What Is Military History? by Stephen Morillo and Michael F. Pavkovic. Polity Press (http:// www.polity.co.uk), 65 Bridge Street, Cambridge, CB2 1UR, United Kingdom, 2006, 160 pages, $49.95 (hardcover), $19.95 (softcover).

Louis Johnson and the Arming of America by Keith D. McFarland and David L. Roll. Indiana University Press (http://iupress.indiana.edu), 601 North Morton Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797, 2005, 456 pages, $35.00 (hardcover).

Strategic Challenges: America’s Global Security Agenda edited by Stephen J. Flanagan and James A. Schear. Potomac Books (http://www.potomacbooksinc.com), 22841 Quicksilver Drive, Dulles, Virginia 20166, 2008, 432 pages, $52.00 (hardcover), $28.00 (softcover).

Strategy making for second lieutenants—no doubt readers will wonder if this reviewer has lost it! Lieutenants have everything they can handle, learning how to survive in the T-6 aircraft or how to avoid electrocution in a laboratory or maintenance shop! Yet military history suggests that, in most cases, waiting until one is a general or even a field-grade officer will usually be too late to develop as a strategic planner. Alfred Thayer Mahan and Carl von Clausewitz both began a lifetime of study at a very young age. Napoléon himself began his study as an artillery lieutenant. That appears to have been an important motivator in the genesis of the Air Force’s Developing Aerospace Leaders initiative of the 1990s. Gen Michael Ryan, chief of staff at the time, was distressed at the dearth of senior Air Force officers with an education broad enough to qualify them to lead a combatant command or a joint force command.¹

As with all the earlier review essays in this “Fodder” series, this article aims to help air warriors/scholars in their development of a lifelong professional reading program. It reviews in depth three new books on the current subject and suggests a dozen works to facilitate one’s study: two for an overview, and the rest for what Col Roger Nye called “Depth and Mastery.”²

One of those three, Keith D. McFarland and David L. Roll’s Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, appeared on the chief of staff’s reading list in 2008. It discusses national security strategy during the run-up to World War II when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president and Johnson served as an assistant secretary of war, followed by Johnson’s stormy time as secretary of defense 10 years later. Another one, Stephen J. Flanagan and James A. Schear’s Strategic Challenges: America’s Global Security Agenda, which had its genesis at the National Defense University, centers on strategy making in the present and near future. But before we get into an analysis of these books, let’s tarry a while with strategy making made easy.

Though perhaps fairly simple in concept, strategy is not easy in practice. Thus, perhaps starting with a graphic view will help (see fig. 1). One can define strategy as the art of relating means available to objectives desired. If the means prove insufficient to achieve the objectives, then strategists must either increase the means or change the objectives. In simple terms, they must first get a grasp of the world as it is and then envision the world as we would like it to be. Then they must put together a scheme that will enable us to move from the world as it is to the ideal world. After implementing the scheme or plan, then the strategists must gather data on how well it is working and make adjustments to improve the implementation. Certainly, it is a fairly simple concept, but as Clausewitz has instructed us, everything in war is simple, but the implementation in combat is most difficult.³

The first great difficulty involves getting a grasp of the real world. Practically all historians know that no history book completely duplicates what has existed—that it can never do more than approximate reality, no matter how erudite and fair-minded the author. Certainly, some things we really do know: the sun has always risen in the east and set in the west—or so it appears from the movement of the earth. Since we face an adversary who has a mind of his own, is secretive, and tries to mislead us, there are many things we don’t know—and we understand that we don’t know them. Further, there are things we do not know, but we fail to realize that fact: in 1943 very few people had the least notion that a bomb was on the horizon that would soon level whole cities at a single stroke. Thus the strategist must strive to know as much as possible about the real world and try to fill in the rest with assumptions (guesses). Most strategists of December 1941 knew that the Japanese were moving but assumed that they would strike the Philippines or elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Figure 1. Strategy making for brown bars. (From a concept originally expressed in Kenneth M. Dolbeare and Patricia Dolbeare, American Ideologies: The Competing Political Beliefs of the 1970s [Chicago: Markham Publishing Co., 1971].)

One’s view of the ideal world is even less certain than that of the real world. In general we usually hope that we can make the world safe, preferably without fighting because war is unpredictable, dangerous, and expensive. Once security and peace are assured, then we would usually like to make the world more prosperous—especially for ourselves but also for the rest of the world, in the hope that prosperity would be conducive to continued peace. Finally, after attaining security, peace, and prosperity, in the American case, we usually declare that we would like the rest of the world to become freer and more democratic. We do so not only because we think ourselves humane but also because we argue that democracies are generally peaceful. But people will make huge sacrifices for other ideologies, such as religion.

Again, in simple terms, the strategy to move the real world toward the ideal world can employ various instruments: persuasion, bribes, coercive threats and actions, and psychological measures. Unhappily, the diplomacy of the League of Nations failed. The use of foreign aid often brings on the “what have you done for me lately” demand and thus sometimes has only limited effect. Our experiences in Vietnam and Iraq teach us that many uncertainties accompany the application of military force. Propaganda and other psychological measures have sometimes had their effects but can easily go awry because of the limits of understanding alien cultures—witness the powerful initial reaction to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001: “Why do they hate us so?”

Figure 1 generally describes what used to be known as the scientific decision-making process: define the problem, gather the facts, develop all possible options for action, implement the best one, gather feedback, and make adjustments. Understanding the world as it is involves defining the problem, gathering all the facts available, and making assumptions. Picturing the world as we would like it to be entails conceiving all possible options and selecting the one we deem the best. Strategy has to do with gathering resources to implement that option, applying them, and collecting feedback to judge the outcome. Unhappily, we know that, very often, this process does not work. Why? Figure 1 includes a pair of dice and a depiction of Clausewitz—the godfather of uncertainty, chance, and the fog of war. So in the company-grade years, air warriors/scholars need to gather as many of the concepts and facts as they can, knowing full well that they will never have them all. Thus, they will improve the odds that when the time for decision comes, their guess will more closely approximate reality than that of their adversary—and that their system will adapt to the lessons of combat faster than the enemy’s.⁴

Both Clausewitz and Mahan, the great American naval theorist, based their set of ideas on an extensive study of military history. Thus, I recommend acquiring a foundation in military history and the history of airpower if commissioning programs have not included those subjects.

The platter is full to overflowing with volumes on military and airpower history. One could make a good start with a history of military history—for example, the relatively new book What Is Military History? by Stephen Morillo and Michael F. Pavkovic. It summarizes the development of the discipline, speaks of conceptual frameworks that historians use to explore the subject, and covers the principal controversies stimulating the field.

As noted, we have often found that no matter how “scientific” our decision process, things often do not turn out the way we planned. For second lieutenants, perhaps the most useful chapter of What Is Military History? deals with conceptual frameworks, including a discussion of causation that helps explain things. The ancient Greeks attributed inexplicable outcomes to the competing wills of many gods. Christian Europeans, until the Enlightenment at least, explained them as the will of one God (and many people still do). Afterward, science got the credit—albeit the governing scientific principles sometimes remained undiscovered. Many Americans have felt that technology is the master. Karl Marx held that economics ruled the world. Still others maintain that pure chance determines what happens in ­battle and war—as with advocates of the recent chaos theory.⁵ The chapter offers no final answers, but it should stimulate thinking and inspire the formulation of questions to ask in further studies.

Toward the end, Morillo and Pavkovic include a worthy chapter on “Doing Military History” that offers some good hints on methods to facilitate this part of a professional reading program. Readers will also find a good tool in the book’s fairly comprehensive and up-to-date bibliography (though more comprehensive on military rather than airpower history). In such a huge field, singling out an authoritative general military history is difficult. Though a bit dated, perhaps William McNeill’s The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) would prove suitable.

People often confuse the terms theory, doctrine, and strategy. A theorist is not necessarily a strategist, and vice versa. Theory deals with generic things: war in general or air war in general. Strategy deals with a particular problem, such as the war at hand or the particular campaign to be won. Theory and doctrine are inputs to strategy—along with weather, intelligence, technology, political directives, and even intuitive judgment. In one way of looking at it, theory is a set of general propositions about the way that we organize for war and employ forces in war. We may think of doctrine as theory that has the formal approval of the highest authorities of an organization. Strategy is the application of theory and doctrine to the problem at hand. Mahan was a theorist; Adm Chester Nimitz, of World War II fame, was a strategist. That is to say, Mahan largely dealt in generalizations applicable to a wide variety of cases; Nimitz with a particular case at hand—how to defeat the Japanese in the Pacific.

History tries to approximate the real world and thus is easier to comprehend than either abstract theory or doctrine. It is usually an important input to both of the latter. After acquiring a bit of a background in the histories, brown bars should review Air Force Doctrine Document 1, Air Force Basic Doctrine, 17 November 2003, to relate the concepts there to what they know about the past. Then to deepen their studies, they should look at some biographies of the great strategists of the past and some of the more specialized descriptions of particular wars and campaigns—without limiting their studies to the period following the Wright brothers since many ideas that antedate those pioneers are still relevant. As a recent Air Force white paper suggests, our service seeks to control three interdependent domains—air, space, and cyberspace—and believes that such control is also essential to enabling the Army and Navy to dominate the land and sea domains (thus the need to build up some understanding of fighting in the latter two domains).⁶

Another book under review here, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, will help one’s understanding of the air domain and its heritage—and it will do so in an engaging way. The coauthors seem to have a great combination of historical expertise and effective writing, and their subject is an interesting man indeed. Keith McFarland, now a university president in the Texas A&M system, has extensive scholarly experience and is the author of a biography of pre–World War II secretary of war Harry Woodring, Johnson’s boss for more than three years. David Roll is a partner in the law firm that Johnson founded more than a half century ago. Doubtless, one can partly attribute the excellent writing style evident in the current work to Roll’s experience; furthermore, notwithstanding his employment, the book is remarkably free of hero worship—it does address several warts.⁷

For the company-grade aspirant strategist, McFarland and Roll have provided a splendid place to start the study in depth. Removed some from the present day, the book enables us to understand that there is much more to strategy making than scientific reasoning. Politics, personality, and sheer accident can deflect the creation of grand strategy from a purely rational approach. Almost from the beginning, Louis Johnson was a champion of airpower, especially strategic airpower (fig. 2).

Figure 2. The Boeing B-15 (left) and Boeing B-17. An experimental plane developed during the 1930s for long-range bombing, the B-15 proved too big for the engines then available and did not go into serial production. Also developed in the 1930s, the B-17, a much smaller aircraft than the B-15, came on the line in 1937, serving as one of two mainline, long-range bombers in the US Army Air Forces. In those days, Louis Johnson championed airpower, especially bombers such as these.

However, he was also a very ambitious man and sometimes seemed fearless as well. Thus, both Roosevelt and Truman used Johnson to achieve ends that, in the final analysis, were diametrically opposed.

On the eve of World War II, Roosevelt confronted the problem of beginning rearmament in the face of a powerful isolationist sentiment in the public and Congress (not to mention an isolationist secretary of war). The president did not feel able to fire Secretary Woodring for political reasons, yet he could play Assistant Secretary Johnson against him, succeeding in his effort to start air rearmament long before Pearl Harbor. Then after three-and-a-half years in office, though Roosevelt seemed to have promised Johnson that he would succeed Woodring, he dismissed Johnson—but tried to let him down easy. Instead, the president appointed Henry Stimson, a Republican, again for political reasons, producing a good outcome because it did give the run-up to war a bipartisan flavor, and Stimson turned out to be effective in that role. But Johnson’s ego suffered a hard blow.

The problem for President Truman seemed just the opposite. The United States had accumulated a huge national debt to finance World War II, and Joe Stalin and the rest of the communist world predicted that economic collapse was about to bring down capitalism once and for all. Truman and many other Americans were absolutely dedicated to reducing expenditures and restoring a balanced budget. Meanwhile, the National Security Act of 1947 attempted to unify the services, a process that required a firm hand at the helm to bring soldiers, sailors, and airmen into line. Watching the disintegration of the marvelous military organizations the nation had assembled, and facing a whole array of new technologies that they needed to accommodate, the services were not much inclined to unification and economy. But Truman put a low limit on the military budget and refused to compromise. Now he needed a tough man to succeed Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and bring the recalcitrant military men under control—Johnson seemed tough enough. In effect, now Johnson’s task was to disarm.

After the close-run election of 1948, American politics was in one of its most virulent phases. The USSR seemed on the rise, and China fell to the communists as well; naturally, the opposition blamed this on the administration. Secretary Forrestal did not seem to be having much luck in disciplining the service leaders, so Truman selected Johnson to take his place in 1949.

Johnson occupied the office for only a year and a half, but a turbulent time it was indeed. The new Air Force felt entitled to a monopoly of the nuclear mission, and the other services were doing everything they could to grab a piece of the atomic pie. The Navy answered with the new supercarrier USS United States, a vessel of about 65,000 tons, compared to the 45,000 of the Midway class. The Navy envisioned it as a flush-deck ship to accommodate airplanes with enough wingspan to carry a 10,000-pound atomic bomb out to an appreciable range. At the time, few dreamed that nukes would soon shrink to the point that a standard carrier plane loaded with them could get off the catapult. As one of his first acts as secretary, Johnson cancelled the construction of the ship just after its keel had been laid, setting off a storm of protest in the Navy and among its supporters in Congress. But both the Army and Air Force had been dead set against the ship’s construction. These events led to the “Revolt of the Admirals” (fig. 3) and the dismissal of Adm Louis Denfeld, chief of naval operations. Many people in the sea services considered the episode a precursor to the abolition of the entire US Marine Corps.

Johnson’s other great battle—forcing the services to remain within the president’s budget cap—was really the same battle. Many military heavyweights opposed that effort, as well as a number of congressmen whose districts would feel the pinch—and many budding Cold Warriors. Thus, when the Korean War began, the former champion of military preparedness found himself at the helm of a Defense Department that seemed utterly unprepared. For the most part, Johnson’s strong suit appeared to be loyalty to Roosevelt and Truman and their programs. Unhappily for him, the Democratic Party had enjoyed power for 17 years and now occupied pretty shaky ground. Thus, though it seemed to hurt Truman greatly, he felt he had to let Johnson go and appoint a national icon, Gen George Marshall, in an attempt to calm the waters in wartime. This happened just before the spectacular Inchon landings in Korea, which Johnson long thought might have saved him, but he again had to take the blow to his ego and perhaps to any presidential ambitions he might have had.

Louis Johnson and the Arming of America is a marvelous, readable book. Dealing with national security strategy (grand strategy), from which military strategy should flow, it is a worthy tome for the personal reading program of company-grade, neophyte strategists. But enough about the past; our third work is more keyed to the present and possible futures.

Figure 3. Six- and 10-engine versions of the B-36. The early B-36 occupied the center of the controversy over the USS United States and the “Revolt of the Admirals.” Secretary Johnson cancelled the carrier, but B-36 production continued. The airplane initially came with six engines. During the revolt, one of the arguments held that the B-36 was too slow to survive in enemy airspace. The Air Force sought to overcome that possibility by equipping the B-36 with two engine pods having two jets each, making it a 10-engine bomber. (Another scheme designed to overcome the speed limitation involved experimenting with the F-84 parasite fighter.)

Dr. Stephen J. Flanagan, a vice president at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, and James A. Schear, director of research at the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies, have edited the anthology Strategic Challenges: America’s Global Security Agenda, which includes contributions from a number of other experts. These authors, most of them associated with National Defense University, are impressive scholars with both military and academic experience that well equips them for the work at hand.

Normally, anthologies feature essays of varying quality, often not much related to any discernable pattern. Strategic Challenges, however, expertly assembles an excellent survey of current problems facing America’s decision makers at the grand-strategy level—and offers insights to possible solutions. Flanagan contributes to the opening and final chapters, and both he and Schear provide a good summary.

This book will quickly bring the lieutenant forward to the present and even the future. A survey of the concerns now facing national strategy makers, it is as comprehensive a treatment as one is likely to find in one volume—and a credible and timely one at that. After discussing the environment that the strategic planner now faces and will likely face in the future, Strategic Challenges proceeds to an array of the particular issues ahead. Naturally, in the leadoff spot is a chapter on the global war on terrorism, followed by others on weapons of mass destruction, homeland defense, regional instability, preparation for possible struggles with the other major powers, and management of alliances. At the end come two summarizing chapters, both of them stimulating and informative.

One of the most engaging treatments, an essay by Joseph McMillan and Christopher Cavoli, deals with confronting global terrorism. The authors remind us that terrorism is nothing new—that it has existed since the dawn of human conflict. Some of their ideas have been with us as far back as Vietnam and earlier, but they are cogently presented and worth reviewing:

• Increasing violence favors the insurgents—so it was with the British in the southern American colonies in the 1770s.

• Victory is hard to define and hard to see—there was no great army to defeat in the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines in the 1940s and 1950s.

• The war on terror is bound to be a long one—precisely Mao’s strategy in the late 1940s and Ho Chi Minh’s in the Vietnam War.

• We must try to sever the connection between insurgents and population—one reason why violence did not favor the counterinsurgents when we decimated the Vietcong in 1968.

• We must try to reduce the causes of discontent and boredom, factors that partly explain why revolutions are often led by a small elite—not the most oppressed (e.g., the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution).

• We must avoid unifying the jihadists’ anger against us. At the beginning of the American Revolution, one-third of Americans were Patriots, one-third Loyalists, and one-third waiting to see how it would turn out. As we have seen many times since, excessive violence tends to create more insurgents than it kills.

This chapter, along with the others, well illustrates the problems of uncertainty, the fog of war, and chance, and will help air warriors/scholars reduce some of the unknowns as they grope toward a worldview to support their professional study.

The penultimate chapter, by Christopher Lamb, Charles Lutes, M. Elaine Bunn, and Christopher Cavoli, helps us move from our worldview toward a description of the world as we would like it to be—and toward an understanding of some of the means and strategies we might use to get there. Although a little wordy in places, it is among the most stimulating in the book. The authors explain that the conclusion of the Cold War marked the end of the long years of having a well-defined and fairly well understood adversary.

The new situation is filled with uncertainty and, apparently, a whole new set of dangers. An early response entailed departing from the Cold War methodology of planning against a well-defined threat in favor of attempting to build our strategies based on capabilities rather than threats. We saw in figure 1 that strategy making has always been shrouded with uncertainties, so leaders have had to depend on guesses and assumptions to some extent. But now the knowns seem to have become much less numerous than heretofore, and the unknowns crowd upon decision makers from all points of the compass. It seems that we know neither the enemy nor his motivation. But trying to base planning on capabilities alone, according to our team, is impossible. Planning against every possible threat will make us weak everywhere. Possibilities are nearly infinite; resources are limited. Therefore, say our authors, we must devise a system of “bounded uncertainty.” That is to say, we must limit the number and seriousness of the threats in order to develop enough resources to cover the most likely and most serious ones. The system, therefore, has become one of estimating the level of danger and accepting a certain amount of risk, depending on the dangers that seem most likely and most threatening.

Another rising requirement of the new era has to do with global force planning and global force management. The regional command structure that sufficed for the Cold War has become somewhat dated by the new political situation and changing technology. Problems of the different regional and functional commands interact; capabilities of neighboring commands and different services have a bearing on potential solutions for all of them. Here as elsewhere in the book, the authors recognize that the new strategic world places a higher premium on American instruments of power beyond the military. The new world requires increased emphasis on the diplomatic, economic, and informational instruments of power and the creation of ways of integrating their actions. Thus, future planning has to take these things into consideration, and that makes the process all the more complex since military commanders need to understand and cooperate ever more with civilian leaders in other government agencies.

Force management on a worldwide basis takes on a new kind of complexity as well. Pulling forces back to the continental United States so that they can redeploy equally well against any new threat anywhere is not that simple. Some forces and bases have to remain in forward areas not only for the sake of deterrence but also to facilitate movement to meet new threats. Basing ground forces is the biggest problem. Naval and air forces are largely self-deploying.

The Army is both slow to prepare for movement and slow in movement. But putting ground units in a place where they can easily move to a scene of trouble and yet be ready for action when they arrive is perhaps even more complicated than it was when the Soviet threat existed. Back then we could more easily predict the locus of the trouble. The threat was so obvious that agreement on its seriousness proved easier to obtain than it is now.

How can we achieve optimum basing without knowing the locus of the threat? If troops remain in the built-up areas of the world such as Germany and Japan, would they arrive in the conflict area combat ready? As the Soviet threat disappeared, readiness of the allies to dedicate large areas to training ground forces or to permit live-fire ranges in their lands rapidly decreased. Oftentimes, though, moving forces to the more open spaces of Europe and Asia with available ranges and within a shorter distance to trouble spots is not a solution. Without good ports and airfields, loading and off-loading could take more time than the travel from the more distant, built-up nations. Too, because loading and off-loading time is considerably longer than transit time, even by sea, the enormous costs of replacing the bases and ports already at hand may not be worth the small difference in transit time. The Marine Corps has a partial solution of having its own ships and some supplies readily available in pre-positioned vessels. Lighter than those of the Army, Marine forces require replenishment within a few weeks. An all-seaborne force, the Corps requires no other nation’s permission to redeploy to a new trouble spot.

Aircraft carriers are self-deploying and carry along some of their own logistical sustainment. But we don’t have many of them, so we cannot risk these concentrated national treasures. They present less of a loading problem than do ground forces, but transit time across the vast oceans is considerable. Carriers have the virtue of leaving a smaller “footprint” than ground forces and therefore are less an irritant to international relations. Land-based fighter aircraft do have some footprint but perhaps not as much as ground forces. Tankers can shorten their transit times, but their logistical tail can be complex. Long-range-strike airpower does not need local logistical support, and its transit time is low—but we have relatively few of these aircraft available, and their reinforcement would prove expensive. Moreover, the political costs of moving forces are considerable and may be prohibitive, both in the vacating and receiving countries.

All of that merely scratches the surface of the wealth of information and ideas in Strategic Challenges. Truly, effective strategy makers really do need a lifetime of study behind them—and a generous measure of good luck as well.

The three books reviewed here are fine fodder for a second lieutenant’s professional study. Doubtless, the second one, on Louis Johnson, will prove more engaging reading since Strategic Challenges may be a little on the heavy side for the neophyte air warrior/scholar. But, before becoming a first lieutenant, if a brown bar could master these two after studying the two overview books in the dozen listed below, that would be a major achievement—and a running start on a lifetime of strategic studies.

A Dozen Books for Professional Reading on Strategy* Two for the Overview Making Twenty-First-Century Strategy: An Introduction to Modern National Security Processes and Problems by Dennis M. Drew and Donald M. Snow. Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 2006. The authors have produced an exceedingly well written basic summary of strategy making. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2d ed., by Graham T. Allison and Philip Zelikow. New York: Longman, 1999. Second lieutenants should read this work up front because it will yield insights into the many factors affecting choices in strategy making and will help with further studies. Ten More for Depth What Is Military History? by Stephen Morillo and Michael Pavkovic. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006. This is a short and persuasive history of military history. The Campaigns of Napoleon by David G. Chandler. New York: Macmillan, 1966. Though a formidable book for a young lieutenant, it is authoritative, and Napoléon was one of the greatest—perhaps the greatest—strategist in the history of land warfare. Navies in History by Clark G. Reynolds. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998. This book would be a good survey of the sea domain to use in conjunction with Buell’s case study, below. Master of Sea Power: A Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King by Thomas B. Buell. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980. A masterpiece of military biography, Master of Sea Power will at the same time introduce readers to the complexity of strategy making for naval war. The Influence of Sea Power upon History by Alfred Thayer Mahan. New York: Hill & Wang, 1966. The author is probably the principal theorist on the sea domain. John Warden and the Renaissance of American Air Power by John Andreas Olsen. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007. Written by an articulate Norwegian Air Force officer favorably disposed to John Warden and his “strategic” application of airpower, this book offers the neophyte strategist good insights in one stream of thinking about strategy making for airpower. It deserved its place on the chief of staff’s reading list for 2008. Air Power: The Men, Machines, and Ideas That Revolutionized War, from Kitty Hawk to Gulf War II by Stephen Budiansky. New York: Viking, 2004. A possible counterbalance to the Olsen book, above, this erudite journalist provides an interpretation that favors the “tactical” applications of airpower. Powerful and Brutal Weapons: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Easter Offensive by Stephen P. Randolph. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. This book represents an excellent case study that will provide the young strategist with an articulate, well-written explanation of the many factors beyond military logic that affect the conduct and outcomes of campaigns. The Command of the Air by Giulio Douhet, trans. Dino Ferrari. 1942. Reprint, Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1983. Although Douhet’s work is dated by now and doubted by many, air warriors/scholars should read the original so that they know what he really said. Many people still assert that airpower still awaits its theorist. Beyond Horizons: A Half Century of Air Force Space Leadership, rev. ed., by David N. Spires. Peterson AFB, CO: Air Force Space Command in association with Air University Press, 1998. This book is a solid history on the space domain. One for Good Measure On War by Carl von Clausewitz, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. For the land-war domain, this book is pretty heavy reading for brown bars, but they are certain to revisit it again and again throughout their careers—and strategists must be familiar with it. *Because the literature of military history, theory, and strategy is too vast to read in its entirety, this listing makes no pretense at being authoritative. It is merely a possible starter list for the study of the art and science of strategy making.

*Prof. Dennis Drew of the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies and Dr. Daniel Mortensen of the Air Force Research Institute gave valuable assistance in the preparation of this article; its remaining faults are entirely my responsibility.

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Notes

1. James M. Smith, “Expeditionary Leaders, CINCs, and Chairmen: Shaping Air Force Officers for Leadership Roles in the Twenty-first Century,” Aerospace Power Journal 14, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 30–44, http://www.airpower
.au.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj00/win00/smith.pdf (accessed 18 July 2008); Mike Thirtle, “Developing Aerospace Leaders for the Twenty-first Century: A Historical Context for the DAL Concept,” Aerospace Power Journal 15, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 52–57, http://www.airpower.au.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj01/sum01/thirtle.pdf (accessed 18 July 2008); and Rebecca Grant, “Why Airmen Don’t Command,” Air Force Magazine 91, no. 3 (March 2008): 46–49, http://www.afa.org/magazine/march2008/0308command.pdf (accessed 18 July 2008).

2. Roger H. Nye, The Challenge of Command: Reading for Military Excellence (Wayne, NJ: Avery Publishing Group, 1986).

3. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 577.

4. This idea has many fathers, one of the main ones being Michael Howard. See his “Military Science in an Age of Peace,” Chesney Memorial Gold Medal lecture, 3 October 1973, reprinted in Journal of the Royal United Services Institute 119 (March 1974): 3–11.

5. Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (Saint Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2004), 283–87.

6. Gen T. Michael Moseley, The Nation’s Guardians: America’s 21st Century Air Force, CSAF White Paper (Washington, DC: Department of the Air Force, Office of the Chief of Staff, 29 December 2007), http://www.af.mil/ shared/media/document/AFD-080207-048.pdf.

7. Although the book is well written and highly readable, the copy editing, though very good, is not perfect: “ordnance” and “ordinance” are confused, and one photo caption shows Assistant Secretary Johnson and Maj Gen Oscar Westover in front of a “B-17”; in fact, the aircraft is a B-15. The book also refers to the B-36 as an eight-engine bomber. Until the jets were added, it had “only” six; afterward, 10.