Quote Originally Posted by SteveMetz View Post
Point taken. Personally, I think initiatives like this are useful. Less so the parallel attempts to cast F22 as an IW platform.
Agreed. There's also just enough vague muttering about the Air Force's "indisputable contributions" (whatever they are...oddly enough they're never directly mentioned) to COIN efforts that it smacks of politics as usual to me. I read this paper a while back (I think LawVol might have linked to it), and at the time it struck me as having a very "one size fits all" character and the standard assumption that the AF needed to be there building a host nation air force from the beginning.

What will be interesting to me is seeing how much traction this gets in the AF proper. AFSOC isn't really considered part of the "big Blue" force, and this could set off something of a turf war within the higher ranks. We'll see. It would be a shame if it did, because there are some good ideas in the paper.