New World Vistas: Air and Space Power for the 21st Century. Attack Volume.
Abstract
Shaping the Air Force to meet the needs of the future is a daunting undertaking. In the face of grave geopolitical uncertainties, defense planners must define with the greatest possible precision a set of military capabilities that will allow the United States to prevail in a broad range of possible scenarios. Planners must also propose a path for acquiring those capabilities- a task that is complicated by the difficulty of formulating innovative concepts that capitalize on existing or emerging technologies and by the declining availability of resources. In the past, the planning process was often heavily dependent on predictions about the likely future state of the world. While this was an acceptable approach when the enemy was well defined and well understood, it is less appropriate in today's environment. Therefore, the New World Vistas Attack Panel, charged with defining operational capabilities that would enable the United States Armed Forces and particularly the Air Force-to conduct any mission, meet any contingency, dominate any battlefield, and win any war, adopted a somewhat generic approach to its mission. That is, it began by specifying certain 'umbrella' prerequisites for achieving decisive military victory: (1) The commander is skilled in the operational art of war; (2) The commander knows the capabilities, activities, and intents of the enemy, and he denies the inverse; and (3) The victor dominates the battlefield and controls the operations of all enemy forces-land, naval, air, and space
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1995
- Accession Number
- ADA309594