Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
In absolute terms yes. But in this case if control of the air is lost by our air forces everybody else will be defeated in turn but their defeat will result from the air forces losing. And our air forces are all betting on one airplane design and one engine type. That bet isn't looking so good.
Carl,

If you take a conventional view of war, the way the U.S. prefers to fight, then a more accurate way to put it is we can't win with acceptable casualty levels. Of course that is speculation, there are a lot factors that will influence our national will to endure or fail to endure high casualties.

North Vietnam defeated us even though we owned the air (we greatly over estimated the effect of air power on a nation's will, just as Germany did, and just as we did when we started our strategic bombing of Germany). The Taliban continues to challenge us in the land domain with no air power whatsoever.

Air superiority is no guarantee that we'll win or lose, but failure to maintain it will certainly result in a need for new doctrine and approaches to warfare. Based on your comment that we can't assume we'll always have it, maybe we should be working on that doctrine now? We have no idea what disruptive technology will emerge in the future, to include technology that could greatly reduce the effectiveness of our air power. On a smaller scale we saw the impact that Stingers had on the USSR in Afghanistan.