The 31 Initiatives: A Study in Air Force-Army Cooperation PDF Download

Author: Richard G. Davis
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1428915621
Category : Unified operations (Military science)
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Author: Richard G Davis
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781477605103
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Throughout U.S. military history, the establishment has worked to integrate air power into its doctrine, strategy, force structure, and tactics in order to maximize the nation's security. This study highlights one aspect of this process - providing the most potent mist of army and air forces to prosecute ground warfare. It also illustrates the impediments of joint action created by the services' separate organizations and distinctive doctrine. Office of Air Force History, United States Air Force.

Author: Office of Air Force History
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781507732021
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
For the past eighty years the US military establishment has worked to integrate air power into its doctrine, strategy, force structure, and tactics in order to maximize the nation's security. This study by Dr. Richard Davis highlights one aspect of this process, that of providing the most potent mix of army and air forces to prosecute ground warfare. It also illustrates the impediments to joint action created by the services' separate organizations and distinctive doctrine. In addition, this monograph suggests that changes to improve interservice cooperation are often either forced by combat or imposed from the top down by the highest levels of the service or defense hierarchies. In World War II, Korea, and Vietnam the services developed weapons and systems that brought air power to bear on the battlefield in a relatively quick and overwhelmingly powerful manner. Without the impetus of war, however, the services seem often to fall back on their broader agenda of preparation for future war. In the case of the 1980s, intervention by the Chiefs of the Air Force and Army Staffs forced increased cooperation for battlefield synchronization and integration. In this instance the two Chiefs recognized the need and acted. Generals Gabriel and Wickham, aided by their deputies for plans and operations, Lieutenant Generals John T. Chain, Jr., and Fred K. Mahaffey, set up a small ad hoc group, bypassing their own services' formal staff structure, to fabricate a new method of mutual force development, including cross-service budgeting and programming procedures. The Chiefs adopted the group's recommendations as the foundation of a continuing joint force development process.

Author: Richard G. Davis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Unified operations (Military science)
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: James C. Slife
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Air power
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Colonel Slife chronicles the influence of the late Gen Wilbur L. "Bill" Creech7a leader, visionary, warrior, and mentor7in the areas of equipment and tactics, training, organization, and leader development. His study serves both to explain the context of a turbulent time in our Air Force's history and to reveal where tomorrow's airmen may find answers to some of the difficult challenges facing them today. Colonel Slife, who addresses such controversial topics as the development of the Army's AirLand Battle doctrine and what it meant to airmen, is among the first to describe what historians will surely see in years to come as the revolutionary developments of the late 1970s/early 1980s and General Creech's central role. Creech Blue enlightens the Air Force on its strongly held convictions during that period and challenges the idea that by 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Air Force had forgotten how to wage a "strategic" air campaign and was dangerously close to plunging into a costly and lengthy war of attrition had it not been for the vision of a small cadre of thinkers on the Air Staff. In exploring the doctrine and language of the decade leading up to Operation Desert Storm, Colonel Slife reveals that the Air Force was not as shortsighted as many people have argued.

Author: Richard G. Davis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic government information
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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This monograph analyzes US military air power - US Army relations form 1907 to the present. It emphasizes one aspect of those relations-how air forces intended for the tactical support of ground forces can best be controlled and integrated into the overall ground battle. After a review of changing air- ground relationships from 1907 to 1982, this work examines the 31 Initiatives, the most recent US Army - US Air Force agreement on developing joint combat forces and battlefield cooperation. It also discusses the process behind the formulation of the 31 Initiatives and discusses how that process provides one example of the introduction of innovation or change into a military organization. In addition, this work details the immediate and longer term response of the two services to the Initiatives. The importance of this monograph is twofold. It supplies a case study of innovation and, more significantly, it places the 31 Initiatives in their place as the far-reaching and comprehensive end product of a decade of Air Force - Army cooperation.

Author: Stephen Lee McFarland
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Except in a few instances, since World War II no American soldier or sailor has been attacked by enemy air power. Conversely, no enemy soldier orsailor has acted in combat without being attacked or at least threatened by American air power. Aviators have brought the air weapon to bear against enemies while denying them the same prerogative. This is the legacy of the U.S. AirForce, purchased at great cost in both human and material resources.More often than not, aerial pioneers had to fight technological ignorance, bureaucratic opposition, public apathy, and disagreement over purpose.Every step in the evolution of air power led into new and untrodden territory, driven by humanitarian impulses; by the search for higher, faster, and farther flight; or by the conviction that the air way was the best way. Warriors have always coveted the high ground. If technology permitted them to reach it, men, women andan air force held and exploited it-from Thomas Selfridge, first among so many who gave that "last full measure of devotion"; to Women's Airforce Service Pilot Ann Baumgartner, who broke social barriers to become the first Americanwoman to pilot a jet; to Benjamin Davis, who broke racial barriers to become the first African American to command a flying group; to Chuck Yeager, a one-time non-commissioned flight officer who was the first to exceed the speed of sound; to John Levitow, who earned the Medal of Honor by throwing himself over a live flare to save his gunship crew; to John Warden, who began a revolution in air power thought and strategy that was put to spectacular use in the Gulf War.Industrialization has brought total war and air power has brought the means to overfly an enemy's defenses and attack its sources of power directly. Americans have perceived air power from the start as a more efficient means of waging war and as a symbol of the nation's commitment to technology to master challenges, minimize casualties, and defeat adversaries.

Author: General Giulio Douhet
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1782898522
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 620

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In the pantheon of air power spokesmen, Giulio Douhet holds center stage. His writings, more often cited than perhaps actually read, appear as excerpts and aphorisms in the writings of numerous other air power spokesmen, advocates-and critics. Though a highly controversial figure, the very controversy that surrounds him offers to us a testimonial of the value and depth of his work, and the need for airmen today to become familiar with his thought. The progressive development of air power to the point where, today, it is more correct to refer to aerospace power has not outdated the notions of Douhet in the slightest In fact, in many ways, the kinds of technological capabilities that we enjoy as a global air power provider attest to the breadth of his vision. Douhet, together with Hugh “Boom” Trenchard of Great Britain and William “Billy” Mitchell of the United States, is justly recognized as one of the three great spokesmen of the early air power era. This reprint is offered in the spirit of continuing the dialogue that Douhet himself so perceptively began with the first edition of this book, published in 1921. Readers may well find much that they disagree with in this book, but also much that is of enduring value. The vital necessity of Douhet’s central vision-that command of the air is all important in modern warfare-has been proven throughout the history of wars in this century, from the fighting over the Somme to the air war over Kuwait and Iraq.

Author: Maurer Maurer
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1428915850
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Author: Lieutenant Colonel Usaf David J Dean
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781478379393
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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This book grew from an opportunity to study a third world air force fighting an externally supported insurgency. The players were the Royal Moroccan Air Force and the Polisario, the latter trying to wrest control of the Western Sahara from the Kingdom of Morocco. The United States has also been a player in the Morocco-Polisario war as the source of much of Morocco's war material, especially the weapons used by the Royal Moroccan Air Force. Help from the United States was especially important when the Polisario deployed Soviet-built SA-6 surface-to-air missiles to counter the growing effectiveness of the Royal Moroccan Air Force. For many reasons, the United States and the US Air Force were not able to assist the Moroccans effectively. The Morocco-Polisario-US scenario that provides the basis for this study was a tiny aspect of the US foreign and military policy in the early 1980s. But it shows a political-military problem that deserves a good deal of thought now. That problem simply stated is: How is the United States going to exert political-military influence in the third world during the next twenty years? Clearly, overall US influence in the third world will be a combination of political, military, economic, and social activity. But the military, in many cases, will be the most visible form of assistance, and one upon which the recipient nation will depend for immediate results. Are the military components as instruments of national policy able to act effectively in the third world? If not, what needs to be done? The US Air Force (and the other services) needs to consider the question of effective assistance to third world countries as part of a basic shift in strategic thinking. Our primary strategic planning effort has been to insert large numbers of US ground and air forces into an area such as the Persian Gulf to accomplish our policy objectives. That planning effort must continue, but with the understanding that inserting a major US force in any third world region is extremely unlikely, both for domestic political reasons and because potential host nations are reluctant to support large US forces. Our primary strategic focus for planning needs to shift to providing effective leverage for third world friends and allies. That leverage can be in the form of arms sales, training, doctrine, or even small specialized forces. But providing leverage depends on effective planning that builds the data base which allows us to pinpoint the host country's needs and capabilities. Developing that kind of expertise in the USAF, and in the other services, will be a difficult and frustrating long-term proposition. The Air Force must recognize the need for a change and must act upon it. Planning to exert effective political-military influence in the third world may not be a glamorous task, but it will be the name of the game for the next twenty years and beyond. This book offers some ideas in that regard.