Airpower and Political Culture
Abstract
Airpower is the most responsive and, in many ways, the most useful form of military force yet developed. Increasingly, airpower demonstrates the capacity to dominate warfare, yet variations in its effectiveness show that air forces rarely achieve their material potential. The great success with which liberal democracies have employed air forces as instruments of power is most easily attributed to asymmetrical wealth, but this understanding misses the role democratic institutions and value systems play in the development and employment of airpower. Western democracies have evolved a distinctive and dominant security institution, the national air force. Authoritarian regimes have only occasionally imitated such arms and then could not trust them. The interelationship between democracy and effective airpower has both current and future significance. Airpower effectiveness clearly depends on training, equipment, organization, and strategy, but comparative studies of air power tend to focus on just technical and material factors. Social, political, and organizational factors can also determine air power's value as an instrument of power, either amplifying or attenuating its material potential. Scholarly studies of the sensitivity of military power to political culture tend to focus on armies--the arms of conquest prized by authoritarian states so there is much to learn in this field, far more than one brief article can disclose.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1997
- Accession Number
- ADA515049
Entities
People
- Charles M. Westenhoff
Organizations
- Air University