undivided CONCEPT.

undivided CONCEPT, MORE than any other, helps as the raison d'etre for an independent Air Force--strategic attack. Theoretically, although the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and special operations forces are all capable of an degree of strategic attack, the Air Force and the Airman's perspective bring the universal into sharp focus. In fact, not until the summer of 2004 was US Strategic Command tasked to draft a joint publication in succession strategic attack--presumably because of previous impasses.

the couple the birth of the air arm and recent thinking regarding strategic attack progeny from the cataclysm of World War I, characterized by dint of the ability of surface forces to kill their enemies by means of the hundreds of thousands and an equal inability to yield a decision on the battlefield. World War I aviators saw time to come warfare dominated by aircraft that could carry the fight directly to the enemy's center of gravity even now avoid the stalemate of the trenches--strategic rather than tactical attack.

During the interwar years, theorists of the like kind as Giulio Douhet, Hugh Trenchard, and William "Billy" Mitchell, as well as institutions of the like kind as the Air Corps Tactical instruct presented competing theories of strategic attack, many of them later levy to the test in the crucible of World War II further often with disappointing results. Despite the validity of the conceptual foundations, the US military generally lacked resources to course of life such attacks from the air. simply the atomic strikes against Japan in the last days of the war approached strategic attacks in succession the scale envisioned by the early airpower advocates. Understandably, postwar strategic thinking became almost exclusively a nuclear planning process

In the late 1980 technological and theoretical evolutions gave strategic attack a renewed conventional dimension. The advent of reliable precision-guided munitions and stealthy air platforms, combined with Col John Warden's idea of parallel strategic attack, meant that US aircraft could engage enemy center of gravity from beginning to end the depth and breadth of a theater with nonnuclear munitions. The cascading efficiencys and catastrophic system failures brought forward by such attacks enable joint forces to accomplish their tasks at a higher time of operations against a disrupted enemy. This rebirth of strategic attack invalidated the old-fashioned way of designating heavy bombers as strategic platforms and fighters as tactical platforms. Because the boundary strategic now applies to the nature of the target and because many aircraft now escort essentially strategic strikes, every bomb can become a strategic weapon, and nearly each platform can function as a strategic delivery system

Air Force Doctrine Document (AFDD) 2-12 Strategic Attack, 30 September 2003 defines its make submissive as "offensive action conducted by dint of command authorities aimed at generating purports that most directly achieve our national security objectives according to affecting an adversary's leadership, conflict-sustaining resources, and/or strategy" (p 1) Although the Air Force is admirably suited to deliver so attacks, no one claims that the air arm can "do it alone" or that the other services have no part in accomplishing national objectives. Quite the contrary, the of the present day emphasis on interdependent operations--a stronger affiliation than joint--probably means that the Air Force will have to commit more resources to the direct support of surface forces rather than undertake traditional strategic strike operations.

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