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Chapter 2 traces the literary response to the seductive futurist appeal and colonialist genealogy of air power in two World Wars. After the Great War, the “empire of the air” was celebrated as a last resort of martial heroism and the colonies provided laboratories for experiment. The interwar period saw the consolidating imperial gaze of air power and mechanized war turned on the civilian home front as both apocalyptic nightmare and escapist fantasy. This chapter explores T.E. Lawrence's haunting fantasies of air power as he dedicated mind and body to the RAF's role in policing the empire in the 1920s and 30s. It argues that for those who waged the war of space and movement, the mythology of armored masculinity and panoramic vision all too often resulted in blackout and bodily disintegration. It explores these conflicts of “airmindedness” in the work of Virginia Woolf, Rex Warner, George Orwell, Richard Hillary, and Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris.

This chapter is the first of two on air power. This chapter focuses on colonial bombing campaigns as an exercise of air power and examines the ways in which these campaigns were understood as police measures. The chapter then explores the ways in which contemporary air power, in the form of drones, might also be understood as a form of police power. In making this case the chapters also shows how the invention of air power meant the destruction of the civilian.

This chapter examines the production and marketing of aluminum as a carrier of uneven global modernities, thus highlighting the ways in which mobility and immobilization were simultaneously created in the world of traveling commodities, transport systems, and tourism. More specifically, it considers the role of aluminum, the “speed metal,” in modernization by linking the North American world of mobility, speed, and flight to the heavier, slower Caribbean world of bauxite mining, racialized labor relations, and resource extraction. The chapter first looks at the emergence of U.S. air power in the early twentieth century before discussing the cultural motions of Caribbean modernity and the complex constellations of mobility and immobility that structure transnational American relations. It also discusses the role played by companies like Alcoa in promoting innovation in the United States in the use of aluminum and imagining the light modernity of the future.

By World War II, public fascination with aviation and air power had created a powerful presence in popular culture.Military and government leaders sought to exploit that presence in shaping public perceptions of the war against Japan and the public fascination that drove it, but so too did writers, editors, producers, and even air power theorists.Movies, books, and popular magazine articles in significant numbers featured air power themes in a number of different guises.Some sought merely to cash in on audience appeal, while others sought to boost public morale or support for the war effort; still others used the various media to build public support for air power itself or to push distinctive theories about air power’s application.Regardless of intent, these depictions reached wide audiences and helped shape attitudes toward the war, the enemy, and air power itself, giving a unique insight into the nature of the Pacific air war.

By the start of World War II, the Martians had become involved in politics. They helped the United States get ready for modern warfare, including advancements in air power, the atomic bomb, and an ever-enhanced application of the computer in weapons development. They initiated the Manhattan Project and participated in it. However, they became divided as to the desirability of actually using the atomic bomb after Germany’s defeat.

Taking up the argument from the previous chapter concerning air power as police power, this chapter looks at no-fly zones as the perfect accompaniment for drones. The chapter takes a long historical detour to explore the birth of the idea of ‘international police’. The chapter shows that for ‘international police’ to really take hold of the geopolitical imagination, air power was necessary. Once air power was invented then the leading states could discuss ‘policing the world’ by exercising violence. The chapter therefore picks up the threads of the previous chapter and argues that within the contemporary frame the use of drones as police power is inherently linked with the use of no-fly zones.

This introduction describes the strategic bombing mission of the US Army Air Forces’ Eighth Air Force against the Fock-Wulfe plant at Bremen, Germany, on April 17, 1943, assessing the use of high-altitude daylight precision bombing,. The introduction then reviews American strategic bombing theory from its origins in World War I to the thinking of three great interwar air power theorists―the Italian Giulio Douhet, the Briton Hugh Trenchard, and the American Billy Mitchell―to the founding of the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS), the development of the Norden bombsight and B-17 bomber, and the genesis of HADPB theory at the Air Corps Tactical School.

This chapter examines two crises of the US against the Bosnian Serbs and Serbia in 1992 and 1999, respectively. In both cases, coercive diplomacy failed but coercion ultimately succeeded. The first crisis arose over actions in the Bosnian Civil War from 1992 to 1995, whereby the United States finally coerced the Bosnian Serbs into accepting a peace agreement but could never compel them to give up territory until it had already been taken by force. The second crisis arose over Serbia’s treatment of Kosovar Albanians and concluded when Serbia’s President Slobodan Milosevic finally conceded Kosovo after a 78-day NATO air campaign. He conceded, however, only when the expected economic costs to Serbia from the air campaign outweighed the political value of maintaining control of Kosovo. This crisis is a rigorous test of the survival hypothesis as Serbia eventually conceded homeland territory while it still retained the means to resist.

The intellectual underpinnings for the development of American air power after the First World War took place at the Air Corps Tactical School, located at Langley Field, Virginia from 1920 to 1931 and thereafter at Maxwell Field in Alabama. Chapter Two traces the true changes in air power thought and theory that began at ACTS in 1930s. Graduates of ACTS included air power luminaries included Harold George, Haywood “Possum” Hansell, Hoyt Vandenberg, George Kenney, Ira Eaker, Claire Chennault, and Kuter, “Larry” to his friends. This chapter is important because it shows these theorists, not only great thinkers, but men, who lived, laughed, argued, and drank with each other. Finally, this chapter discusses the schism that developed between the adherents of strategic bombardment theory and those who focused on pursuit (fighter) aviation. It was not just a doctrinal dispute, but one that tore friendships apart.

This chapter discusses the year when the prisoners of war (POWs) were freed from their Japanese oppressors. This seemed evident in the inability of the Japanese to protect and adequately feed their prisoners. Those POW who still remained in Japanese camps were shuffled from place to place due to the constant threat posed by the American air power. The end of the year brought freedom to the POWs and Internees, who were shocked by the skill, scale, and modernity of the fleets and personnel that had rapidly formed to carry them home.

Through the prism of post-cold-war air campaigns, differing national positions of contributing European air forces, as well as their relative weights and evolving capabilities, are gauged. Since major Western air campaigns have occurred only with substantial US involvement, American capabilities offer natural benchmarks. The issue of breadth versus depth has affected all European air forces. Maintaining a coherent set of aerospace capabilities has proven a challenge even for larger European countries. Smaller countries can pursue only limited ambitions and maintain segments of aerospace power. Nonetheless, selected smaller air forces with the right equipment, training, and attitude have managed to make visible contributions to multinational air campaigns. Air campaigns also spurred Europe’s military space ambitions. Space assets have become indispensable enablers of modern warfare, and selected European countries have deployed important capabilities into orbit.

Classical deterrence concepts were developed to prevent nuclear war, for obvious reasons, and thus tend to focus on high-stakes crisis bargaining, or “chicken” games, to both threaten and avoid Armageddon. Yet deterrence may operate in many different settings (i.e., different games) and with repeated interactions by the players. Indeed, deterrence is prevalent, if underappreciated, at the operational level of war, even when a state is attacking at the strategic level. Drawing on a number of historical examples, this chapter argues that command of the air over the battlefield is operationally valuable because it deters ground forces from massing and maneuvering, which can benefit either offensive and defensive operations. The degree to which an air force can deter in war depends on various operational factors, including the degree of air superiority achieved over the battlefield, the capability of the air force to locate and target enemy ground forces, the composition of enemy forces, the presence of friendly ground forces, and permissive environmental conditions.

This introductory chapter reviews existing schools of scholarship that describe airpower's evolving role in conflict and informs the book's discussion of the origins of air-atomic theory. It argues that these schools all miss a matter that is important to each of them: the rise and fall of air-atomic power in the early Cold War. It emerged in 1945, was transformed by the growth of US and Soviet nuclear arsenals, and finally was superseded by a new strategic approach that substituted stability for victory. It is argued that the evolution of nuclear strategy and the evidence about it cannot be presented as a chronicle, because events and people intersect in important ways on many paths that would be tangled in a simple narrative. The evolution of air-atomic ideas is best understood in its own terms and its own words, taking great caution to avoid anachronistic judgments. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

The conclusion brings the narrative to an end by discussing why the experience of the US Marine Corps in the small wars era matters and how that experience can be applied to the employment of aviation (more broadly, air power) in small wars today and in the future. The conclusion revisits the concept of small wars and then examines the lessons learned by the marines from 1915 to 1934.

This chapter analyses the logic and capabilities that would be involved in an Indian strategy focusing on limited, airborne operations against Pakistan, including the potential benefits, risks, and escalation potential of selecting certain targets, and the need for ground mobilization to back up an air power option. It assesses the capabilities that India currently has and would need to acquire in order to carry out effective airstrikes against Pakistan. Recent American and Israeli use of air power against terrorist organizations and their state hosts heighten Indian interests in such operations. Yet, the capabilities the US and Israel possess compared to their adversaries are vastly different than those that India possesses relative to Pakistan. Notwithstanding major procurement efforts underway, India is still several years from having an effective option for stand-off strikes. Even then, the escalatory effects of anything more than politically symbolic strikes could be counterproductive to Indian strategic interests.

This chapter critiques the popular concept of cyberwar arguing that both the threat it represents to major powers, as well as its efficacy as a weapon against others has been dramatically over exaggerated. Drawing parallel with the debate over the effect of air power that dominated the period between the First and Second World Wars it suggests that the appropriate conceptualisation of “cyberpower” is as part of a combined arms system.