Quotes About Airpower

He sent in a conventional force, admittedly just a few men from the Tenth Mountain Division. It reminded all that there were never enough SOF. Airpower had killed effectively in Qala-i-Jangi. After all the hammering, though, people had to go in on the ground with rifles, grenades, and guts. To control dirt and the societies that lived on it, you had to use live, trained, disciplined humans, and more than a few.

When asked to give his opinion as to why airpower was stillborn in the U.S., with little funding or interest coming from the navy or army, he replied: "Conservatism. . . . You see, the army and the navy are the oldest institutions we have. They place everything on precedent. You can't do that in the air business. You have got to look ahead.

Aviation is going to control the world economically and militarily whether we like it or not. Airpower is not merely military aviation, it is also civilian aviation and airpower is peace power.

Air power alone does not guarantee America's security, but I believe it best exploits the nation's greatest asset - our technical skill.

After 9/11, a few hundred CIA and Special Operations personnel, backed by airpower and Afghan militias, devastated Taliban and al-Qaeda forces. That effort has since turned into a conventional Pentagon nation-building exercise and gone backward.

In the first half of 1944, battle casualty rates for every 1,000 bomber crewmen serving six months in combat included 712 killed or missing and 175 wounded: 89 percent. By one calculation, barely one in four U.S. airmen completed twenty-five missions over Germany, a minimum quota that was soon raised to thirty and then thirty-five on the assumption that the liberation of France and Belgium and the attenuation of German airpower made flying less lethal.

The first lesson is that you can't lose a war if you have command of the air, and you can't win a war if you haven't.

The finishing off of the encircled enemy army is to be left to the Luftwaffe.

The first lesson is that you can't lose a war if you have command of the air, and you can't win a war if you haven't.

Gulf Lesson One is the value of airpower.

The last thing the American president needed was news that China was about to erase his airpower edge in the Western Pacific.

In short, the briefing talked about things, the elements of airpower—numbers of aircraft and bases—but did not talk about the application of force and how it would be used to frustrate the enemy and accomplish the CINC's military objectives.

secret codicils would allow the German Army to illegally rearm and train on Russian territory throughout the twenties and thirties. Tens of thousands of German "work commandos" would come to Russia in 1923 and begin experimenting in the new, still theoretical technique of the blitzkrieg, the idea that small, high-quality, mobile forces backed by airpower could overcome a country before it could react.