Download or read book Airpower Applied written by John Andreas Olsen and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Airpower Applied reviews the evolution of airpower and its impact on the history of warfare. Through a critical examination of twenty-nine case studies in which various U.S. coalitions and Israel played significant roles, this book offers perspectives on the political purpose, strategic meaning, and military importance of airpower. By comparing and contrasting more than seventy-five years of airpower experience in very different circumstances, readers can gain insight into present-day thinking on the use of airpower and on warfare. The authors, all experts in their fields, demystify some of airpower‘s strategic history by extracting the most useful teachings to help military professionals and political leaders understand what airpower has to offer as a “continuation of politics by other means.” The case studies emphasize the importance of connecting policy and airpower: operational effectiveness cannot substitute for poor statecraft. As the United States, its allies, and Israel have seen in their most recent applications of airpower, even the most robust and capable air weapon can never be more effective than the strategy and policy it is intended to support.
Download or read book Command Of The Air written by General Giulio Douhet and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the pantheon of air power spokesmen, Giulio Douhet holds center stage. His writings, more often cited than perhaps actually read, appear as excerpts and aphorisms in the writings of numerous other air power spokesmen, advocates-and critics. Though a highly controversial figure, the very controversy that surrounds him offers to us a testimonial of the value and depth of his work, and the need for airmen today to become familiar with his thought. The progressive development of air power to the point where, today, it is more correct to refer to aerospace power has not outdated the notions of Douhet in the slightest In fact, in many ways, the kinds of technological capabilities that we enjoy as a global air power provider attest to the breadth of his vision. Douhet, together with Hugh “Boom” Trenchard of Great Britain and William “Billy” Mitchell of the United States, is justly recognized as one of the three great spokesmen of the early air power era. This reprint is offered in the spirit of continuing the dialogue that Douhet himself so perceptively began with the first edition of this book, published in 1921. Readers may well find much that they disagree with in this book, but also much that is of enduring value. The vital necessity of Douhet’s central vision-that command of the air is all important in modern warfare-has been proven throughout the history of wars in this century, from the fighting over the Somme to the air war over Kuwait and Iraq.
Download or read book The Influence of Airpower upon History written by Robin Higham and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From early zeppelins, to the Luftwaffe and the Enola Gay, to the unmanned aerial vehicles of today, air power has long been regarded as an invaluable instrument of war. However, nations have employed aircraft for many other purposes as well; they provide security and surveillance, and they are vital to myriad diplomatic and humanitarian efforts. Air power has become a means for statesmen to advance a variety of goals, opening up new possibilities and problems in times of peace as well as war. The Influence of Air Power upon History examines the many ways in which aviation technology has impacted policymaking since 1903. It analyzes air strategy in nations around the world and explores how a country's presumed technological capability, or lack thereof, has become a crucial aspect of diplomacy. Together, the essays in this insightful volume offer a greater understanding of the history of military force and diplomatic relations in the global community.
Download or read book Global Air Power written by John Andreas Olsen and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What influences have shaped air power since human flight became a reality more than a hundred years ago? Global Air Power provides insight into the evolution of air power theory and practice by examining the experience of six of the world’s largest air forces--those of the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, Russia, India, and China--and of representative smaller air forces in Pacific Asia, Latin America, and continental Europe. The chapters, written by highly regarded scholars and military leaders, explore how various nations have integrated air power into their armed forces and how they have applied air power in both regular and irregular warfare and in peacetime operations. They cover the organizational, professional, and doctrinal issues that air forces confronted in the past, the lessons learned from victory and defeat, and emerging challenges and opportunities. Further, Global Air Power supplements the traditional military perspective with examinations of the ideological, economic, and cultural factors that give air forces their distinctive characters. Chapters show how the interplay among these internal factors, together with external challenges, determines the structure, role, and effectiveness of air forces. Together, these chapters illuminate universal trends as well as similarities and differences among the world’s air forces. Its combination of military history and sociopolitical analysis makes Global Air Power especially valuable to a broad range of historians, air power specialists, and general readers interested in national defense and international relations.
Download or read book Airpower Over Gallipoli 1915 1916 written by Sterling Michael Pavelec and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Airpower Over Gallipoli, 1915–1916, focuses on the men and machines in the skies over the Gallipoli Peninsula, their contributions to the campaign, and the ultimate outcomes of the role of airpower in the early stages of World War I. Based on extensive archival research, Sterling Michael Pavelec recounts the exploits of the handful of aviators during the Gallipoli campaign. As the contest for the Dardanelles Straits and the Gallipoli Peninsula raged, three Allied seaplane tenders and three land-based squadrons (two UK and one French) flew and fought against two mixed German and Ottoman squadrons (one land-based, one seaplane), the elements, and the fledgling technology. The contest was marked by experimentation, bravado, and airborne carnage as the men and machines plied the air to gain a strategic advantage in the new medium. As roles developed and missions expanded, the airmen on both sides tried to gain an advantage over their enemies. The nine-month aerial contest did not determine the outcome of the Gallipoli campaign, but the bravery of the pilots and new tactics employed foreshadowed the importance of airpower in battles to come. This book tells the lost story of the aviators and machines that opened a new domain for modern joint warfare. The dashing, adventurous, and frequently insouciant air commanders were misunderstood, misused, and neglected at the time, but they played an important role in the campaign and set the stage for joint military operations into the future. Their efforts and courage paved the way for modern joint operations at the birth of airpower.
Download or read book Bombing to Win written by Robert A. Pape and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Iraq to Bosnia to North Korea, the first question in American foreign policy debates is increasingly: Can air power alone do the job? Robert A. Pape provides a systematic answer. Analyzing the results of over thirty air campaigns, including a detailed reconstruction of the Gulf War, he argues that the key to success is attacking the enemy's military strategy, not its economy, people, or leaders. Coercive air power can succeed, but not as cheaply as air enthusiasts would like to believe.Pape examines the air raids on Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq as well as those of Israel versus Egypt, providing details of bombing and governmental decision making. His detailed narratives of the strategic effectiveness of bombing range from the classical cases of World War II to an extraordinary reconstruction of airpower use in the Gulf War, based on recently declassified documents. In this now-classic work of the theory and practice of airpower and its political effects, Robert A. Pape helps military strategists and policy makers judge the purpose of various air strategies, and helps general readers understand the policy debates.
Download or read book Air Power and Maneuver Warfare written by Martin van Creveld and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential part of the Air War College curriculum consists of the study of military history and specific campaigns. Part 1 of this manuscript presents an attempt to clarify the relationship between air power and maneuver warfare since 1939, a subject that derives its importance from the fact that maneuver warfare has been the U.S. Army's official doctrine since the early eighties and remains so to the present day. Part 2 contains the collective wisdom of the military doctrine analysis of the Air University on the same subjects, as well as the way in which we have presented them.
Download or read book Air Commanders written by John Andreas Olsen and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2013 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book combines short military biographies and operational analyses to reveal how the personalities, attitudes, and life experiences of twelve outstanding U.S. airmen shaped the central air campaigns in American history. These case studies illuminate the character of these airmen, the challenges they confronted in widely disparate armed conflicts, and the solutions that they crafted and implemented. Their achievements proved decisive not only in the campaigns they led, but also in shaping the U.S. Air Force and the dominant role of airpower in modern warfare.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Air Power written by John Andreas Olsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Air Power offers a comprehensive overview of the political purposes and military importance of air power. Despite its increasing significance in international relations, statecraft and war, the phenomenon of air power remains controversial and little understood beyond its tactical and technological prominence. This volume provides a comprehensive survey designed to contribute to a deep and sophisticated understanding of air power. Containing contributions from academics and service personnel, the book comprises five sections: - Part I Foundation: the essence of air power - Part II Roles and functions: delivering air power - Part III Cross-domain integration: applying air power - Part IV Political–social–economic environment: air power in its strategic context - Part V Case studies: air power in its national context Examining a series of themes and factors that contribute to an understanding of the utility and applicability of air power, this Handbook focuses on the essence of air power, identifies its roles and functions, and places air power in its wider strategic and national contexts. The Routledge Handbook of Air Power will be of great interest to students of air power, strategic studies, defence studies, security studies and IR, as well as to military professionals and policy-makers.
Download or read book Airpower Reborn written by John Andreas Olsen and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2015-04-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Airpower Reborn offers a conceptual approach to warfare that emphasizes airpower's unique capability to achieve strategic effects. Six world-leading theorists argue that a viable strategy must transcend the purely military sphere, view the adversary as a multi-dimensional system, and pursue systemic paralysis and strategic effects rather than military destruction or attrition. The book is divided into three parts. The first section presents a historical perspective on airpower theory and airpower strategy, tracing their evolution from the 1920s to the 1980s. The second section contains in-depth examinations of the strategic concepts that John R. Boyd and John A. Warden developed in the 1980s and 1990s, with an emphasis on their contemporary relevance. The final section provides further context on modern airpower theory and strategy. Theory, in this setting, serves as the basic paradigm, strategy represents its generic, mechanisms-centered application, and plans of campaign constitute the specific steps for any given situation. In short, the authors look beyond the land-centric, battlefield-oriented paradigm that has continued to dominate military theories and strategies long after airpower offered new options. The book acknowledges the essential role of advanced technology in improving airpower capabilities, but emphasizes that air services must cultivate and harness the intellectual acumen of airmen and encourage officers and men to think conceptually and strategically about the application of aerospace power. Modern airpower can offer political decision-makers more and better options-provided the underlying strategy coherently links the application of airpower directly to the end-state objectives rather than limiting it to “the battle.” The book recommends that all countries should consider establishing a dynamic and vibrant environment for mastering aerospace history, theory, strategy, and doctrine; a milieu for cultivating broader knowledge of and insight into airpower; and a setting in which airpower experts have the opportunity to communicate their narrative to politicians, the media, and fellow officers, and to interact to mutual benefit with experts from all sectors of governance. This effort should emphasize the potentially unique contribution of airpower to political objectives and joint operations, and in turn connect to operational headquarters that do operational planning. Mastering such strategic thought lies at the heart of the military profession, but it requires in-depth knowledge and understanding of theory, strategy, and airpower, and transcends traditional metrics.
Download or read book Air Power written by Stephen Budiansky and published by Viking Adult. This book was released on 2004 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With "Air Power," a gifted writer pens an epic up-to-the-minute history of the airplane in combat--the pilots, the strategists, the weaponry, and the high-tech battles they increasingly dominate.
Download or read book NATO s Air War for Kosovo written by Benjamin S. Lambeth and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2001-11-16 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a thorough appraisal of Operation Allied Force, NATO's 78-day air war to compel the president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, to end his campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. The author sheds light both on the operation's strengths and on its most salient weaknesses. He outlines the key highlights of the air war and examines the various factors that interacted to induce Milosevic to capitulate when he did. He then explores air power's most critical accomplishments in Operation Allied Force as well as the problems that hindered the operation both in its planning and in its execution. Finally, he assesses Operation Allied Force from a political and strategic perspective, calling attention to those issues that are likely to have the greatest bearing on future military policymaking. The book concludes that the air war, although by no means the only factor responsible for the allies' victory, certainly set the stage for Milosevic's surrender by making it clear that he had little to gain by holding out. It concludes that in the end, Operation Allied Force's most noteworthy distinction may lie in the fact that the allies prevailed despite the myriad impediments they faced.
Download or read book Airpower in the War Against ISIS written by Benjamin S. Lambeth and published by . This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Airpower in the War against ISIS chronicles the planning and conduct of Operation Inherent Resolve by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) from August 2014 to mid-2018, with a principal focus on the contributions of U.S. Air Forces Central Command (AFCENT). Benjamin S. Lambeth contends that the war's costly and excessive duration resulted from CENTCOM's inaccurate assessment of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), determining it was simply a resurrected Iraqi insurgency rather than recognizing it as the emerging proto-state that it actually was. This erroneous decision, Lambeth argues, saw the application of an inappropriate counterinsurgency strategy and use of rules of engagement that imposed needless restrictions on the most effective use of the precision air assets at CENTCOM's disposal. The author, through expert analysis of recent history, forcefully argues that CENTCOM erred badly by not using its ample air assets at the outset not merely for supporting Iraq's initially noncombat-ready ground troops but also in an independent and uncompromising strategic interdiction campaign against ISIS's most vital center-of-gravity targets in Syria from the effort's first moments onward.
Download or read book Air Power and Armies written by Sir John Cotesworth Slessor and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2009-08-31 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of Sir John Cotesworth Slessor (1897–1979), one of Great Britain's most influential airmen Sir John Slessor played a significant role in building the World War II Anglo-American air power partnership as an air planner on the Royal Air Force Staff, the British Chiefs of Staff, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff. He coordinated allied strategy in 1940–41, helped create an Anglo-American bomber alliance in 1942, and drafted the compromise at the Casablanca Conference that broke a deadlock in Anglo-American strategic debate. Slessor was instrumental in defeating the U-boat menace as RAF Coastal Commander, and later shared responsibility for directing Allied air operations in the Mediterranean. Few aspects of the allied air effort escaped his influence: pilot training, aircraft procurement, and dissemination of operational intelligence and information all depended to a degree on Slessor. His influence on Anglo-American operational planning paved the way for a level of cooperation and combined action never before undertaken by the military forces of two great nations.
Download or read book Precision and Purpose written by Karl P. Mueller and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2015-07-08 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between March and October 2011, a coalition of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states and several partner nations waged a war against Muammar Qaddafi's Libyan regime that stemmed and then reversed the tide of Libya's civil war, preventing Qaddafi from crushing the nascent rebel movement seeking to overthrow his dictatorship and going on to enable opposition forces to prevail. The central element of this intervention was a relatively small multinational force's air campaign operating from NATO bases in several countries, as well as from a handful of aircraft carriers and amphibious ships in the Mediterranean Sea. The study details each country's contribution to that air campaign, examining such issues as the limits of airpower and coordination among nations. It also explores whether the Libyan experience offers a potential model for the future.
Download or read book At the Dawn of Airpower written by Laurence M Burke and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2022-05-15 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the Dawn of Airpower: The U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps’ Approach to the Airplane, 1907–1917 examines the development of aviation in the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps from their first official steps into aviation up to the United States’ declaration of war against Germany in April, 1917. Burke explains why each of the services wanted airplanes and show how they developed their respective air arms and the doctrine that guided them. His narrative follows aviation developments closely, delving deep into the official and personal papers of those involved and teasing out the ideas and intents of the early pioneers who drove military aviation Burke also closely examines the consequences of both accidental and conscious decisions on the development of the nascent aviation arms. Certainly, the slow advancement of the technology of the airplane itself in the United States (compared to Europe) in this period affected the creation of doctrine in this period. Likewise, notions that the war that broke out in 1914 was strictly a European concern, reinforced by President Woodrow Wilson’s intentions to keep the United States out of that war, meant that the U.S. military had no incentive to “keep up” with European military aviation. Ultimately, however, he concludes that it was the respective services’ inability to create a strong, durable network connecting those flying the airplanes regularly (technology advocates) with the senior officers exercising control over their budget and organization (technology patrons) that hindered military aviation during this period.
Download or read book John Warden and the Renaissance of American Air Power written by John Andreas Olsen and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 603 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr. John Andreas Olsen has written an insightful, compelling biography of retired U.S. Air Force colonel John A. Warden III, the brilliant but controversial air warfare theorist and architect of Operation Desert Storm s air campaign. Warden s radical ideas about air power s purposes and applications, promulgated at the expense of his own career, sparked the ongoing revolution in military affairs. Legendary in defense circles, Warden is also the author of "The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat" (republished by Brassey s, Inc. in 1989). Presenting both the positives and negatives of Warden s personality and impact in this objective portrait, Olsen offers a trenchant analysis of his revolutionary ideas and great accomplishments. "
