decisions that have reshaped today's Air Force. Of major importance is the integration of airpower needed to assure rapid deployment. Consequently, the Air Force can support the decisions of the national leadership within hours and days, not weeks. Composite wings at Pope Air Force Base, Moody AFB, and Mountain Home AFB are made up of squadrons with all the parts (bombers, fighters, tankers, and other support units) needed to deploy instantly and take the battle anywhere in the world.
Tom Clancy will introduce you to one of these composite wings: the 366th based at Mountain Home AFB, Idaho. Readers will visit each squadron and learn its part in supporting what he accurately calls 'this miniature air force.' Our 366th Wing is indeed a microcosm of the command as a whole. Of particular interest will be watching some of the realistic training exercises used by ACC people to sharpen their skills. You will participate in war games at Nellis AFB, Nevada, as aircrews simulate real battle situations against enemy aircraft and threats on the ground. And then Clancy, the expert story-teller, will take you into the future. You will join the 366th as it is deployed to action in Vietnam. While this scenario is fiction, the descriptions are real. The time or place might change, but the story could easily be a picture of the future.
As a result of our 'easy' success in the Gulf War, the American public has a level of expectation that will be difficult to maintain in the future. What is now expected is a quick, painless, 99-0 victory with few casualties against
In this book you will learn about the sophisticated aircraft ACC would provide to the commander in chief of a unified command in a war zone. From the versatile F-16, to our reliable workhorse C-130, to the high-flying U-2 spy plane, and the state-of-the-art flying wing B-2, you will see the capabilities and limitations of each plane, and clearly understand the unique role of each in battle. A strike aircraft is only as effective as the skill of the crew and the lethality of weapons it carries. In this book you will find excellent descriptions of air-to-air missiles, air-to-ground munitions, unguided bombs, and base defense weapons. This is critical for an understanding of modern airpower. With fewer planes, each must have far more capacity to destroy targets and greater ability to survive an attack.
As this book demonstrates, the future capability of our military lies not only in new weapons, but in a style of leadership that gets the most return from our limited resources… the most output for a given input. The leadership at Air Combat Command has tried to create a working climate that inspires trust, teamwork, quality, and pride. The goal is to delegate authority and responsibility to the lowest level and to give every member of the team, regardless of rank, a sense of ownership in the product or mission. For no one person or community in ACC is more or less important than anyone else. The outstanding, highly trained young men and women in this command are the reason I am confident in their ability to respond to any national crisis.
Airpower has come of age. This book chronicles the creation of a command with a unique culture — the U.S. Air Force Air Combat Command. It possesses the leadership, the combat power, and the highly trained, competent people to provide the world's best combat air forces anywhere in the world, at any time, to win quickly, decisively, with overwhelming advantage and few casualties. Tom Clancy does a masterful job of telling us all about it. I am proud to have served as the first commander of Air Combat Command, and proud to commend this book to your reading pleasure.
INTRODUCTION
In August 1914, a British aviator patrolling the skies above Mons, in Belgium, spotted the advance of von Kluck's German army toward the British Expeditionary Force. Interviewed for TV five decades later, the pilot recalled the reaction of senior officers when he reported the news… they didn't believe him. Pilots soon took cameras with them to give proof of their sightings to skeptical general officers whose vision was limited to the view from the ground.
Before long, both sides were flying reconnaissance missions, and hostile aviators were firing pistols at one another. Then machine guns. And soon after that, aircraft were designed as aerial killers — the first fighters. They were delicate, unstable constructs of wood and wire, usually underpowered by inefficient engines. But they could fly. And the learning curve was steep back then. One day, someone asked, 'If you can hang one engine on an airframe, why not two, or even more? If you can see to shoot, you can see to drop a weapon, can't you?' Thus began the age of the bomber.
It was the Germans at Verdun, in the bitter weather of February 1916, who first made actual the concept we now call airpower — the systematic application of tactical aircraft to control a battlefield (the definition will change and develop). The objective was to seal off the battlefield from French aviation, denying the enemy the ranging eyes needed to see behind the German trench lines; and as it turned out, the plan didn't work terribly well. Still, others saw what the Germans tried, and recognized that it could be made to work. By the end of the war, aircraft were attacking infantry on the ground. And for the first time soldiers knew what field mice had long understood: The target of an aerial predator feels as much psychological burden as physical danger.
Between the wars, a handful of visionary officers in Britain, Italy, Germany, Japan, Russia, and the United States grappled with the theory of airpower… and with its practical applications in the next, inevitable war. The most famous of these, the Italian Guilo Douhet, proposed the first great 'philosophy' of airpower: Bomber and attack aircraft can reach far into the enemy's rear to attack the factories that make the weapons and the railroads and roads and bridges that transport them to the fighting front. It was Douhet's view that airpower alone — without armies or navies — could bring victory in war. In other words, if you smash enough factories, railroads, roads, and bridges, you'll bring your enemy to the point where he will lie down and wave the white flag.
Douhet was too optimistic. An air force is remarkable not only for what it can do, but for what it cannot. The unchanging truth of warfare is that only infantry can conquer an enemy — infantry is people, and only people can occupy and hold ground. Tanks can roll across ground. Artillery can punish and neutralize ground. And airpower — which is at heart longer-range artillery — can punish and neutralize over long distances. But only people can take up residency there.
Yet airpower can have a powerful effect, and this fact was not lost on the German General Staff. In May 1940, when another German attack violated French soil at a place called Sedan, French soldiers excused their rapid departure from the battlefield by saying, 'But
The second global conflict announced the importance of airpower in terms that no one could ignore. Now, huge fleets of aircraft attacked everything they could reach — and that reach was ever growing, for aviation science advanced rapidly. Engineering talent tends to follow the excitement of discovery and possibility. Engineers who had once devoted their skills to developing steam engines for ships or railroad locomotives found more exciting work. The great breakthroughs in engine power came first, and those drove improvements in airframe design.
By the beginning of the Second World War, Daimler-Benz and Rolls-Royce had both developed water-cooled
