Quote Originally Posted by LawVol View Post
Rather than assume I understand what you are saying, could you elaborate please?
Sure. What I refer to here is what I have taken over the years from the writing of air power theorists as well as some of the semi-official AF writing about Vietnam and Korea. My take is that they in essence view warfare as a zero-sum exercise: you are either at war or you are not. If you are at war, you should be able to use all weapons and methods at your disposal to defeat your opponent. You see strains of this in most discussion of Korea and Vietnam, where complaints are raised about (with Korea) not being able to attack bases in China or (in Vietnam) not bombing Hanoi soon enough or with enough severity. Political limitations are viewed with hostility - as shackles on the true effectiveness of air power - and not as a common feature in warfare (since war stems from politics in many if not all cases). If the population is part of the production system, they should be subject to attack. The same goes for political centers and the like. LeMay was a vocal advocate of this, but there have been others. You bomb power plants to cut off power to the populace, hit the Red River dikes (a VN example) to flood out food production areas, and so on.

You see strains of this in Warden's air campaign theory, although he does tone down the rhetoric. But even there you can see an attempt to shape warfare to the air power-centric doctrine and not adapting the doctrine to the political situation as dictated by national policy. One of the main points of this doctrine is maximum force (weapons, systems, etc.) delivered to vital points (as many as possible) as quickly as possible. Under such a mindset problems quickly become a question of what weapon to use and in what quantity, not if weapons should be used at all.

This ignores the contributions of lift (mentioned by Tom and I know you've talked about it as well, John), real-time recon like the SR-71 provided, and other functions. Dunlap mentions the Misty FACs, but he also fails to mention that they were marginalized by the AF when they were operating and have only recently enjoyed a resurgence of interest and semi-official approval. He also doesn't mention the number of times the AF has tried to retire or transfer the A-10 or other systems that don't really fit into the high-speed, lots of bombs on target mission that the total activity vision of warfare calls for.