The genesis of this book is in the early 90s, when the author was teaching at the Air Command Staff College, and had a variety of conversations with mid-career officers, senior faculty, and general officers, that revealed a great deal of confusion and unhappiness about the future of the USAF and flight officers. The thesis, as developed at RAND, is that the USAF has "lost sight of the bubble", the strategic theory of airpower, and has degenerated to an organization of careerist pilots unable to coherently justify their increasingly expensive existence to Congress or the American public. The corrective is a new theory of airpower, instituted from senior leadership on down to the most junior airman, which will reconstitute and advance the USAF as a premier instrument of American power. This book advances that theory, using historical research and aviation metaphors to bridge USAF and policy-making audiences.

As might be expected from a RAND publication, the argumentation is concise, clear, and deeply researched. Builder starts with the earlier days of airpower, and great figures like Billy Mitchell and Hap Arnold, who laid the groundwork for the conquering air forces of WW2. The theory as developed after WW1 was that airpower could become a decisive arm, flying over trenches to strike at the heart of the enemy (population and morale, the technological infrastructure of war), and ending wars without the bloody stalemates of the War to End All Wars. Though airpower played a major role in WW2, it was not the decisive arm that had been theorized. The new technology of the atomic bomb carried airpower to its logical extreme: wars of absolute destruction. However, the newly independent USAF had become fixated on its means, ever more advanced aircraft, rather than the ends of projecting power. Ballistic missiles began to substitute for ICBMs, and aerial bombardment proved ineffective in guerrilla warfare. The final section of this book is a mediation on the new global village caused by revolutions in ICT, and an emerging global insecurity caused by violence between factions and non-state actors, rather than an increasingly diminished nation-state. The final word is a restatement of purpose: The mission of the Air Force is the military control and exploitation of the aerospace continuum in support of the national interests.

So after 20 years, how does the book hold up? The futurism stuff is a little dated, but not totally wrong. Airpower has scored some major successes since The Icarus Syndrome was written, with NATO interventions in Bosnia and Libya adding to victory in Desert Storm. Conversely, air power alone has been insufficient to halt Islamic extremism, intervene in the Syrian Civil War, or deter Russian adventures in Georgia and Ukraine. The development of drones has been a major success, although the CIA and Army have extremely ambitious Predator/Reaper programs compared to the laggardly Air Force. I don't think the personnel and morale problems that prompted this book have been solved at all. Most tellingly, basic procurement remains a disaster, with the F-22 buy cut to only 187 airplanes, the Joint Strike Fighter over-budget and underperforming, USAF command trying and failing to kill the A-10, scandal and rebids for the KC-45 Tanker, and repeated allegations of incompetence and unprofessionalism in the nuclear forces. I'm trying to think of what's gone well for the USAF since the 90s, and it's really hard. The basic problem is one of 'why': Mitchell and Arnold knew exactly why they had to dominate the air: to avoid the slaughter of the trenches. Currently, with American dominance of air and space a given, its hard to justify why that capability must be maintained and expanded.