: Despite our best scientific intentions, the world remains an inherently complex and unpredictable place. This dissertation explores the American penchant for science and technology and its impact on the development of American precision air power. Throughout their short history, American airmen, in an effort to overcome the pervasive uncertainty of war, have sought greater precision in their air-to-ground weapons, as well as in their plans for employing these weapons. This mechanistic approach to air warfare, however, has not rid air operations of ambiguity and irregularity. As the historical case studies in this dissertation show, an overly-engineered approach has often only further amplified the negative manifestations of nonlinearity. Given the continuing existence of irregularity despite increasing technological sophistication, this study recommends the application new paradigm to air warfare, a paradigm drawn from the modem sciences of chaos and complexity to replace the determinism of the Newtonian science. With its closer analytical fit to the realities of air warfare, a nonlinear analytical paradigm can both improve our understanding of the past, as well as assist us in better preparing for air problems of the future.

A Time for Courage: The Royal Air Force in the European War, 1939-1945

Seeking Clocks in the Clouds: Nonlinearity and American Precision Air Power

Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces

Coercion and military strategy: Why denial works and punishment doesn't

What is Soviet-American competition all about? Is the Soviet Union a security problem that the United States must solve? Or is it an insecurity condition with which the U.S. must learn to live -- and if so, on what terms? What kind of a player is the United States in the great game of power politics? In "The Geopolitics of Super Power," one of our most respected strategic theorists answers these and other questions.In geopolitical terms, Colin Gray sees the Soviet-American antagonism as an enduring contest between a continental empire and a maritime coalition, each with its distinctive character and purposes. Gray explores the roots of the American style in foreign policy and strategy, and how that style relates to defense options.He identifies four broad alternatives for U.S. national security policy: passive and active means of containment, disengagement from foreign security commitments, and the "rollback" of the Soviet empire. Gray argues vigorously for active containment, for the systematic deemphasis of nuclear weapons, and for the intelligent use, for deterrence and defense purposes, of the West's great competitive strengths in the political, economic, and technological spheres.

The geopolitics of super power

: The theory of strategic air bombardment states that airpower is best used offensively to penetrate an enemy's home territory and disrupt or destroy the economy and means of war production to force the enemy to surrender. Strategic bombing will succeed either because it has fatally compromised the ability to carry on hostilities or because bombing has broken the will of the people and/or leadership to continue the fight. In World War II only multiengine bomber aircraft had the range, payload, and accuracy to accomplish this task. The strategic bombing theorists posited that destruction of the foe's means of production by aiming bombs almost entirely at manufacturing, service, and distribution facilities would quickly lead to the surrender of its armies at the front when, or even before, they exhausted the supplies remaining in their logistics system. This was the ideal result. If, for any number of reasons, that direction of attack proved impractical or insufficient, then strategic bombing theory suggested that an attack on the enemy's will to resist by applying force against the civilian population (i.e., bombing the enemy's principal population centers) might achieve the same end. In this study the author examines the employment of strategic bombers by and the target selection of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and the US Army Air Forces (AAF) in their campaign against Germany in World War II. In doing so he provides readers with a statistical basis of analysis that will enable them to form their own judgment as to the validity of the theory of strategic bombing and the intentions of the Anglo-Americans in their use of it.

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A Time for Courage: The Royal Air Force in the European War, 1939-1945

Citations

Seeking Clocks in the Clouds: Nonlinearity and American Precision Air Power

Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces

Coercion and military strategy: Why denial works and punishment doesn't

The geopolitics of super power

Bombing the European Axis Powers: A Historical Digest of the Combined Bomber Offensive, 1939 -1945