Air & Space Power Journal, Air University, Maxwell AFB, AL / Published September 24, 2020
As foreign adversaries use the information domain to misinform and affect the will of our people, the US should develop leverage to hold at risk their closed or semipermissible information domains. The core US interest in cyberspace remains freedom—freedom to access information, freedom to express, and in the virtual world, freedom to assemble.
The United States demonstrated its strategic commitment to the space domain by creating the US Space Force. For the last two decades, the Air Force wrestled with the imperative to develop a cadre of space professionals. The emergent Space Force provides an opportunity to revisit the topic of space professionalism.
Kerry Chávez Dr. Ori Swed The proliferation of civilian drone technologies to violent nonstate actors (VNSA) gives them a new offensive edge and increases challenges to security providers. Though far inferior to exquisite military-grade drones, commercial models enable VNSAs to leverage airpower’s unique attributes for violent attack, intelligence gathering, and propaganda generation.
Maj Lou Nguyen, USAF Lt Col Jeremy L. Sparks, USAF For far too long, many of America’s competitors have used the cyber domain with wanton abandon, with seemingly little to no response from the US government. What role can the Department of Defense (DOD) play in countering our adversaries, and can the DOD get to the point of bringing effects to these cyber threats, up to and including the use of kinetic weapons?
LCDR Trevor Phillips-Levine, USN Perpetuated by the fall of the Soviet Union and engagement in the War on Terror, US airpower readiness for high-end conflicts has been allowed to erode. Overemphasis on close-in air support missions have led to cancellations or curtailment of numerous projects designed for warfare against peer adversaries, while the fleet life of existing platforms was squandered on low-risk missions. As the United States (US) Air Force begins to retool its arsenal for the return of great power competition, concern has mounted about its commitment to close-in support of land components.
Maj Nicholas T. G. Narbutovskih, USAF Historical case studies of airborne reconnaissance from World War I through Operation Enduring Freedom validate that airborne reconnaissance is critical to war fighting. The dilemma is that airborne special reconnaissance does not formally exist in doctrine. Despite the Joint Force’s increasingly heavy reliance on light fixed-wing reconnaissance platforms in the last two decades, there is no authoritative guidance on how to best integrate these platforms.
Maj Rudy Novak, USAF Many questions linger on what conceptually and physically the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) entails and what it will provide to the war fighter. This article outlines the fundamental table stakes that should guide architects in the development of this future concept. While ABMS has evolved with the heightened influence of JADC2, this article focuses on its role in aerial combat.
edited by Brent D. Ziarnick Reviewed by Capt Jeremy J. Grunert, USAF “Deterrence,” states Peter Sellers’ titular character in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, “is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack.” In Kubrick’s black comedy, the observation cynically underpins the film’s satirical attack on Cold War nuclear policies in general and the USAF’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) in particular.
edited by Rebecca R. Moore and Damon Coletta Reviewed by Lt Col Matthew C. Wunderlich, USAF In NATO’s Return to Europe, editors Rebecca Moore and Damon Coletta bring together seven leading political scientists, scholars, and historians to examine issues within the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) while outlining options for the future. Employing the history of NATO as the backdrop to make sense of geopolitics in the Ukraine, the authors clarify the challenges facing the alliance while recommending future solutions to preserve NATO by returning the focus to European affairs.
by Richard Overy Reviewed by 1stLt Walker Mills, USMC “For good or ill, air mastery is today the supreme expression of military power and Fleets and Armies, however necessary, must accept a subordinate rank.”
edited by Lawrence Rubin and Adam N. Stulberg Reviewed by 1st Lt John Lee, USAF In The End of Strategic Stability, editors Lawrence Rubin and Adam Stulberg bring together 17 regional experts to examine contested understandings of deterrence and strategic stability among existing and potential nuclear actors. Rubin and Stulberg are professors at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs.
by Jeffrey W. Donnithorne Reviewed by Capt F. Jon Nesselhuf, USAF The resignation of Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, USMC, general, retired, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, USMC, general, retired, give pressing interest to Jeffrey W. Donnithornes’ new book on civil-military relations: Four Guardians: A Principled Agent View of American Civil Military Relations.
by Forrest Marion Reviewed by Maj Will Selber, USAF America’s 17-year war in Afghanistan has received significant attention from a wide array of chroniclers. Those authors who focus on the USAF’s contribution usually discuss the service’s unmanned aerial vehicles, the heroism of its battlefield Airmen, or the prowess of its ever-vigilant pilots. Curiously missing from the war’s historiography, however, is a dedicated analysis on the USAF’s longest air advising mission.
by Doug Millard Reviewed by 1st Lt James Corcoran, USAF What do you see when you look up at the stars? This is one of the fundamental questions that author Doug Millard, a deputy keeper of technologies and engineering at the Science Museum in London, tries to answer in his book Satellite: Innovation in Orbit.
by Robert Mandel Reviewed by Dr. Amir S. Gohardani In Optimizing Cyberdeterrence: A Comprehensive Strategy for Preventing Foreign Cyberattacks, author and professor Robert Mandel tackles one of the most relevant topics of the Information Age. In an interesting approach that focuses on deterring international cyberattacks rather than internal cyberattacks, the author makes the case that there are underexamined distinctions between cyber deterrence and other types of deterrence.
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