1   The Man of Influence   In just sixty years the United States Air Force has grown from a disorganized giant, mired in the jumble of too rapid demobilization after World War II, to the most influential military service in the world today. In the process it has achieved triumphant successes that exceeded even the promise of its evocative song "The Wild Blue Yonder" while overcoming haunting failures of concept, equipment, and personnel.   Fortunately for the United States and the world, the successes have vastly outnumbered the failures in both number and degree. Until September 11, 2001, the Air Force has been a significant, if not the principal, factor in the remarkable victories of both the Gulf War and the Cold War. Every leader of the United States Air Force, from Secretary to Chief of Staff to squadron commander, would be quick to note that these triumphs were won in concert with the Army and the Navy. No matter how hotly the three services contend for roles and missions, appropriations, media attention, and public support, the serious bickering stops when it comes to battle. The concept of joint operations, so successful in World War II, was not always observed in the intervening years, but was demonstrated admirably in the Gulf War, operations in the Balkins, in Afghanistan, and in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Nonetheless, while much of what will be said applies equally to its sister services, this book will focus on the United States Air Force.

  The Air Force achieved its great successes despite a number of formidable obstacles, foreign and domestic. The first and most immediate of these was the talented, focused, and effective air forces of the Soviet Union, which developed excellent equipment in massive numbers along with the strategy and tactics to use it. The USSR shared its capabilities bountifully with its satellite states, some of which were destined to become fierce opponents of the United States. The threat of the Soviet Union was real, massive, and seemingly never-ending. Soviet nuclear missile capability, exaggerated at first, soon grew to immense proportions. And while the Soviet Union is no more, its missile force, now divided among three of the survivor states, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, not only remains but is perhaps more threatening because its control is far less certain.   There were less obvious but equally important hazards at home. The first of these was the continual requirement to cope not only with the vagaries of the Congressional budgeting process but also with the growing restrictions inherent in oversight--a kindly term for micromanagement by both Congress and the Executive Branch.

The second was the telling loss of public support, almost two decades in duration, resulting from distaste for the war in Vietnam. For the first time in its history, members of the United States Air Force found themselves publicly vilified for doing what they had been ordered to do. And while the prestige of the USAF has been largely restored today, there lurks a reservoir of antimilitary sentiment still to be found in the media, in academia, and, surprisingly, in the government.   Most remarkably, even while the Air Force struggled to overcome these varied challenges, it created and maintained a unique ability to plan far into the future. The Air Force''s reliance on technology was perhaps inherent in the very science of flight itself. More than the Army or the Navy, and more than the services of other nations, including the Soviet Union, the Air Force put its faith in advanced technologies. Fostered from the very start by General of the Air Force Henry H. "Hap" Arnold, and encouraged by succeeding Chiefs of Staff, the Air Force not only made the funds available for research, it granted credibility and opportunity to the military and civilian personnel who pursued technology as a career.

The funding was not always constant, for wartime operational considerations invariably drained funds away from research, but the basic idea that research and development was the essential element for the continued success of the Air Force always remained.   Despite every effort to avoid the characteristics and the operating methods of a giant bureaucracy, the very size and age of the Air Force has made it one. Prescience is not normally associated with a huge organization, yet the Air Force has over the years managed to endow its leadership and its operating forces with the ability to anticipate future requirements for equipment and training. The phenomenal result has been that the Air Force, operating under the budget constraints imposed upon all the services, has managed all current crises while doing the necessary research and development to accelerate the technologies necessary for future conflicts.   For forty years the principal task of the United States Air Force was to deter offensive action by the Soviet Union. The USAF accomplished this in part by combining the experience and techniques gained in the employment of air power in World War II with an ever increasing arsenal of atomic weapons, including the intercontinental ballistic missile. The rest of the task was achieved when the Air Force, drawn reluctantly and against its instincts into the space age, responded by capitalizing on the opportunity to create an amazing array of new technologies.   At the same time, the USAF had to respond to other challenges.

Some of these were of the monumental size and scope of the Korean and Vietnamese wars, while some were less threatening, like the invasions of Grenada and Panama. In addition, the USAF had to undertake disaster relief at home and abroad, as well as show the flag and project power. And all the while, it had to deal with major social issues ranging from the integration of black personnel into the service, to overcoming civilian distaste for the military during and after the Vietnam War period, to providing equal opportunity for women and minorities.   Despite the multifaceted nature of the Air Force''s tasks, it was successful in almost all of them, all the while containing the Soviet Union and making the most vital contributions to winning the Cold War. It was next thrust into a peacekeeping role in the Balkans. Then, as the global war on terror became manifest, it became actively engaged in new operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.   In retrospect, the years of the Cold War have a monolithic quality, as if there had been an unchanging confrontation with the Soviet Union which the Air Force steadfastly met with unchanging means. Yet it was not so, for the nature of the threat changed almost annually, forcing a corresponding change in the Air Force''s response.

In the very early years, at the time of the Berlin Blockade, the Air Force''s response was a hollow one, brandishing a nearly empty nuclear arsenal at a gigantic array of Soviet forces. As the years passed, the Soviet Union, through its surrogates, challenged the United States all around the world, in each instance with a minimal involvement of its own troops. Thus it fought the Korean War with North Korean and Chinese forces, supplemented by Soviet equipment, training, and limited personnel. It supported the North Vietnamese in a similar economic manner, letting another country bleed for its own purposes. The same pattern prevailed in the Middle East, in Africa, and ultimately as close as Cuba. With the Soviet Union tugging at the seams of countries all around the world, the U.S. policy of containment, begun by President Truman, was an expensive one.

  Yet it was ultimately successful, despite the lack of a decision in Korea and the loss of the war in Vietnam. Over the years, the United States Air Force, both the benefactor and the beneficiary of the American system of free enterprise, was able to build air and missile forces that kept the Soviet Union within the general sphere of influence allotted to it at Yalta.   The Soviet Union was not only contained, it was strained, its military budget consuming it economically and technically. The Soviet advances in military equipment and in space exploration were obtained by investments that matched and often exceeded those of the United States, particularly as a percentage of gross national product. The tremendous expenditures were at the expense of a rational expansion of the USSR''s civilian economy. The productive capacity of the Soviet Union, channeled so single-mindedly into its military efforts (for its space program was primarily for military purposes), was unable to develop an industrial base with a technology and a market structure comparable to those of its old Western enemies or of the emerging nations of Asia. The USSR''s atrophied civilian industrial base made its military burden increasingly difficult to bear by 1980, and impossible to bear a decade later.   In that critical ten-year period, three separate undertakings by the United States spelled the downfall of the Soviet Union.

The first was the buildup of American arms that began in 1980 and reversed the decline in strength that had occurred under the Carter administration. The Soviet economy, already almost exhausted, was strained beyond endurance by the requirement to match the American buildup.   The second undertaking was the dazzling if ultimately unfulfilled prospects of President Ronald Reagan''s "Star Wars" program. The grandiose project was obviously beyond the capacity of the Soviet Union to match; the risk that the United States might succeed was too much for Soviet leaders to contemplate.   The.