'...Or Go Down in Flame?' Toward an Airpower Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century
Abstract
To lead is to choose. Choosing commits one's group to courses of action and to consequences. In 1995 the leaders of the United States Air Force asserted that long-range planning in the Air Force was "broken" and that they would fix it. Doing so requires vision, a sense of the evolving environment, and a process for linking visions to strategies and tasks. Bureaucracy without vision mistakes activity for progress. Vision without the wherewithal for change is called dreaming. Today, planning matters because the Air Force, in our view, is poised between two courses--one to "live in fame," the other to "go down in flame," as the Air Force song goes. Bad choices forebode institutional irrelevance or, worse, disintegration and defeat. Some people may find contemplation of a future without an Air Force to be a distraction, a waste of time, or a logical impossibility. But it is none of those.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1996
- Accession Number
- ADA529762
Entities
People
- Martin C. Libicki
- Richard Szafranski
Organizations
- Air University