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This chapter describes the wartime application of the intuitive intelligence mode in new domains, including policing, colonial administration, and military tactics. The intelligence strategy morphed from a means of gathering knowledge to a means of acquiring political control. As agents strove to fulfill their dreams of adventure in Arabia, they strayed into the realm of warfare, applying their expertise on Arab affairs to the use and theorization of irregular warfare, deception tactics, and airpower, all of which set the Middle East campaigns apart from the war of attrition in Europe. The official construction of Arabia as a “spy-space” where the expert agent knew how to meet cunning with cunning was central in the articulation of these tactics and underwrote the adoption of an avowedly conscienceless approach to involvement in the Middle East.

This chapter describes the confluence of political, technological, and social changes that prompted the emergence of covert military intervention as an escalation-control technique. It lays the foundation for assessing how more recent political and technological changes, such as cyberwarfare and drones, influence the covert sphere. In particular, this chapter highlights the special role of World War I. It conceptualizes the Great War as a critical juncture that dramatized the dangers of large-scale war escalation and accelerated political, social, and technological developments that influenced escalation control. These changes sharpened the problem of escalation control by making leaders more vulnerable to hawkish domestic constraints and making intentions about limited war harder to discern. Yet it also made possible new ways of using military force anonymously through, for example, the development of airpower. World War I prompted major powers to experiment with ways of limiting war; this included manipulation of the form of external military intervention.

The third chapter was written after listening to several ground officers and historians argue that the nature of war was unchanging and immutable. One stated that war as experienced by an ancient Greek hoplite was the same as for any soldier today in Iraq or Afghanistan. That statement bears examination. Such attitudes are almost always expressed by those who know only of land warfare—which they equate to war in general. For sailors, aviators, space or cyber warfare practitioners, the experience of war is fundamentally different, especially today. New methods, but also old ones too often ignored, clearly demonstrate that war is indeed mutable.

Determining principles of war and the mental effort required to articulate them are important for military officers. During a crisis when time is short and there are many demands on our attention, we must simplify and extract general rules from conflicting data points. Principles of War have been espoused for centuries, but the urge to codify such rules took on added impetus in the twentieth century. Today, such principles are considered invaluable learning tools at military schools. Yet, it is time for an update, because those used today were devised a century ago by a soldier who had little or no insight into warfare at sea or in the air. His precepts have survived, largely intact, until the present day. The result has been a distorted view of war. We must begin anew—not to reshape the earlier principles, but to look at modern war and devise new ones that govern the new environment.

The final chapter is an overview of the entire book, which leads to a new paradigm of war. Starting with a past overemphasis on bloody battle inherited from Clausewitz, it then proceeds through discussions of various methods to avoid such battles, to capitalize on speed and surprise, to reflect individual service and national cultures, and to capitalize on new technologies and doctrines. These varied factors suggest alternatives that emphasize the importance of speed, surprise, precision, and the limitation of risk.

This chapter analyzes the evolution of military education at the RCAF Staff College in the decade following the Second World War by stressing the multifaceted approach which relied on the three components of military power: conceptual, moral, and physical. While the former took the lion's share of RCAF military education with its extensive study on airpower, the two latter aspects were also present in the Staff College formative experience to cement an esprit de corps. By comparing the Staff College program to elements present in contemporary staff education at the Canadian Forces College, the essay underlines the roots of military education in the Canadian Forces after the Second World War.

This chapter revisits the thinking of the U.S. militaries' late 20th century air power theorists Colonels John Boyd and John Warden and recent experiences and learning about 'small wars' and counter insurgency. The author notes that while there are some similarities in the two colonels' central ideas about overwhelming the enemy neither one had made much of a study of small wars both claimed, however, that their ideas could be applied to any size of conflict. The author shows that the use of kinetic air power may not work in what is currently called Irregular Warfare and that discerning if and how to use it is an "intellectual challenge &quotmore so than one of having the best technologies. The author further points out that because Irregular Warfare does not align easily with staff and war college curricula on classic air power there is ironically very little 'irregular' curriculum.

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.

Since 9/11 the Air Force has been compelled, sometimes reluctantly, to adopt a subsidiary role to US landpower in the various wars against terror. This process has left the notion of Airpower and Air Leadership struggling to find a voice. While the reemergence of great power competition might bring rain to the Air Force's leadership desert, it is the contention of this chapter that the Air Force needs to be able to adapt and lead even if that is not the case.

This chapter focuses on how airpower played a major role in generating what Peter Adey has termed ‘aerial life’, a culture that promotes national identity and security through activities related to aviation. The rapid movement that characterises modern aerial life makes and remakes places and spaces, producing ‘aeromobilities’ as subjects and objects circulate in an increasingly globalised world. This aeromobility of ‘people, goods, and ideas’ has been supported by state and industrial investments in scientific and commercial innovation and management. It is possible to view airpower as the military segment of a more general aeromobility that marks late modern society, but it can also be argued that aeromobility is intrinsically militarised.

This chapter explores NATO’s air campaign and the partnership between NATO states and Libyan revolutionaries. It examines the role of former Libyan military officers in staffing command posts and communicating with NATO at the frontlines of Benghazi and Brega, Misrata; the Nafusa Mountains, and Tripoli. It examines NATO’s internal struggles over defining the end state and definition of threats to civilians implied by its civilian protection and arms embargo mandate, and its increasingly hazy scope. It notes that NATO officers maintained scrupulous rules of engagement, not taking sides and avoiding an official ground liaison office, and focusing on fixed strategic targets — but argues that this, given NATO’s limited assets, created intelligence challenges of corroboration which could only be met through partnering Libyan opposition forces with special forces and advisers. This fostered competition between both NATO states and Libyan opposition forces, and created a slow tempo of attacks. Both Libyan opposition and loyalist forces adapted tactics to compensate for the air power. The chapter concludes that the campaign was a variation of a model deployed in Afghanistan that required political and operational unity between local combatants and western and Arab advisers, but that sponsored significant political strains, divisions and frustrations.