare.”39 This fallacy holds that aerial strategy is the selection of targets. Airpower properly employed, which is to say 

true to its offensive nature, influences and even controls the 

course of events on the ground and at sea primarily by its kinetic effect. For airpower, the world is akin to a dartboard. Air 

theorist John Warden’s “Five Rings” of target categories highlight the salience of this comparison.40 Airpower delivers on its 

potential when it is unleashed to damage and destroy the vital 

centers of enemy power.

For example, in 1964 the US Air Force came up with a 94-

item target list for US airpower to destroy in a 16-day blitz on 

North Vietnam. These targets, which did not include civilians 

as an enemy asset, comprised the lion’s share of Hanoi’s industry and modern infrastructure, such as it was. The “94 targets,” 

subsequently iconic in the debate about the US conduct and 

misconduct of the war, were all attacked in the Rolling Thunder 
28

aerial coercion campaign waged against North Vietnam from 

March 1965 until October 1968. US airpower was to perform 

well, at least as well as it was technically able, in those years.41

Whether or not a compression of the assault into a time span 

of days or a few weeks would have made any significant difference to its political or military impact is arguable. In the opinion of this author, the “94” option could not succeed strategically, no matter how high the tempo with which damage was 

inflicted. Airpower was always going to “fail” in a mission that 

was fundamentally misconceived. It is true to claim that the US 

government displayed an almost incredible incompetence in 

its strategic and political mismanagement of Rolling Thunder, 

with its serial bombing halts (seven major bombing pauses, 

thirty-six all told) and targeting constraints. But, even had 

Gen Curtis LeMay’s original, pure vision of an aerial blitz been 

unleashed in say 1965, it could not possibly have succeeded. 

North Vietnam ultimately was not vulnerable to aerial coercion. 

This judgment holds notwithstanding the apparently contrary 

evidence from Linebacker II (18–29 December 1972).42

This fourth fallacy is especially deadly because it invites misunderstanding in two vital respects. All the while it presents 

what can appear to be no more, nor less, than elementary common sense. The fallacy points to a partial truth that fits prior 

public and even much supposedly expert understanding. Every 

geographically specific kind of military capability has characteristic features that necessarily are obedient to physical realities.43 Land power is terrain bound in a world that can be regarded as comprising a body of islands, distributed in a highly 

irregular manner. It follows that land power must have some 

difficulty moving, both within complex terrain, and between 

islands.44 Similarly, sea power is gloriously global because, in 

geographical truth, “all the seas of the world are one.”45 But, 

alas for sea power, human beings live only upon the land. Conflicts always are between specific continentally defined, or at 

the least associated, security communities. Somehow, sea 

power has to make a strategic difference transenvironmentally, 

upon the land. This is not always easy or even possible. Airpower, in its turn in this litany of limitation, although unquestionably global in its potential mobility, is heavily constrained 

by the laws of physics. Aircraft can do many things, but as 
29

combatant vehicles themselves they are limited to the delivery 

of firepower in several lethal forms. They can provide a fairly 

local presence at low altitude over the land and the sea, but it 

is not possible to occupy and continuously control terrestrial 

battlespace from the air, though UAVs can “persist” in action.46

This is no more a criticism of airpower than were the previous 

comments criticisms of land power and sea power. Each of the 

five geographical environments of and for warfare—land, sea, 

air, space, and cyberspace—has partially defining physical limitations that technological advance cannot wholly abolish. The 

solution, of course, is to go “joint” and not to try to squeeze an 

achievement from say, airpower that it is physically incapable 

of delivering. Combined and joint arms and the enlistment of 

complementary foreign allies are the ways in which sensible 

countries and their militaries address the challenges posed by 

the constraints upon their geostrategically strongest suits.

To claim that airpower is about targeting is not entirely wrong. 

It is only an error if one insists that targeting for kinetic effect is 

all that really is important about the roles of airpower in war. 

The roots of this fallacy are not exactly hard to trace, any more 

than are the reasons for its continuing popularity among some 

misguided airpersons. While targeting for bombardment from 

the air can be regarded as a duty that enables more effective 

land power and sea power, also of critical moment to airpower as 

a cause or quasi-religion is the behavior that allows airpower to 

win wars independent of significant war-fighting assistance from 

the other military instruments and their agencies. Unfortunately, 

although firepower from altitude, whatever the character of the 

vehicle, is nearly always useful, and sometimes is far more than 

just useful, it cannot be synonymous either with war as a whole 

or even with warfare. It should be clear enough from this analysis that the fallacy does not lie in claiming importance for the 

targeting function or for kinetic impact from the sky. Rather are 

the fallacious elements: (1) the belief that bombardment equates 

to warfare, let alone to war; (2) the belief that bombardment itself somehow, mysteriously must translate into a strategic effect 

that will prove politically conclusive; and (3) the belief that airpower’s distinctive strategic contribution is focused in its ability 

to damage things and kill people. Paradoxically strong adherence to this fallacy, a theory designed to promote airpower, 
30

must have strongly negative consequences for its much preferred subject. By inadvertently harming its own institutional 

and other cause(s), the airpower-is-targeting camp of doctrine/

opinion also harms its country’s interests. Our essential airpower needs to be developed and, when necessary, applied in 

ways that yield maximum return for its costs. Fallacious beliefs 

can prove costly, not excluding the price paid by our military 

establishment in a joint prowess that falls short of what could 

be achieved were airpower and its potential better understood.

Lest my argument has been at all obscure, let me restate it 

in the most direct possible terms. Airpower writ large generally 

must express careful thought on targeting. But airpower is not, 

and cannot be, about targeting. What matters is not targeting 

per se or even the damage that well-directed aerial bombardment can inflict. Instead, what are of importance are the effects 

of that damage upon the course and outcome of a conflict. This 

is why a previous discussion in this study zeroed in on the fallacy that airpower is, or can be, inherently strategic. What airpower does cannot be strategic, regardless of what one calls a 

particular military organization (e.g., SAC or Strategic Command). What is strategic about airpower and its behavior—and 

land power, sea power, space power, and cyber power—is its 

instrumental value. 

The targeting and symbiotically-associated kinetic themes in 

airpower theory have an unfortunate tendency to crowd out appreciation of the less dramatic, but frequently no less important, activities of air organizations. In truth airpower is all 

about mobility and power projection. It is about bringing fire to 

bear on the enemy, whether near or far; about inserting and 

extracting friendly ground troops;47 about surveillance, reconnaissance, and other forms of intelligence gathering; about 

supply and its movement; about medical evacuation; and about 

search and rescue. Also, our airpower is about the business of 

helping train the airpower of friends and allies.48

This fallacy hurts at two levels. It risks encouraging the false 

belief that warfare is really all about killing people and damaging material, in this case from weapons in vehicles in the sky. 

Such violence is necessary and indeed is the most defining 

characteristic of war.49 However, wars are not won by violence 

alone, and the violence exercised can be more, or less, effec-
31

tively chosen. The fallacy, by its implicit exclusions, also demotes the importance of airpower capabilities and behaviors 

other than the kinetic. To continue with the Vietnam theme in 

this part of the text, how important was airpower in Vietnam as 

manifested in the 428 helicopters of the 1st Air Cavalry Division? US airpower performed magnificently over Southeast 

Asia from 1964 to 1973. It “failed” only in the sense that neither when employed independently to coerce, nor when used to 

support the warfare in the South (and, to a lesser extent over 

Laos and Cambodia), could it deliver or help deliver a fair facsimile of victory. There are wars wherein an appallingly flawed 

strategy, and sometimes even a thoroughly ill-advised political 

purpose can be offset by the strategic effect of the military 

power applied. Vietnam, unfortunately, was not such a case.50

Fallacy Five

Airpower must always be subordinate to land power.

Because we humans can live only upon the land, and because all of our inter- and intracommunal quarrels must have 

terrestrial reference, it has to follow that land power, power on 

the land, is the senior military instrument. No matter how influential the joint contribution from the sea, air, space, and 

cyberspace, conclusive effects and their consequences have to 

be terrestrial. Militarily speaking, it follows of necessity that 

land power must always be the supported instrument.

This fallacy is important because, as so often with plausible 

conceptual errors, it contains sufficient truth to be highly credible. Little imagination is required in order to grasp why this 

erroneous belief is dangerous to strategic effectiveness. A blanket conviction that land power must always be the dominant 

military instrument all but ensures some misuse of airpower. 

This fallacy presents a minor, even banal, truth as justification 

for a massive mistake. Let us concede the truism that every 

conflict has terrestrial reference. We humans do not live in, or 

fight for, the air. When we fight in the air, or for dominating 

some segment of the air, it can only be in pursuit of advantage 

in a terrestrially defined contest. These elementary facts should 

be as uncontentious as they seem often to be unknown to rival 

theorists and practitioners.
32

The land power versus airpower controversy, which has flickered and flared from the early 1920s until the present day, reflects a pervasive Western intellectual weakness—a liking for 

binary distinctions. Warfare allegedly is regular or irregular, conventional or nuclear, symmetrical or asymmetrical, and is led 

by land power or airpower. Western strategic debate has great 

difficulty accommodating the holistic subtlety of both/and, ch’i

and cheng (unorthodox and orthodox, energetic and passive). 

This systemic conceptual limitation is especially unfortunate 

given the increasing, though limited, number of important tasks 

that are not necessarily owned exclusively by any one of the 

five geographical environments. Rephrased, today far more than 

ever in the past, some military tasks can be performed on land, 

from the sea, and from the air. For the most obvious example, 

firepower with comparable accuracies can be delivered by artillery, land-based short- and medium-range missiles (ballistic 

and cruise), from ships, and in principle from orbiting satellites. 

Notwithstanding our joint organization for war fighting, the distinctive physical geographies continue to hold a telling grip on 

minds and, of course, on bodies. The geographies are real and 

to operate in one rather than in or on another requires unique 

equipment, doctrine, training, tactics, strategic reasoning, and 

mindset. For reasons of inherent physical limitations as well as 

state of technology, the inter-geographical military and strategic 

debate largely is focused upon the relationship between land 

power and airpower. Other debating pairs are possible, indeed 

are extant, but none (say airpower versus space power or land 

power versus sea power) has the fuel currently available to soldiers and airpersons.51

It may occur to some readers that debate between spokespersons for land power and airpower is ever liable to be impoverished by the troublesome swamp of spongy definitions. What 

is land power? What is airpower? These apparently conceptual, 

even philosophical, concerns have major implications for the 

power and influence of military institutions and for the manner 

in which we fight. This is not simply a matter of idle intellectual 

curiosity, rather is it a subject area deeply infused with practical significance.

Common sense is not always victorious in military debate, but 

let us at least try. All military power is land power. Our military 
33

strength derives from the land, whereon we have to live, and must 

be sustained by our assets on land. This is true for armies, navies, air forces, space forces, and cyber forces. Although it is perhaps a trivial, but necessary truth, more explicit recognition of its 

merit might help defuse some needlessly angry contention.

What is military land power? If it is anything that can fight, 

or contribute quite directly to our ability to fight, on land, why 

should understanding of its domain be limited to the ground? 

Since the US Army owns more aircraft, helicopters in particular, 

than does the US Air Force, does it make sense to conceive of 

land power distinct from airpower? Given that the United States 

will never, repeat never, wage ground (or sea) warfare without a 

more or less integral air dimension as an enabler, a complement, 

or more, is it useful or accurate to talk about American land 

power, sea power, or airpower? I challenge any American defense 

professional, regardless of service orientation, to claim that he or 

she can conceive of the country waging war of any character on 

land or at sea in a manner utterly indifferent to the state of play 

in the air environment. The very idea is absurd in the 2000s, 

and indeed has been since at least the 1940s.

If we put aside for the moment the argument just presented, 

which suggests that today the concepts of land power, airpower, 

and sea power do not reflect military reality very usefully, is it 

possible to discern any general strategic truth about the relationship between land power and airpower? The answer, for 

once helpfully, is both “yes” and “no.” Yes, in that the strategic 

history of the past 20 years demonstrates beyond a reasonable 

doubt that, ceteris paribus, the balance of relative influence 

between land power and airpower has been shifting in favor 

of the latter. 52 US airpower is vastly more capable than it was 

in Vietnam as we noted above. Despite a substantially inappropriate air posture, doctrine, and training, it still performed 

far above and beyond the strict call of duty. From the 1960s to 

the present, in conflict after conflict, US airpower cumulatively 

has been transformed into a truly lethal instrument, regarded 

either as an agent of kinetic effect or as a multicompetent enabler of ground power. But, and this has to be treated as a 

noteworthy caveat, the relative importance of airpower, especially airpower of the fixed-wing, longer-ranged kind, must be 

situational. Airpower is militarily relevant to every conflict, be 
34

it largely irregular in character or be it conventional—in which 

case it will be the dominant military force—be it largely rural in battlespace or be it predominantly urban. However, its 

strengths are flattered in some contexts rather than others.

To combat a highly irregular and in the main only part-time 

enemy who hides amongst quite densely packed civilians, airpower cannot be the leading edge of military effectiveness. In 

the form of helicopters for tactical troop mobility and resupply, 

for the infliction of occasional very precise destruction, and for 

useful reconnaissance and intelligence gathering generally, 

airpower will be important, even vital. Nonetheless, in an urban context for insurgency, airpower’s contribution to the COIN 

effort typically will be as necessary as it will be limited. The 

need for sustained presence by friendly “boots on the ground” 

may be a cliché, but it happens to be a strategic truth neglected 

at one’s peril. Extreme tactical mobility by rotary-wing aircraft 

has the ability to place small numbers of very lightly armed 

soldiers in the greatest of danger. And the ability to insert does 

not always mean the ability to extract at will.53

By way of contrast, if an enemy chooses or has no practical alternative other than to wage warfare in a regular-conventional 

way, US airpower will defeat him long before US ground power 

comes into contact. This was clearly true in 1991, it was even 

more clearly true in 2003, and it should not require any very detailed defense as a thesis for the future.54 US airpower will kill or 

disable any enemy forces it can locate on land, at sea, or in the air. 

I would like to add “or in orbit” but that would not be true. US 

defense policy and the national military strategy endorse the concept of “space control” unambiguously. Unfortunately, for reasons 

that need not be identified or explained here, the US armed forces 

currently do not have the means, let alone the official license, 

contingently to enforce this policy and strategy.55

Although land power, in the form mainly of unmistakeable 

ground power, continues to be literally essential for the conduct 

and conclusion of America’s wars. It does not follow that this 

power must be the primary instrument of military, for strategic 

with political, decision. For example, the general and genuinely 

dazzling prowess demonstrated by the US Army and Marine 

Corps on the ground in Iraq in April 2003 was enabled by an 

air campaign that guaranteed them swift success.56 This is not 
35

to claim that the Army and Marine Corps could not have won 

without the air campaign, and neither is it to suggest, absurdly, 

that they did not face some determined, largely irregular foes 

who could not be lightly brushed aside. It is to claim, though, 

that as a matter of researchable record, US airpower played the 

dominant role in the brief regular war of spring 2003. Some 

among America’s future enemies may prove far more effective 

in resisting US conventional military prowess than were the 

Iraqis in Gulf War II. But, this probability does not plausibly 

reduce the strength of the proposition that American airpower 

will decide the course and outcome of its regular warfare.

The thesis that airpower must always be subordinate to land 

power is fallacious because it rests upon a basic misunderstanding of airpower and its capabilities. Conceptually enabled by the 

great theoretical and practical oversimplification of a generic 

“airpower,” it is a relatively easy matter to twist the debate into 

an argument about the efficacy of so-called “strategic airpower” 

(see the discussion below) committing the “binary error.” Use of 

air-striking power independent of operations on land and at sea 

is condemned as a secondary, or an even net futile effort being 

somewhat complementary at best, to the decision that is being 

achieved by friendly “boots on the ground.” As we show in our 

analysis of the next fallacy, this error, apart from being motivated in large part by parochial institutional interests, is much 

facilitated by the poverty of historical and current debate about 

the promise and performance of “strategic bombing.”57 In a recent publication for the Air Force Research Institute, I sought to 

argue that in a vital sense “one cannot get there from here.” If we 

are to grasp how airpower and land power relate militarily and 

strategically, first we need to identify the contemporary measure 

of their essential unity. In particular, if land power must include 

a highly significant air dimension, which is the case today, it is 

not obviously sensible for us to try to argue about their relative 

military and strategic importance.

Fallacy Six

The theory of strategic airpower is fundamentally flawed.

The classical and neoclassical theories of strategic airpower 

come in several variants, but the central tenet is to the effect 
36

that airpower, properly exercised, is able to be an instrument of 

independent decision in war. There is, or should be, a rather 

more intelligent, less demanding, theory of strategic airpower 

which is eminently defensible historically. Unfortunately, the 

dominant ancient and modern theory took such firm hold within 

the air community and has been seized upon for so long by its 

critics that it is extraordinarily difficult to consign it to the museum of attractive ideas where it belongs. Because of what has 

been believed to be its life and death implications for the institutional independence of air forces and because technology has 

seemed to provide ever-greater support for the key concept, the 

extreme version of strategic-airpower theory continues to live.

Among the classical and neoclassical authors of strategic-airpower theory, I will single out just four: Italian general Giulio 

Douhet (1869–1930), Marshal of the Royal Air Force (RAF) Sir 

Hugh Trenchard (1873–1956), Brig Gen William Mitchell of the 

US Army Air Service (1879–1936), and far more recently Col 

John A. Warden III, US Air Force (1943–).58 The differences in 

their theorizing arguably are important, significant, and interesting but they pale into near insignificance in comparison with 

the breadth and depth of their agreement. Each of these “classical” and “neoclassical” (Warden) theorist practitioners preached 

vehemently the gospel that it is possible to secure “a victory for 

air power and airpower alone,” to quote British historian Sir 

John Keegan on the subject of NATO’s ultimately successful 78-

day air campaign against Serbia over Kosovo in 1999.59

Douhet claimed that airpower should be employed initially in 

order to disable and destroy the enemy’s airpower on the 

ground. Next, having thus secured “command of the air,” airpower would so terrify a civilian population by direct assault 

with high explosives, incendiaries, and gas that its government 

would be obliged to sue for peace. For his part, Trenchard came 

to believe that bombing must destroy the morale of an enem y’s 

civilian population, the same thesis as Douhet’s. But, whereas 

Douhet was willing to advocate assault explicitly upon civilians, Trenchard always insisted that civilian morale should be 

attacked through the infliction of damage and destruction upon 

vital industry. American “Billy” Mitchell was far less focused 

upon the mysterious quality, “morale,” and far more upon the 

damage that precise long-range bombing could do to an ene-
37

my’s “vital centers.” He cofounded the American school of airpower doctrine which prescribed defeat of the enemy through 

the destruction of the most vital “nodes” in his “industrial web.” 

If we fast-forward to the late 1980s, US Air Force colonel John 

Warden all but individually revived the classical theory of strategic airpower though his preferred route to victory by airpower 

was through the imposition of command paralysis. Warden reinvented the “air campaign” for the contemporary context albeit with much assistance from the intellectual heritage of 

Mitchell and the US Air Corps Tactical School of the 1930s. 

Warden specified a bombers’ dartboard comprising five concentric circles. “The most important element—the enemy command—is in the center circle; essential production is second; 

the transportation network is third; the population is fourth; 

and the fielded military forces—the shield and spear—are fifth. 

The most critical ring is the enemy command structure because it is the only element of the enemy—whether a civilian at 

the seat of government or a general directing a fleet [sic.!]—that 

can make concessions.”60

Figuratively or literally, Warden’s vision of a well run strategic air campaign is one which seeks to decapitate and hence 

paralyze the enemy. Even if this ambitious goal is unachievable, the five-ring thesis provides a general theory of how an air 

campaign should be conducted. It explains targeting priorities. 

In short, it is an air strategy. Of course, the problem is that 

Warden’s theory, in common with those crafted between the 

two world wars, is not just an air strategy. The theory is presented as an air theory of war. The theory claims to encompass 

all that needs to be done, as well as explaining how it should be 

done, in order to secure victory in war as a whole.

With the arguable exception of NATO’s air war about Kosovo 

in 1999, “strategic airpower,” which is to say airpower intended 

by its employers to achieve decisive strategic effect for political 

success, seems to have failed in war after war after war.61 The 

air community has defended the integrity of its quasi-sacred 

doctrine by arguing repeatedly that the available airpower was 

misused, some wrong choices were made as to quantity and 

quality, and its technology has not been quite adequate for the 

mission. The first argument has been politically safer than the 

latter two. It so happens that the airperson’s defense of air-
38

power has had a solid foundation in fact. Airpower has been 

misused. Not infrequently, highly challengeable technical decisions have been made. While it cannot be doubted that prior 

to the late 1990s and the 2000s airpower was hindered significantly by some strictly technical limitations. However, this 

is not to deny that from the 1940s to the present, the military 

and hence strategic deficiencies of available airpower, more often than not, have been the product of a mismatch between 

the war fighting anticipated and that which actually happened. 

One can always do better with more effective technologies, but 

it helps if there is some natural fit between the competencies 

of a particular air posture and the military tasks that are faced 

in conflicts.

It is unusual for a single scholar to dominate a strategic debate, 

but this is what has happened with respect to the argument over 

strategic airpower since the mid 1990s. The scholar in question 

is Robert A. Pape whose tour de force, Bombing to Win: Air Power 

and Coercion in War, appeared in 1996.62 Contemporary debate 

about coercion from the air has been all but paralyzed by Pape’s 

analysis. Although there is much of value in Pape’s book and his 

other writings on the subject of strategic bombing, his central 

thesis is plainly and demonstrably wrong. Lest I be accused of 

misrepresenting Pape, I must hasten to permit the scholar in 

question to hang himself with his own words.

Thus, from Iraq to Bosnia to North Korea, increasingly the first question 

in debates over American intervention is becoming, “Can air power 

alone do the job?”

The answer is no. First, coercion is very hard. It hardly ever succeeds 

by raising costs and risks to civilians. When coercion does work, it is 

by denying the opponent the ability to achieve its goals on the battlefield. However, even denial does not always work. Sometimes states 

can succeed only by decisively defeating their opponents. Second, 

strategic bombing does not work. Strategic bombing for punishment 

and decapitation do not coerce, and strategic bombing is rarely the 

best way to achieve denial. The “precision-guided missile revolution” 

is not likely to enhance the coercive effects of strategic bombing.63 (emphasis added)

The final sentence just quoted would be a revelation indeed to 

the regular Iraqi army of spring 2003. For all the good sense in 

Pape’s analysis, he is guilty of committing cardinal errors against 
39

both the gods of strategic theory and the often-unanticipated 

hand of history. Specifically, Pape and those he has misled have 

made four significant errors, a quartet that combines to destroy 

the value of his theory that is crafted to condemn coercion by 

strategic bombing. 

First, Professor Pape is by no means the first, and he certainly will not be the last, theorist to be discredited by events. 

Despite his evasions in the immediate aftermath of regular Gulf 

War II, presented in a Foreign Affairs article in 2004,64 the 

course of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 showed unmistakeably 

that Pape was wrong. By precision bombardment, assisted by 

an electronic political-warfare campaign, US airpower prevented the Iraqi Army from mounting a coherent defense of the 

country.65 Baghdad’s defeat in regular warfare in 2003 was the 

result of more than one or two factors, but it is difficult to argue seriously that US airpower was not in pole position among 

them. Pape has suffered from the familiar malady of “theory 

lock.” Scholars are reluctant to admit that the theory upon 

which their career and reputation rests is wrong. In 2003, US 

airpower did to Saddam Hussein’s regime what Robert A. Pape 

claimed it could not do—period. Was this an exception that 

proves the rule? Probably not. Pape’s fundamental problem is 

that he plunged into the highly context-dependent realm of 

strategy within actual historical cases and mistakenly elevated 

what he believed his case studies revealed to the level of a general theory.66 In other words, his (anti)theory about strategic 

bombing, even if historically well evidenced, can only be as reliable as his historical cases allow. His reasoning may have been 

good enough for the mid 1990s, but assuredly it is not for today, as he all but admits in the 2004 article cited above. Lest I 

be misunderstood, I must explain there is no disgrace in being 

wrong in prediction.

Second, although classical and neoclassical strategic airpower theory specifies the ability to win wars by aerial action 

alone, we are not obliged to endorse such an impractical goal. 

In principle, there is no reason why aerial coercion should not 

suffice to produce a “win.” Neither Professor Pape nor anyone 

else can explain why airpower is incapable of independent decision. But, if we relax, as we should, what we are prepared to 

accept as success for strategic airpower; the nonsense in Pape’s 
40

theory is immediately revealed. Just because the classical airpower theorists grossly overstated their case, there is no good 

reason why we also should sin. It is unhelpful in the extreme to 

demand, or expect, of airpower that it should be able to win 

wars unaided by its supposedly “joint” partners. Rarely, airpower will deliver such a success. But, as a general rule it will 

succeed either by deciding which belligerent wins—which is to 

say, “us”—or by greatly assisting our other armed forces so 

that they can succeed in their warfare-leading roles. It must all 

depend upon the specific historical context. As theorist after 

theorist, and historian after historian, insists correctly, the 

utility of airpower is highly situational.67 We need hardly add 

that this claim does not apply to airpower alone among the 

military instruments.

Third, Professor Pape neglected to notice that not all wars 

are to the death for the most vital of interests. Yes, an enemy 

engaged in a war literally for physical and political survival may 

be beyond coercion from the air or from anywhere else, but 

most wars do not have that character. Carl von Clausewitz was 

capable of effecting an intellectually dramatic “hand-brake 

turn” in 1827 when he realized that warfare typically lacked an 

absolute or total quality.68 Hence his revised manuscript of On 

War shifted most significantly in recognition of the salience of 

the political factors critical to limited warfare. Coercive bombing cannot be sensibly analyzed only with reference to entirely 

desperate belligerents.69

Fourth and finally, the content of the classic theory tends to 

emphasize strongly the bombing of nonmilitary targets, albeit 

generally not civilians per se, only their morale! A more useful 

theory of strategic airpower would not be wedded to a rigid template, a doctrinal credo of bombing priorities. Properly stated, a 

proper theory of airpower must inform strategies anticipated to 

achieve maximum strategic effect upon the course and outcome of distinctive, indeed unique wars. This effect may be 

secured in political or military command decapitation or just 

paralysis, by the physical destruction and enfeeblement of 

fielded forces, or in a combination of these. The historical context must guide the application of airpower. To claim as a grand 

generalization “strategic bombing does not work” is plainly 
41

wrong, theoretically and empirically. Faulty theory has a way of 

producing flawed answers.

Fallacy Seven

The institutional independence of the US Air Force is a major hindrance to the development of a truly joint, coherently integrated 

American theory of, and doctrine for, warfare.

This is a plausible fallacy to most nonairpersons. Even to 

those with no organizational stake in the abolition or radical 

demotion of the US Air Force from its status as a distinct, bureaucratically coequal armed service—this claim appeals to 

both strategic logic and common sense. This being so, it is perhaps surprising to appreciate just how erroneous the argument 

proves to be when subjected to close examination.

The fallacy holds that the United States does not require an 

institutionally, and hence politically, independent air force. The 

claim has several interlocking pieces. Although there remains 

a long-range-(presumably very largely nuclear-) strike mission, 

there is no strict necessity for this even to imply the need for a 

American air force. Seaborne forces increasingly can fulfill the 

mission, while the comparatively recent creation of US Strike 

Command expresses the conviction that strategic-offense, defense, space, and cyberspace forces, should be organized and 

commanded as a single bundle of assets. Nuclear deterrence, 

for example, is a national-strategic task, not an air force one, 

and this has been a reality since the 1950s, when the US Navy 

first acquired the ability to strike at Soviet targets with nuclear 

weapons. In addition to there being no strategic nuclear (or 

other) mission that might lend persuasiveness to the case for 

independent airpower, the entire historical record of airpower 

in warfare demonstrates the complementary character of airpower, land power, and sea power (and now space power and 

cyber power). Institutionally and politically independent airpower cannot be trusted to perform as a reliably joint team 

player. The deepest belief of airpersons is that theirs is an instrument uniquely capable of securing independent military 

and strategic decision. While they can be bludgeoned into airland and air-sea cooperation, usually they will perform reluctantly in those roles. They will not be uncooperative just for the 
42

sake of being uncooperative. Rather will they be strongly motivated to resist what their quasi-religion of (strategic) airpower 

tells them is the proper employment of their specialty.

The core problem, this fallacy insists, is that an independent 

air force creates and sustains an air ethos that history shows 

to be counterproductive for the most effective prosecution of 

warfare in all its complexity. All major institutions, especially 

military ones, are obliged to invent, foster, and officially adopt 

distinctive cultures.70 I should rush to explain that there is no 

necessary implication of a malign parochial, if Machiavellian, 

cunning in this argument. Generic opponents of institutionally 

independent airpower usually can be brought to recognize that 

airpersons are quite sincere in their credo, albeit mistakenly. I 

could proceed further to present the arguments against a separate US Air Force—past, present, and prospectively future. But 

I believe that the points exposed already will suffice. The indictment, for this is what it amounts to, is truly serious.

There are, and have always been, some unworthy reasons fuelling this fallacious belief but also one must admit that there is 

some good sense. Stated at its broadest, the purveyors of this fallacy, that is, the sincere ones, fail to grasp that separate armed 

services are a regrettable necessity. One could even go so far as 

to claim that an independent US Air Force, Navy, Army, (sort of) 

separate Marine Corps, and Coast Guard are necessary evils. 

Over the past decade, leaders of the US Navy and Coast Guard 

have advanced the concept, and some limited reality, of a “National Fleet.”71 In truth the United States does not and will not 

wage war by service, or by discreet geography, but rather by inherently joint combatant commands. The country wages warfare 

holistically with its armed forces, not with its Navy, Army, Air 

Force, and Marine Corps. However, although modern warfare 

for the United States necessarily is a joint project, it does have 

to be prosecuted in distinctive geographies and the distinctions 

matter greatly. Neither Americans nor other people realistically 

can aspire to recruit, equip, train, and employ generic soldiers, 

warriors, or combat persons—pick your preference! Although 

warriors and other military personnel share features in common among the geographical environments, it remains a fact 

that military behavior differs radically from geography to geography. In other words, while the separate armed services consti-
43

tute some organizational affront to the essential unity of warfare 

and war, more importantly they express inescapable material 

and consequential psychological truths.

Some air theorists have advanced the proposition that there 

is an “airmindedness” that needs to be treated as a vital input 

to defense planning, military strategy, and operational designs.72 This obviously self-serving belief happens to be true as 

well as every bit as significant as air theorists insist. Indeed, 

the most persuasive and unbiased explanation of the worldviews of airpersons, soldiers, and sailors is to be found in an 

outstanding short book written forty years ago by an American 

rear admiral, J. C. Wylie.73 He exposed the enduring reasons 

why the world as potential battlespace, its difficulties and its 

opportunities, looks very different to those who must function 

on land, at sea, in the air, or—today—in control of space power 

and cyber power. The United States is obliged to approach warfare holistically but also it has no option but to rely upon the 

expertise of military professionals who have no choice other 

than to be expert operators in one geography rather than others, 

let alone all five of them. And, as Wylie insisted, the world looks 

very different to those who must function in the mud of terrestrial terrain, on or under the uniformity of the sea, or over the 

heads of both.

It follows, as history and—for once—common sense suggest, 

that although airpersons will not as a consequence of their airmindedness necessarily have a grasp of the “grammar” of warfare as a whole,74 they are certain to enjoy a superior understanding of what their particular military instrument can, 

cannot, and therefore should not be expected to deliver. At 

higher levels of command and staff work, of course, the airperson is required to empathize with those of other geographical 

persuasions (land, sea, space, and cyberspace) and perform 

jointly to a degree ever greater with career altitude.

The point that some critics of the US Air Force have failed to 

grasp is that the airmindedness that the airperson lives, 

breathes, and fosters is not only a reflection of the semirecreational joy of flying—though this should not be denied—or of 

loyalty to an institutional culture. In addition, and far more 

important, there should be no dispute over the fact that the US 

Air Force ought to be trusted to comprehend aerial battlespace, 
44

if not always its terrestrial implications, better than do the 

Army and the Navy. Of course, faulty service doctrine can impede, and has impeded, such comprehension. This is why the 

promotion of unsound doctrine is so damaging to the service in 

particular, as well as to the country’s strategic potency overall. 

The Air Force should learn from its history that when current 

doctrine hinders nationally required performance, eventually it 

is compelled to fall into line, regardless of its current credo. The 

US Army Air Forces shifted doctrine in the winter of 1943–1944 

in order to sanction long-range fighter escort for the daylight 

bomber offensive against Germany (and later Japan). In 1965 

the US Air Force, under great pressure from Gen William Westmoreland, US Commander Military Assistance Command Vietnam, via the White House, assigned a modest fraction of its 

quintessentially strategic B-52 force to a tactical mission over 

(largely South) Vietnam, the Arc Light strikes.

Airpersons need to appreciate the challenge in a vital paradox. 

On the one hand, only they can be trusted fully to understand 

airpower’s strengths and limitations in detail. On the other, soldiers and sailors frequently mistrust them because of their actual, perceived, or anticipated military and strategic parochialism. All one can say about this, really, is that each service, 

reflecting its particular duties and contexts, cannot help but filter data through its own geographical lens. This is just a fact of 

strategic life and indeed of institutional loyalty and occupational 

culture. To have an independent air force is an expression both 

of geostrategic reality and is the best way by far to ensure that 

the ever more critically significant aerial dimension to conflict is 

appreciated in a professionally expert way. One need hardly add 

that service independence does come at some occasional cost in 

the quality of jointness foregone. However, the potential cost of a 

shotgun multiple marriage of the still fairly separate services 

would be truly enormous. If one wishes to advance the misuse of 

airpower, one could hardly do better, or worse, than recommend 

the institutional demise of the US Air Force.

Last, but not necessarily least, among the reasons why it is a 

fallacy to believe that the United States should not maintain a 

separate air force is the factor of morale, the human dimension. 

We humans, military folk probably more than most because of 

the unique demands of the profession, demand, even crave, clear 
45

identity. It is a source of particular pride to join, be initiated into, 

encultured, and looked after by an armed service. The key values are tradition, pride, and their product, morale. Given the 

potential material perils of the warrior’s life, his psychology has 

always been critically important. Moreover, given that warfare, 

in nearly all its aspects, essentially is a team effort, the strength 

of an individual’s identification with his “team” is of fundamental moment. Today, all US service personnel are exactly that, 

players in a great joint enterprise. But the physical and hence 

key psychological reality is that they have a particular military 

geographical orientation and hence unique military institutional 

affiliation: they have a military family, actually a cluster of family groups, greater and smaller. This matters for military performance—it is an eternal truth about “soldiering.” The ancient 

Greeks knew it, as did the Romans, and so should we.

Fallacy Eight

Airpower can never be other than a minor player in the conduct 

of COIN.

This is yet another fallacy apt to persuade because it contains 

some truth. Also, it sounds plausible with the image conveyed of 

firepower from the sky being applied without due care and discrimination, against insurgents who often are indistinguishable 

from largely innocent or even friendly civilians. The claim is to 

the effect that whereas airpower today should be a force for military decision in regular-conventional warfare, in COIN much, 

even most of its potential benefits cannot be delivered. The very 

nature of COIN warfare, so the argument proceeds, denies airpower the kind of targets against which it can be lethal. At a 

more fundamental level, whereas regular-conventional warfare 

is won by defeating the reasonably symmetrical forces of the 

regular-style enemy, in COIN victory is won only by securing the 

support of a large majority among the general public. The military road to success in regular warfare is by a flexible mix of 

firepower, shock, and maneuver. COIN warfare, in the main, is 

radically different. We must add the qualifier “in the main,” because it is easy to forget that insurgency is not synonymous with 

guerrilla warfare or terrorism. Both are only tactics or styles of 

combat. By definition, indeed insurgencies aspire to expand 
46

their scale of military behavior and “go regular” in order to 

achieve a decisive strategic and then political victory. This means 

that although insurgencies start small and highly irregular in 

style, if successful they will grow large and increasingly regular. 

It follows that COIN is not by definition a conflict only with an 

enemy committed narrowly to irregular forms of action.

Despite the important qualification in the paragraph immediately above concerning the “mixed” character of many insurgencies—with regular and irregular styles of fighting—it is generally true to claim that COIN requires the defeat of a 

guerrilla/terrorist foe. Two facts provide the highly plausible 

basis for the fallacious belief that airpower can only be a minor 

player in COIN. First, it is the case that COIN must principally 

be a political venture—so airpower is at a discount simply because it is a military tool. Everyone agrees that good governance is the key to counterinsurgency success. But what many 

scholars and officials neglect to mention is that generally a 

COIN campaign is required precisely because good governance 

has been lacking. In addition, not all textbooks on COIN explain as clearly as they should that such governance, though 

typically essential, cannot deliver political success in the absence of physical security for the bulk of the population. Neither can succeed without the other. COIN does not work as a 

wholly military enterprise but neither can it be treated as an 

exclusively political mission. Second, airpower is a military tool 

inherently incapable of engaging “up close and personal” with 

enemies or actual and potential allies amongst the people on 

the ground.75 In combination, these twin blows suffice to make 

a potent generic claim for airpower’s minor status in COIN.

Although this analysis explains and exposes this fallacy for 

the error that it is, the reality is, COIN must privilege land power, 

really ground power, over airpower. Given the necessity for a 

joint, even integrated, ground-air approach to COIN’s military 

dimension, one needs to be careful lest the notion is conveyed 

that ground and air are competitors rather than mutually dependent partners. Content to follow “Billy” Mitchell’s lead, this study 

takes a broad view of the nature of airpower.76 For our purposes 

here, airpower is understood to mean the potential military and 

strategic effects of anything useful that can fly. So airpower can 

refer to the inherent capabilities of the diverse air instrument as 
47

well as to its consequences in application. The gloriously mobile 

strength of airpower “works” kinetically as well as logistically. 

It gathers intelligence, evacuates the wounded, shifts troops 

and removes them, performs direct support to friendly assets 

in half a dozen ways, and indirect support in a dozen or more. 

With very rare exceptions, airpower will be the supporting force 

rather than the supported force in COIN.77 However, to use that 

familiar formula is to risk misleading the reader. The supporting airpower is, by definition, the junior partner in COIN.78 But 

that subordinate role, with its basketful of tasks, has become 

literally essential. To refine the point, while many states in the 

past have conducted COIN with zero or very poor aerial assets, 

the United States today and tomorrow could not even conceive, 

pragmatically, how to do so. America is uniquely air dependent 

in its way of COIN but it is far from lonely. Every country in the 

world that has a COIN problem and owns some airpower finds 

ways to employ its asymmetric (over insurgents) capability more 

or less usefully.

It may or may not be convenient to make a sharp conceptual 

and operational distinction between supported and supporting 

forces, but this idea is unhelpful in its ability to conceal the 

necessity for the contribution of the junior element. Airpower 

for COIN in the 2000s is not just “nice to have,” it is absolutely 

essential. To register this empirically based claim is only to 

recognize operational realities; it is not to argue with the proposition that COIN inherently is ground- and people-centric.

Air strategy is a necessary component of the overall military 

strategy which in its turn is a necessary component of the grand 

strategy for a particular COIN campaign.79 In the vital years from 

1965 to 1968, US airpower did not fail in Southeast Asia. What 

failed was US grand strategy and military strategy, airpower 

contributed intensively but alas haphazardly.80 It is commonplace to observe that America’s airpower for that conflict inherently was so potent that it should have been able to have far 

more of a strategic impact on the course of events than was the 

case. This is apt to neglect the fact that US airpower and what 

passed for air strategy could only be as effective as the US grand 

strategy allowed. It is unlikely that any use of airpower could 

have saved South Vietnam given the fundamentally unsound 

premises upon which overall US strategy rested. The strategy 
48

changed radically in 1968 but by that time, America’s domestic 

political clock had struck twelve.

There is a danger that in analyzing airpower somewhat abstractly, as here, postural detail that really matters may be lost 

from sight. Airpower is not a uniform capability. A country may 

enjoy a sound understanding of what airpower should be able 

to accomplish, either as a primarily supporting or supported 

force, but countries do not fight with concepts, sound or otherwise. They fight with actual people, aircraft, and the infrastructure to keep those people and aircraft flying. An inadequate air 

posture will always be able to frustrate what otherwise appeared to be a good idea. The French in Indochina ultimately 

were defeated militarily in notable part because their airpower 

was required to generate more strategic effect in different ways 

than it was able. US airpower in Southeast Asia in the 1960s 

was awesomely powerful in an absolute sense, but in its fixedwing components it was an instrument designed and trained to 

wage a short war of the highest intensity in Europe. For COIN 

support, an air force judged good enough to fight “the big one” 

is not necessarily good enough to cope with the different challenges posed by a complex irregular and regular style in warfare. In some significant ways, the proper diverse employment 

of airpower for COIN is every bit as challenging as is the task of 

preparing for a great-power conflict. Suboptimal equipment for 

airpower in COIN must lead to a suboptimal contribution to the 

ground-air team effort, notwithstanding the professional skills 

and courage of airpersons. Nonetheless, even the ill consequences that flow from the self-inflicted wound of poor, or just 

unlucky, choices in aerial force structure fade into relative insignificance when they are compared with the harm inflicted by 

incorrect strategy, military and grand.

Airpower is a vital component in the total civilian-military effort necessary for success in COIN. But land power, really 

meaning ground power, has to be the lead, the supported, military force. Efforts to reverse the supported-supporting force 

relationship in favor of airpower have yet to be validated as 

sound. Indeed, quite the reverse has been the case. Over Lebanon in July–August 2006, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) provided 

an all but definitive demonstration of the error in air-led COIN 

doctrine.81 The IAF seemed to fail. However, what really failed 
49

in Lebanon in 2006 was not the IAF,82 let alone airpower generically, but rather a foolish grand strategy and a military 

doctrine that over promised. Israel required its air force to 

achieve results beyond its means. If any institution failed, it 

was the Israeli Army. In a role subordinate to airpower, whose 

campaign it was supporting, the Army performed poorly. One 

should hasten to add that an important reason why the Israeli 

Defense Forces (IDF) did not perform well was that the enemy, 

Hezbollah, performed well at all levels of conflict (tactical, operational, strategic, and—above all—political).

There is an obvious military and strategic lesson to be drawn 

from Hezbollah’s humbling of Israel in 2006. Victory is improbable if one asks airpower to perform tasks for which it is not 

well suited against an intelligent and competent enemy. Strategic history favors irony and paradox. The undoubted major tactical virtues of the IAF encouraged strategic vice. Airpower is 

the sharpest tactical tool in the Israeli military toolkit, but that 

does not mean that it can substitute for political sense, grand 

strategic competence, or for joint integrity in military strategy. 

In August 2006, the IAF unsurprisingly failed to deliver a quality of decisive effect that was beyond it.83

Airpower has qualities that politicians tend to find uniquely 

appealing. The more extreme advocates of strategic airpower, 

seeing their favoured force as the dominant military source of 

strategic effect, find themselves in a dangerous alliance with 

policymakers in the search for swift and economical solutions 

to messy and complex problems. Even when properly conducted, COIN is always untidy and requires protracted military 

campaigning in the context of what the British government today likes to call a “comprehensive approach,” one that combines political, military, and economic efforts. It is tempting to 

believe that an air-led COIN effort, relying primarily upon kinetic effect, will be able to defeat insurgents. Known or suspected deficiencies in one’s ground power could be sidelined 

and casualties on both or all sides should be modest. Lebanon 

2006 can be viewed as a candidate-classic example of the misuse of airpower because of erroneous doctrine and strategy. 

The grand political, strategic, and military narrative of the Israeli adventure in Lebanon in that year illustrates near perfectly why it is essential for US security that fallacies about 
50

airpower in general, and US airpower in particular, should be 

recognized, exposed, understood, and avoided.

It may be important to mention a pathology, not of airpower 

itself, but of its misuse. Because the air instrument is swift in 

execution, lends itself to overoptimistic expectation, risks few 

American lives, and—in the US case—these days, at least, almost invariably is available, it is a constant temptation. When 

politicians want to do “something,” most especially when they 

need to be perceived as doing something, and when other nonmilitary and military options either are not available or could 

only work slowly and uncertainly, it is a great temptation to 

reach for one’s airpower “gun.” Airpower usually will be the 

first preference for US policymakers who feel the need to make 

a bold, hopefully decisive statement through action. Too often, 

alas, it is highly expedient to resort to kinetic airpower as the 

default option; it is the available tool for those who are impatient or desperate. Of course, there are occasions when kinetic 

airpower should be used. This discussion is not in any sense 

intended to offer blanket condemnation. For a decidedly imperfect analogy, high-proof alcohol can have valuable medicinal 

effect, but it is a constant temptation to abusive behavior by 

those who are weak and become addicted. Because American 

airpower, necessarily and advantageously, is all but ubiquitously available to lead or support military action, it cannot 

help but invite and produce addiction. None of these comments 

contradict this author’s belief that the merits of a “gently, gently” approach to “war amongst the people,” particularly to COIN, 

can be overstated. As always, actual behavior, in contrast to 

theory, principle, and some myths, needs to be appropriate to 

the real-time situation.

It is easy to forget, for example, that the dominant British imperial approach to COIN was known, for excellent reasons, as 

“burn and scuttle.” A punitive expedition, small or large, would 

teach the locals the errors of antisocial insurgent behavior. It is 

not politically correct to admit this in polite Western circles, but 

from the bad old days of colonial “policing” until today in Afghanistan and Iraq, there are times when it is highly desirable, 

strategically, to damage property and kill people. Regrettably we 

are talking about warfare and violence resides at the core of 

warfare’s nature.84 I should not need to add that the violence 
51

should never be other than strictly an instrument. It ought not 

to become merely expressive, let alone recreational for those executing it—do some among our aircrews enjoy killing and damaging? But once the key is turned for its employment, we humans inalienably are in perilous terrain. Potential pathologies 

lurk to ambush what began as sound strategic behavior.

Because COIN can be exceedingly frustrating and demanding 

of high, even some rare, skills tactically on the ground, it is only 

sensible to reach for airpower to find compensation for otherwise 

missing effectiveness. In common with special operations forces, 

airpower is always liable to be charged with tasks that either it 

cannot perform well or that it ought not to be required to attempt at all.85 What are those tasks? The answers derive both 

from airpower’s inherent strengths and limitations, but most 

significantly of course, from the actual condition of friendly airpower in specific historical contexts. General theory has its place 

but it must always be expressed in terms suitable to distinctive 

historical circumstances. For example, although there are enduring truths about airpower that stem from the very nature of 

the instrument, those “truths” allow for a wide range of air competency along the spectrum of challenge. No matter how mature 

and elegant one’s general theory of airpower, that theory will not 

answer such questions as, can—respectively German, French, 

and American—airpower:

1. sustain the Sixth Army in Stalingrad now in November 

1942?

2. sustain the 15-thousand-man garrison at Dien Bien Phu 

now in March 1954?

3. sustain our stronghold at Khe Sanh so close to the DMZ 

now in January of 1968?

Examples are richly strewn throughout modern, even contemporary history. Strategy, including strategies for airpower, is always particular in detail, in its application at specific times, in 

distinct places, and by unique militaries. Airpower is a wonderfully generic concept, meaning anything useful that flies, it is 

anything but generic in its material reality from state owner to 

state owner in particular locales and at particular times. 
52

Fallacy Nine

The twenty-first century is the missile, space, and cyberspace 

age(s); airpower is one of yesterday’s revolutions.

This claim points to the still under-acknowledged fact that 

the emergence, maturing, and near perfection of airpower in 

the twentieth century was itself, and required, the most radical 

change in warfare in the period. The twentieth was the air century notwithstanding the abrupt atomic then nuclear facts of 

the 1940s and beyond. The airpower revolution in warfare, 

though nearly a hundred years in process, is still in some 

senses incomplete. If this were not so, how could this author 

have written this study? In the later part of the first decade of 

the third millennium CE, controversy continues to attach to 

issues such as the relative utility of airpower vis-á-vis every 

other kind of military power and those other kinds have expanded of recent decades to include space and cyber instruments. This fallacy points with unerring accuracy to the readily 

demonstrable facts that ours is not only the “air age” and the 

“nuclear age,” but also the “missile, space, and information 

ages.” As one should expect, the more recent technological arrivals seem more exciting, being new, more challenging to understand, and possibly more deadly in use than are “yesterday’s” military tools.

The fallacy in question here pertains to the claim that airpower is becoming obsolescent to obsolete for a growing number of mission types. What is wrong with this assertion is the 

prediction that, in effect, airpower is being squeezed out of 

playing valuable military roles. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), 

missiles of all kinds, space systems, and computers are reducing the significance of manned aircraft in its several manifestations. The error that fuels this fallacy is the mistaken conviction that the military relevance of manned airpower is being 

overtaken by technology. It is not. While it is true that some 

missions can and should be performed by UAVs, ballistic missiles, and orbiting spacecraft, there is no persuasive case for a 

need to anticipate the demise or even the substantial retirement of manned military aircraft. Ironically perhaps, the same 

technologies that appear to undermine the need for manned 

flying vehicles render manned aircraft much more effective. Yet 
53

again in this discourse, in this case regarding manned airpower, 

controversy is foolishly framed in terms of either/or, when it 

ought to approach the matter as both/and. Yes, there are legitimate issues to analyze and debate over the future of airpower, especially manned airpower, in particular roles. But 

that analysis and debate should be conducted in full awareness of the complementarities of the technologies and vehicle 

types under discussion.

To repeat what by now must read as a familiar refrain, the 

importance of the subject addressed in this concluding fallacy 

could hardly be higher. At issue here is nothing less than the 

future air posture, space posture, and cyber posture of the 

world’s only true airpower, the United States. Should the F-22 

and the F-35 be regarded as the last generation of manned 

fighter aircraft? Does the United States require a follow-on longrange bomber to succeed the venerable B-52, the middle-agedplus B-1, and the B-2? Should we be thinking of some approximation to a flying “missile truck,” generically akin to the naval 

concept of an “arsenal ship?” Are we entering or have we entered 

already the final phase of the era of military manned aircraft in 

some key roles? These are large questions of great importance 

that this study cannot answer with absolute confidence. Nonetheless, this author is optimistic about the future of manned 

military aircraft for a number of strong reasons. Although these 

reasons are not advanced as would-be eternal truths, I do believe them to be more than marginally persuasive.

First, menacing air defense contexts in the future can be 

transformed by defense suppressive measures. Warfare is always a duel. It is necessary and useful not to forget the growing 

problems posed by state-of-the-art air defenses. But it is 

scarcely less necessary and useful to remember that not all air 

defenses will be state-of-the-art, and even those that are may 

be taken down or at least tamed by smart tactics and technologies. Just because the global military environment contains 

weapon systems lethal to particular elements in our arsenal, it 

need not follow that our nominally threatened forces are in any 

sense thereby rendered obsolete. For example, antiaircraft artillery appeared very early in the history of airpower, but scarcely 

ever has it achieved a tactical or technical dominance. Dedicated antitank weapons, similarly, followed closely on the 
54

tracks of the first tanks, but tanks remain with us. The same 

reality has applied at sea. Submarines, for example, have yet to 

negate the value of a surface fleet, they can just make its operations more hazardous.

Second, while it is true in fact and potentially even more so 

that space and cyberspace could perform some missions currently assigned to airpower, it is essential to recognize the eternal truth that no geographical environment can be a sanctuary 

if it is exploited for strategic advantage. Cyberwarfare already 

is a reality. It figured significantly in Operation Iraqi Freedom 

in 2003;86 it is a minor but continuous dimension to great 

power rivalry today; and we can be absolutely certain that it 

will figure in a major way in future conflicts, be they largely 

regular or irregular in character. It is plain to see that cyberspace is not a sanctuary today for any belligerent. Furthermore, orbital space, certainly space systems considered in all 

three of their segments (satellites in orbit, communications 

among them and with ground facilities, and ground facilities 

themselves), inevitably is going to join the other four geographies in the great column of “battlespace.” To summarize, although it is sensible to anticipate growth in the lethality of 

late-model air defenses, there are not good grounds for pessimism over the prospects for US airpower to achieve tolerable 

survivability by tactical skill and technical excellence. Also, 

control of the space and cyberspace environments similarly will 

have to be defended. This is integral to the logic, even the lore, 

of warfare as a duel—past, present, and future.

Third, missiles tend to be relatively cheap when compared 

with manned aircraft. But this general truth easily can mislead. 

Missiles, certainly ballistic missiles, self-destruct in their suicidal missions, aircraft do not. How do we conduct an intelligent 

cost-benefit analysis comparing reusable with one-shot weapons? Also, while missiles have some obvious advantages—no 

loss of morale for example—and while generally, they are immune to the constraints of weather, they are far from invulnerable. This is indeed the missile age but increasingly it will be the 

missile-defense age also. Ballistic missiles, in common with orbiting spacecraft, are obliged to travel as the laws of physics 

command. Since those laws are common knowledge, the trajectories of ballistic missiles are predictable. At least they are pre-
55

dictable if the adversary has the technical means to observe the 

facts of their launch and early progress. In principle, missiles, 

ballistic and cruise, as well as satellites can be programmed or 

commanded to maneuver but this capability is technically demanding and operationally costly in loss of payload.

For logistic functions, manned aircraft face zero competition 

from missiles and spacecraft. This situation is likely to continue indefinitely. Given that it costs $10,000–$20,000 to hoist 

a pound of weight into orbit, space power has a way to go before it can even begin to emerge as a long-haul carrier of heavy 

or bulky items.87 Missiles, transorbital and suborbital, are simply not in the technical-tactical frame to compete with airlift. 

Missiles can travel more rapidly, even as accurately as can aircraft but generically there are huge pragmatic constraints on 

the spectrum of their utility. For an overall judgment, missiles 

lack the flexibility of manned aerial vehicles. One day, UAVs 

may be genuine rivals to manned aircraft for nearly all intelligence gathering and strike roles, but I suspect strongly that 

major air powers will continue to favor retention of the flexibility and adjustability to unexpected circumstance inherent in 

the human presence in the cockpit.

Fourth, even in this age of fairly mature long-range missile 

technologies, if the intercontinental-manned bomber did not exist the United States would need to invent it. The ability to reach 

out and touch foes literally anywhere on Earth—with aerial refueling and some support from forward basing—with the flexibility 

provided by manned aircraft is valuable beyond strategic price. 

In all except for an extreme nuclear scenario, bombardment 

from altitude constitutes nowhere near the whole of warfare, let 

alone the whole of war. But such bombardment is a vital arrow 

in America’s grand-strategic and military-strategic quivers. For 

reasons of survivability, prelaunch and en route, the United 

States should continue to find strategic value in an ICBM force. 

However, that force will not often compete plausibly with manned 

aircraft to be the chosen instrument for very long-range bombardment. Aircraft are not associated as closely as are ICBMs 

with nuclear missions, they are reusable assets, and they can 

execute tasks subject to real-time guidance for flexibility.

Fifth, airpower and space power are in modest measure rivals, 

but to a far greater degree are complementary. What they are not 
56

are two geographically adjacent instruments that are in the 

lengthy process of effecting a fusion that offends against the 

laws of physics. In other words, airpower plus, or multiplied by, 

space power does not equal aerospace power. Aircraft inherently 

enjoy complete freedom of maneuver, subject only to the constraints of fuel weight, volume, gravity, and human operator tolerance. Spacecraft, by contrast, enjoy no freedom of maneuver 

in orbit, save at a high cost in payload for fuel and (admittedly 

small) engines. The relative military and strategic value of aircraft, manned or UAVs, and spacecraft does not admit of a general analysis and answer. This vital subject is thoroughly mission and military context specific. For high-resolution imagery 

needed on short notice, for example, reconnaissance satellites in 

low-earth orbit may not be well positioned to respond. With reference to the possible military value of spacecraft as providers of 

kinetic support for terrestrial combat, gravity would be our 

friend. To date, though, even if the political arguments against 

“weaponizing” space could be overcome, there is no compelling 

reason to do from orbit what we can do far more cheaply and 

flexibly from Earth. By way of a closing thought, US preparation 

for space warfare in all its aspects—to, in, and from orbit—

currently is so immature, in good part because our theory and 

doctrine for space power still leaves so much to be understood 

and agreed, that it is premature to advance far into the zone of 

considering air/space competition. Overall, it seems all but selfevident to this author that for the US armed forces, airpower, 

space power, and cyber power must be approached as true partners, not as rivals.

America, the Air Power

Airpower is America’s sharpest sword in regular-conventional, 

though probably somewhat asymmetrical, warfare. When the 

country chooses to wage warfare against enemies who fight irregularly, it is choosing a military context wherein its most 

deadly weapon will have only some discounted value. If warfare 

against irregulars is judged necessary by US policymakers, then 

so be it. But, those politicians need to understand that in wars 

where airpower cannot be the dominant tool in the military tool 

bag, the United States may well prove to be fatally short of the 
57

means and methods essential for sufficient strategic advantage. 

When airpower leads, which is to say in regular warfare, the 

battlespace is healthily tilted, probably precipitously, in America’s favor. 

In this study, we deployed nine fallacies about airpower for 

the overarching purpose of improving understanding of what 

US airpower generally can do well and what it is likely to do 

poorly. Above all else, the story here has emphasized the necessity for a truly joint, even integrated, approach to warfare. This 

is not, at least should not, reduce to the banality that each 

military instrument in its way is strategically essential, true 

though such a platitude happens to be. Rather should the 

claims be registered that airpower:

1. is America’s prime military advantage, a benign condition 

that has endured since 1943–1944; and 

2. that the more relevant, militarily, airpower is in the unique 

context of a particular conflict, the more probable it is 

that American arms will win. 

These claims should not be read as demeaning to the US Army 

and Navy. The former noble institutions today and in the future, more and more, must be the supporting rather than the 

supported forces in regular-conventional warfare. In warfare 

against insurgents, the reverse is true. As for the US Navy, its 

vital contribution to maritime strategy and even its residual 

interest in naval strategy narrowly, is all but wholly tightly 

meshed with a pervasive aerial dimension. For the United 

States, at least, to try to distinguish between sea power and 

airpower in the twenty-first century would be an exercise in 

futility. The details have changed radically, but the claim just 

made applied no less to the realities of US military power in the 

1940s than it does today. The US Navy and Marine Corps “do” 

airpower of characters and in quantities that the navies of other 

states cannot even begin to emulate. If other states need to 

compete with, perhaps even fight the United States at sea, they 

must seek means and methods highly asymmetrical to those 

favored by America’s sailors and sailor-airpersons.

It may be useful to contextualize my arguments in this study 

by offering the reminder that it has been unknown since the Ro-
58

man era for a state to be militarily dominant in all geographies. 

The United States cannot always translate this dominance into 

decisively favorable strategic effect for true political victory, but 

the facts of the current US superiority are both readily grasped 

and politically appalling, and unacceptable, to the country’s major state rivals (which is to say China and Russia). Hopes to the 

contrary are almost certain to be revealed by future events to be 

just that, only hopes. The point of note is that the United States 

today is not only the world’s first airpower, also it is the world’s 

dominant military sea power and it fields the world’s finest army. 

The US lead in space power is perhaps of 10 to 20 years duration, though its neglect of dedicated active means to achieve and 

sustain space control should be cause for anxiety. As for cyber 

power and its belligerent exercise in offense and defense, no one 

really knows how the United States would fare against a skilled 

opponent. The unarguable success of US cyberwarfare against 

Iraq in 2003 should not be permitted to fuel complacency. In 

military conditions characterized overwhelmingly by regularconventional combat, it is much easier and cheaper for America’s enemies to wage effective cyberwarfare than for them to pose 

credible threats in the air, at sea, on land, or in orbit. Quite, 

what an enemy, in state or nonstate form, would do strategically 

with technical success in cyber disruption is somewhat opaque 

at present.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

To reveal and demolish some fallacies about airpower is not 

much more challenging than shooting fish in the proverbial 

barrel. However, because the fallacies examined here generally 

have contained a germ or two of merit, apparent and otherwise, 

they warrant description as plausible fallacies. In order to conclude this analysis on a positive and constructive note, corrected statements of the fallacies follow.

1. Future strategic history will be marred by the occurrence 

of regular-style conventional warfare between states, 

sometimes conducted on a very large scale. Obviously, the 

danger of escalation to nuclear use by the losing belligerent will be acute.
59

2. All of our geographically specialized military instruments, 

including airpower, are inherently strategic in the effect 

that they have upon the course of history. It makes no 

more sense to talk about strategic airpower than it does to 

discuss strategic land power, sea power, space power, or 

cyber power. It is the consequences of military behavior 

that are strategic, not the forces themselves. 

3. Airpower has never been driven forward by a strategically 

and militarily mindless technological momentum. Ideas, 

theory, and doctrine have always been in the cockpit 

(whether or not the aerial vehicle was ready to fly).

4. The very nature of airpower ensures that targeting for kinetic effect has to be of prime importance among the instrument’s ways to contribute strategically to a conflict. 

But airpower is not only about targeting, as anyone who 

recognizes the variety of essential roles performed by aircraft in warfare should hardly be able to fail to appreciate.

5. Whether airpower is subordinate to land power, or vice 

versa, must depend upon the war’s overall military-strategic context. If its character is largely regular, then today 

and tomorrow it must be airpower that should be the supported force. The reverse has to be true in war with a largely 

irregular military character. These key points granted, it is 

really more sensible not to contrast land power and airpower, but rather to consider them inherently complementary dimensions of variable relative significance within a 

single military, strategic, and political effort.

6. The theory of strategic airpower is only flawed if one elects 

to identify it strictly with the overstated claims of some 

classical writers on airpower. Sensibly crafted instead, the 

theory of strategic airpower is entirely sound. It should 

state that employed either as a weapon independent of 

land- or sea-focused forces, or as an enabling agent for, 

perhaps even components of, land power and sea power, 

airpower generates strategic effect on a conflict. By and 

large, airpower used independently is not able to deliver 

decisive military and strategic victories. However, it has 

demonstrated the ability to decide which combatant will 
60

win. It should be noted that there is no reason in principle 

why airpower can never aspire to secure a decisive victory 

by its own unaided effort.

7. The institutional independence of the US Air Force, in the 

context of a legally and politically superior Department of 

Defense, is best described as a regrettable necessity. It is 

regrettable that the essential unity of war cannot be 

matched with a similar unity of military power. The fact is 

that the skills necessary for warfare vary with geography. 

It is true that airminded people are inclined to register 

military and strategic claims for airpower’s potency that 

may seem to exceed the bounds of plausibility to those of 

a nonair persuasion. However, the undoubted costs of 

service partiality fade from sight when they are compared 

with the price likely to be paid for the misuse of airpower 

by nonairminded military cultures. Given the situational 

specific potency of America’s aerial tools among its military instruments, there is no prudent alternative to ensuring retention of the US airpower advantage through 

sustainment of a dedicated air force.

8. COIN is inherently land-, indeed ground-centric in nature. 

But this geostrategic and tactical fact does not mean that 

the varieties of airpower that support the ground effort 

can accurately or helpfully be described as being only of 

minor importance. In COIN, airpower is not the leading 

edge to the military dimension, but it will always be quite 

literally essential.

9. The twenty-first century continues the air age that began 

in December 1903. The appearance of ballistic missiles, 

spacecraft, and computer-driven cyber power have not 

and do not threaten to oblige us to retire the manned airplane. This new century plainly will be one friendly to 

UAVs, but this condition does not mean that manned aircraft are facing or will face bloc obsolescence as “yesterday’s technology.” The manned aircraft simply is too useful, is too adaptable and flexible, to be abandoned. The 

future of manned aircraft is completely secure even though 

some of its roles in some political and military contexts 
61

increasingly will be assumed by UAVs. For the most obvious example, persisting surveillance can be provided far 

more effectively by UAVs and, of some kinds, by satellites 

than it can by manned aircraft. This undeniable reality 

does not ring the death knell for manned aircraft, though, 

even in surveillance, reconnaissance, and strike-reconnaissance roles. Stated in the most basic terms, the 

manned aircraft is just too flexible and therefore useful to 

be phased out of the defense posture.

Notes

1. In 1852 Leo Tolstoy wrote: “History is nothing but a collection of fables 

and useless trifles, cluttered up with a mass of unnecessary figures and 

proper names.” Quoted in Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay 

on Tolstoy’s View of History (New York: Mentor Books, 1957), 24–25.

2. Carl H. Builder, The Masks of War: Military Styles in Strategy and Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), is classic. His later 

foray into the perilous realm of military culture and ideas is helpfully targeted 

explicitly on airpower and the value of theory. Idem, The Icarus Syndrome: 

The Role of Air Power Theory in the Evolution and Fate of the US Air Force (New 

Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994). These are both excellent 

studies with enduring merit.

3. Carl von Clausewitz, On War [1832–1834], edited and translated by 

Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 

1976), 578.

4. Phillip S. Meilinger, Airpower: Myths and Facts (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air 

University Press, December 2003).

5. Sun-tzu, The Art of War [ca. 490 BCE], translated by Ralph D. Sawyer 

(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 179.

6. I grant that in times of total war the budgetary lid generally is lifted. But 

even in those mercifully rare years (only in 1861–1865, 1917–1918, and 

1941–1945, for the United States), there are practical limits to the military 

effort. Since even the United States did not have infinite resources, hard 

choices had to be made. Of course, the era of industrial mobilization for effectively open-ended production runs of major military platforms is now long 

past.

7. Harold Lasswell, Politics, Who Gets What, When, How (New York: Peter 

Smith, 1950).

8. Bernard Brodie, “The Continuing Relevance of On War,” in Clausewitz, 

On War, 54.

9. Colin S. Gray, The Airpower Advantage in Future Warfare: The Need for 

Strategy, Research Paper 2007-2 (Maxwell AFB, AL: Airpower Research Institute, Air University, December 2007), 11–13, http://www.aupress.au.af.mil/

ARI_Papers/GrayARI2.pdf.
62

10. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, presents an unrivalled brief 

discussion of comprehensive theory versus many theories, or no theories. He 

quotes the words of Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, 

but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” 7. Berlin writes: “If we may recall 

once again our division of artists into foxes and hedgehogs: Tolstoy perceived 

reality in its multiplicity, as a collection of separate entities round and into 

which he saw with a clarity and penetration scarcely ever equalled, but he 

believed only in one vast, united whole” (emphasis added), 62. The author 

must confess to being a strategic hedgehog. See my forthcoming book-length 

effort to present a comprehensive theory of strategy, The Strategy Bridge.

11. For the demonstration of error, albeit error professed in a moderate 

tone, see Michael O’Hanlon, Neither Star Wars nor Sanctuary: Constraining 

the Military Uses of Space (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 

2004). One might as well bid the waves retreat, as if our willpower could command geophysics.

12. See the fine studies in Robin Higham and Stephen J. Harris, eds., 

Why Air Forces Fail: The Anatomy of Defeat (Lexington, KY: The University 

Press of Kentucky, 2006). For a little useful context, it is well to recognize 

that books can be written with such titles as “Why Armies Fail” and “Why 

Navies Fail.” It is easy for the unwary to believe that failure is somehow more 

of an airpower than a land power or sea power issue. Such a belief is, of 

course, ridiculous. Failure happens, period. There needs to be a book with 

the title “Why Air Forces Succeed.”

13. Antulio J. Echevarria II, Challenging Transformation’s Clichés (Carlisle, 

PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, December 2006), 2.

14. Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World

(London: Allen Lane, 2005), 3.

15. Ibid., 1.

16. Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: The Free 

Press, 1991). Also idem, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat from 

the Marne to Iraq (New York: Ballantine Books, 2006).

17. See Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global 

Era (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005); and Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Jan 

Angstrom, eds., Rethinking the Nature of War (Abingdon, UK: Frank Cass, 

2005).

18. Donald H. Rumsfeld, Quadrennial Defense Review Report (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 6 February 2006), 9–18.

19. Smith, Utility of Force, x.

20. As with Sun-tzu, Art of War; Clausewitz, On War; and, to risk undue 

immodesty, Gray, Strategy Bridge.

21. Clausewitz, On War, 75.

22. From a huge and diverse literature, see van Creveld, The Rise and 

Decline of the State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

23. Robert B. Strassler, ed., The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive 

Guide to “The Peloponnesian War [ca. 400 BCE],” (New York: Free Press, 

1996), 43.
63

24. For a well focused set of short essays on the question of the possible 

and probable connections between resource shortages and war, see “Symposium: The World Is Not Enough,” The National Interest, No. 93 (January/February 2008), 25–36.

25. David MacIsaac claims plausibly that the authorial parent of “airpower” as a single word, a form that seems to connote an incantation, may 

have been invented by Major Alford Joseph Williams in his Airpower (New 

York, 1940). “Voices from the Central Blue: The Air Power Theorists,” in Peter 

Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 627, n. 7.

26. See Clausewitz, On War, 128, 177; Colin S. Gray, Modern Strategy

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17–23.

27. William P. Head, War from above the Clouds: B-52 Operations during 

the Second Indochina War and the Effects of the Air War on Theory and Doctrine, Fairchild Paper (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, July 2002); 

Benjamin S. Lambeth, Air Power Against Terror: America’s Conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2005).

28. See David E. Johnson, Learning Large Lessons: The Evolving Roles of 

Ground Power and Air Power in the Post-Cold War Era, MG-405-AF (Santa 

Monica, CA: RAND, 2006).

29. See Philip Anthony Towle, Pilots and Rebels: The Use of Aircraft in Unconventional Warfare, 1918–1988 (London: Brassey’s, UK, 1989); and James 

S. Corum and Wray R. Johnson, Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Insurgents 

and Terrorists (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003); and Alan J. 

Vick, Adam Grissom, William Rosenau, Beth Grill, and Karl P. Mueller, Air 

Power in the New Counterinsurgency Era: The Strategic Importance of USAF 

Advisory and Assistance Missions (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2006).

30. US Air Force, “Essay F: Three Levels of War,” Air Force Manual 1-1, 

Basic Aerospace Doctrine of the United States Air Force, volume 2, March 

1992, 43–49. I have selected a recent, but “historical” document in the hope 

that my argument will not trigger so irritated a reaction as to obscure the 

merits of the case advanced here. 

31. Gray, Airpower Advantage, 8–10.

32. Especially useful overviews of the history of airpower theory include 

MacIsaac, “Voices from the Central Blue”; and the first-rate studies in Phillip 

S. Meilinger, ed., The Paths of Heaven: The Evolution of Airpower Theory (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 1997). The latter is essential reading.

33. See Higham and Harris, eds., Why Air Forces Fail; James Clay Thompson, Rolling Thunder: Understanding Policy and Program Failure (Chapel Hill, 

NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Mark Clodfelter, The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam (New York: The Free 

Press, 1989); and Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in 

War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).

34. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911–1918, volume 2 (London: Odhams Press, 1938), 1442.

35. Stephen Budiansky, Air Power: From Kitty Hawk to Gulf War II: A History of the People, Ideas and Machines that Transformed War in the Century of 
64

Flight (London: Penguin Books, 2003), is an exemplary popular history that 

weighs in heavily on airpower’s necessarily essential and enabling technological dimension. Budiansky can be complemented by the outstanding 

scholarly yet practical-minded study by pilot/historian/analyst Benjamin S. 

Lambeth, The Transformation of American Air Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

36. Lambeth, Transformation.

37. See Stephen L. McFarland and Wesley Phillips Newton, To Command 

the Sky: The Battle for Air Superiority over Germany, 1942–1944 (Washington, 

DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).

38. Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air [1927] (New York: Arno Press, 

1972), 50.

39. Ibid., 59.

40. John A. Warden III, “Employing Air Power in the Twenty-first Century,” in Richard H. Shultz, Jr., and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., eds., The Future 

of Air Power in the Aftermath of the Gulf War (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University 

Press, July 1992), especially 64–69.

41. Ronald B. Frankum, Jr., “Swatting Flies with a Sledgehammer: The 

Air War,” in Andrew Wiest, ed., Rolling Thunder in a Gentle Land: The Vietnam 

War Revisited (New York: Osprey Publishing, 2006), 212–33, is exceptionally 

balanced and fair in its judgments. Rather more problematic is Earl H. Tilford, Jr., Crosswinds: The Air Force’s Setup in Vietnam (College Station, TX: 

Texas A and M University Press, 1993).

42. See John T. Smith, The Linebacker Raids: The Bombing of North Vietnam, 1972 (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1998), chapters 10–11; and 

Head, War from above the Clouds, 72–87.

43. J. C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1989). Chapter 5 offers brilliantly perceptive insight into the influence of physical geography upon the different strategic worldviews of soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

44. See Sun-tzu, Art of War, chapter 10.

45. J. H. Parry, The Discovery of the Sea (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), xi.

46. Persistent presence at altitude requires unmanned aerial vehicles 

(UAV), or spacecraft in geostationary orbit 22,300 miles high.

47. For the most classic of examples, one illustrating the positive and 

negative aspects of air mobility, consider the French experience under siege 

at Dien Bien Phu in March–May 1954. The French deployed by air two parachute brigades (seven battalions) and eleven infantry battalions to this base 

aero-terrestre (air-ground base), but to their surprise, they lacked the ability 

to support the besieged garrison or to extract the survivors as the battle went 

against them. Martin Windrow, The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French 

Defeat in Vietnam (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004), is the most recent and best account. Air mobility enables tactical, operational, and strategic boldness that can, with hindsight, prove reckless. As all prudent air theorists and strategists insist, the exact utility of airpower is always highly 

situational. General truths are subject to contextual exceptions. A well exe-
65

cuted period piece, written by an officer who served in Vietnam with the 1st 

Cavalry Division, is John R. Galvin, Air Assault: The Development of Airmobile 

Warfare (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969). Appropriately enough, the book’s 

foreword was written by Gen James “Jumping Jim” Gavin.

48. Vick et al., eds., Airpower in the New Counterinsurgency Era.

49. To marry two vital points made by Clausewitz: “War, therefore, is an 

act of policy,” but also it is “an act to compel our enemy to do our will” (emphasis in the original) Clausewitz, On War, 87, 75. Not all violence is warfare, but 

all warfare entails violence.

50. See Weist, ed., Rolling Thunder. Powerful revisionist arguments are 

presented in Mark W. Woodruff, Unheralded Victory: Who Won the Vietnam 

War? (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999); C. Dale Walton, The Myth of 

Inevitable US Defeat in Vietnam (London: Frank Cass, 2002); and Mark Moyar, 

Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge 

University Press, 2006).

51. See Johnson, Learning Large Lessons.

52. See Lambeth, Transformation; and idem, Airpower Against Terror.

53. This sadly classic lesson in military prudence was demonstrated for 

all time in Mogadishu, Somalia, on 3 October 1993. See Mark Bowden, Black 

Hawk Down (London: Bantam Press, 1999). From the minor to the major in 

scale, the worst historical case of the misuse of air mobility was the dropping 

of the British 1st Airborne Division near the city of Arnhem in Holland in 

September 1944, for the purpose of seizing and holding the Rhine bridge 

(Operation Market Garden). It is one thing to insert an airborne force, it can 

be quite another to relieve or rescue them. Paratroops were popular, even 

fashionable, in the 1940s and 1950s. The potential for disaster has always 

been severe for these elite troops.

54. See Richard B. Andres, “Deep Attack against Iraq,” in Thomas G. 

Mahnken and Thomas A. Keaney, eds., War in Iraq: Planning and Execution 

(Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2007), 69–96, presents an impressive case for 

airpower’s enablement of the rapid victory on the ground.

55. It is no direct part of the mandate for this study to discuss the future 

of US space power. Suffice it to say that I am greatly troubled by the vulnerabilities of our essential space systems. This persisting condition is a gigantic 

irresistible temptation to any competent state opponent of the United States. 

Prudent preparation for space warfare in all its dimensions is a vital necessity for US and more general international security in the twenty-first century. See Colin S. Gray and John B. Sheldon, “Space power and the Revolution in Military Affairs: A Glass Half-Full,” in Peter L. Hays, James M. Smith, 

Alan R. Van Tassel, and Guy M. Walsh, eds., Spacepower for a New Millenium: 

Space and US National Security (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000), 239–57. Also 

see Steven Lambakis, On the Edge of Earth: The Future of American Spacepower (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001); and John J. 

Klein, Space Warfare: Strategy, Principles and Policy (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006).

56. See Andres, “Deep Attack.”
66

57. Gian P. Gentile, How Effective is Strategic Bombing? Lessons Learned 

from World War II to Kosovo (New York: New York University Press, 2001), is 

exceptionally well researched.

58. Douhet, Command of the Air; Hugh Trenchard, “The War Object of an 

Air Force [2 May 1928],” in Gerard Chaliand, ed., The Art of War in World History: From Antiquity to the Nuclear Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California 

Press, 1994), 905–10; Trenchard, “Air Power and National Security [August 

1946],” in Eugene M. Emme, ed., The Impact of Air Power: National Security and 

World Politics (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1959), 192–200; William Mitchell, Winged Defense: The Development and Possibilities of Modern Air Power—

Economic and Military [1925] (New York: Dover Publications, 19); John A. Warden III, The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat (Washington, DC: 

Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1989); Warden, “Employing Air Power.” Useful secondary 

sources include MacIsaac, “Voices from the Central Blue”; Meilinger, ed., Paths 

of Heaven; Meilinger, Airmen and Air Theory: A Review of the Sources (Maxwell 

AFB, AL: Air University Press, 2001); Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality 

in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic 

Bombing, 1914–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

59. John Keegan quoted in Benjamin S. Lambeth, NATO’s Air War for 

Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 

2001), 220 n. 4.

60. Warden, “Employing Air Power,” 65.

61. See Lambeth, NATO’s Air War for Kosovo; and Ivo H. Daalder and Michael O. Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington, DC: 

Brookings Institution Press, 2000).

62. Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, 

NY; Cornell University Press, 1996). 

63. Ibid., 314.

64. Robert A. Pape, “The True Worth of Air Power,” Foreign Affairs 83, no. 

2 (March/April 2004), 116–30.

65. See Andres, “Deep Attack.”

66. Gray, Strategy Bridge.

67. See Lambeth, Transformation, 308; and Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: 

The Logic of War and Peace, revised ed. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press 

of Harvard University Press, 2001), 1.

68. This thesis is advanced in Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought: from 

the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1989), 199–200. 

Gat’s discovery and judgment has not been seriously challenged by scholars.

69. An excellent critique of Pape, of which I stand in no small debt, is Patrick 

C. Bratton, “A Coherent Theory of Coercion? The Writings of Robert Pape,” 

Comparative Strategy 22, no. 4 (October–November 2003), 355–72. Also recommended are: “Theory and Evidence in Security Studies: Debating Robert 

A. Pape’s Bombing to Win,” Security Studies 7, no. 2 (Winter 1997/1998), 

91–214, articles by Robert A. Pape, Barry D. Watts, John A. Warden III, and 

a reply by Pape; and Karl Mueller, “Denial, Punishment, and the Future of Air 

Power,” Security Studies 7, no. 3 (Spring 1998), 182–228.

70. See Builder: Icarus Syndrome; and idem, Masks of War.
67

71. The US Navy’s capstone strategy document refers to the National Fleet 

Policy as well as to the “Sea Services” as a unitary maritime conception. The 

Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard are all the authors of A Cooperative 

Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, US Navy, October 2007, http://www

.navy.mil/maritime/MaritimeStrategy.pdf.

72. No less an Airman than Gen Henry H. “Hap” Arnold himself blessed 

the concept of “airmindedness,” Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., “Developing Joint 

Counterinsurgency Doctrine: An Airman’s Perspective,” Joint Force Quarterly, 

no. 49, (2nd quarter, 2008), 86–92.

73. Wylie, Military Strategy, chapter 5.

74. Clausewitz, On War, 65.

75. This claim may seem to be refuted by the capabilities of rotary-wing 

aircraft. However, even these flexible machines, albeit often locally welcome, 

have a separating effect in the relationship between civilians and the COIN 

effort.

76. Mitchell, Winged Defense, xii, 3–4.

77. See Corum and Johnson, Airpower in Small Wars.

78. It is the opinion of this author that, notwithstanding its many virtues, the 

new COIN manual of the US Army and Marine Corps is notably thin in its accommodation of the air dimension. Airpower in COIN is relegated to appendix E. 

This is unfortunate both for the gratuitous limitation it imposes on presentation 

of an inherently joint subject, and probably even more for the message that it 

appears to send. A joint, even integrated, COIN capability should not be relegated to an appendix. Perception matters. See Field Manual 3-24, Warfighting 

Publication number 3-33.5, The US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency 

Field Manual. Dunlap, “Developing Joint Counterinsurgency Doctrine,” does not 

pull many punches in its Airman’s critique of FM 3-24.

79. Wisely, it has been said that “COIN is grand strategy in miniature.”

80. See Frankum, “Swatting Flies with a Sledgehammer.”

81. N. Parton, “Air Power’s Illusion? Israel’s 2006 Campaign in the Lebanon,” British Army Review No. 143 (Autumn 2007), 41–47, is a deadly assessment. The author happens to be a group captain in the RAF, a fact which 

lends weight to his critique.

82. An important source for the IAF’s faulty air-led COIN doctrine was the 

study by Shmuel L. Gordon, The Vulture and the Snake, Counter-Guerrilla Air 

Warfare: The War in Southern Lebanon, Mideast Security and Policy Studies No. 

39, Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan University, July 1998, 

http://www.biu.ac.il/Besa/books/39pub.html (accessed on 23 May 2008).

83. Airpower is a vital team player against somewhat irregular enemies; 

rarely can it comprise the whole of the team, with ground power assigned 

unchallenging mop-up duties. In addition to the scorching analysis by Group 

Captain Parton (see note 81), the careful balanced judgments by William M. 

Arkin merit respect. See the latter’s important study, Divining Victory: Airpower in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University 

Press, August 2007).
68

84. Ralph Peters, “In Praise of Attrition,” Parameters 34, no. 2 (Summer 

2004), 24–32, says what needs to be said, no matter the offense it must cause to 

decent liberal opinion. War is violence, and COIN, at least in part, is warfare.

85. I pursued the subject of airpower’s inherent strengths and limitations in 

my Explorations in Strategy (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1998), chapter 4.

86. See Andres, “Deep Attack.” The cyber dimension to Operation Iraqi 

Freedom is nowhere near as well known as it deserves to be.

87. “Launch costs are $10,000-$15,000 per pound to inject into low earth 

orbit. To attain a geostationary “parking slot” costs between $15,000 and 

$20,000 per pound.” The space shuttle was intended to serve as a relatively 

inexpensive “bus service” into orbit, hence its aspirational name. Alas, it has 

been a disappointment, at least it has disappointed as the needed provider of 

basic transportation. I am grateful to Col M. V. Smith, USAF, for his advice 

on current launch costs. 
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Understanding Airpower

Bonfire of the Fallacies

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