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AMERICAN airmen are confronted with two different but not mutually exclusive visions of future warfare. The first, stemming from the Gulf War, perceives airpower dominating modern mechanized warfare. The second discerns modern mechanized warfare-especially as demonstrated in the Gulf War-as a thing of the past. In the latter view, the future of warfare increasingly will be in the realm of insurgency, even more specifically the realm of protracted revolutionary warfare. To a large extent, the Air Force has ignored insurgency as much as possible, preferring to think of it as little more than a small version of conventional war. Insurgency, however, differs fundamentally from conventional war. The reluctance of the world's most powerful air force to address the peculiarities of insurgency and counterinsurgency, combined with predictions that such protracted conflicts will be more common in the future, creates an important void in U.S. airpower theory.1
This essay explores the relationship between protracted revolutionary conflict and the theory of airpower as perceived by the U.S. Air Force between the end of World War II and 1992. The thesis is straightforward: specifically, the U.S. Air Force has not effectively accounted for the realities of insurgent conflict in its theory of airpower. To support the thesis, this essay will provide definitional clarity to the complexities of insurgent warfare and then examine how U.S. airmen have reacted to the insurgent challenge unofficially (through the unofficial literature since World War II) and officially (through the Air Force theory of airpower as expressed in its doctrine2). Three time frames organize these latter two tasks-first, the postwar era until 1964, second, the period of heavy U.S. combat involvement in Vietnam and its aftermath (1965-80), and finally, the period from 1980 until the Air Force published its Foreign Internal Defense Doctrine and Basic Doctrine in 1992.
Insurgency-The Fundamental Differences
The author has argued elsewhere that insurgencies-particularly those whose strategies have derived from Mao Zedong and his many disciples-are fundamentally different from conventional wars in at least five ways.3 Each of these differences make the traditional application of airpower problematic.
The first difference is time. For the insurgent, time is a weapon. The longer the insurgency remains active, the more it discredits the government trying to stamp it out. The longer the insurgency remains...