Challenge and Opportunities

Abstract

It was air power that opened the nuclear age, and it did so with an intensity of focus that surpassed even Douhet’s exaggerated vision of the potential of air bombardment. But within a very short time new factors had begun to blur that focus, and the history of air power since 1945 is essentially a history of diffusion, a history of air power and of the strategic thought behind it moving away from an insistence on the primacy of defeating an enemy by overwhelming air attack on his homeland before his army and navy could even mobilise.