The Airpower Advantage in Future Warfare

etween political ends and the means available for obtaining
them.” 55
Alternatively, one could turn to the perennially relevant
pages of Clausewitz’s On War. But, the United States continues
to be hobbled in the leverage it can obtain from its armed forces
in peace and war by its seemingly systemic, perhaps cultural,
aversion to the sophisticated practice of strategy. And to overcome
that aversion, Americans require the services of a holistic
theory of war and warfare. Only then will its potential airpower
advantage be fully liberated to fly and hit the target.
Notes
1. I have discussed America’s problem with strategy in many places, most
recently in Irregular Enemies and the Essence of Strategy: Can the American
Way of War Adapt? (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War
College, March 2006), pp. 31-2; and Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace,
and Strategy (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007). For the
purposes of this paper, I choose to define airpower in the minimalist tradition
as anything that flies. In this instance, a controversy over definition, far from
being simply an exercise in scholasticism, has profound implications for grand
and military strategy, as well as for the roles and missions of the services.
2. See Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, revised ed.
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), p.188.
3. For two first-rate studies that argue the case for a radical improvement
in airpower’s competitive position vis-à-vis landpower in regular warfare, see
Benjamin S. Lambeth, The Transformation of American Air Power (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2000); and 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).
4. Outstanding treatments of the contrasting world views of the armed
services include Carl H. Builder, The Masks of War: American Military Styles
in Strategy and Analysis (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1989); and J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power
Control (1967; Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1989), especially Ch. 5.
5. See B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach (1941; London:
Faber and Faber, 1967), Ch. 22; and Luttwak, Strategy, Ch. 13.
6. The “tacticization of strategy” is discussed helpfully in Michael I. Handel,
Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought, 3rd ed. (London: Frank Cass, 2001),
pp. 355-60. Handel believes that the advent of air war promoted such tacticization
by creating “a situation in which targeting has de facto become a substitute
for proper strategic planning.” p. 358. He claims, not unpersuasively, that “in the
twentieth century, particularly after the Second World War, an additional cause
[of tacticization] emerged in the form of military-technological developments (i.e.,
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