This book briefly examines the history of joint air operations and some night air operations from World War II through Operation Desert Storm. Colonel McLean focuses on the need for increased training for joint operations at night. He describes a hypothetical contingency in Korea to illustrate some of the challenges of conducting joint night operations. He offers recommendations for a building-block approach to improve training in our joint night air warfare capability.

The genesis of this book can be traced to two specific assignments, the author's Air Force-Navy officer exchange duty in F-14s and his tour on the staff in the Special Management Organization for low-altitude navigation and targeting infrared for nigh (LANTIRN). From his experiences with the Navy, he gained an appreciation for how well the services can work together if we can overcome the challenges to joint operations. The author's experiences since then with Marine and Army personnel convinced him that the same discipline, pride, and expertise run through any warrior, regardless of what color uniform he or she wears or what service insignia is painted on the side of the airplane. This ingrained devotion to duty, properly directed toward mission accomplishment, can override any sense of interservice rivalry and greatly increase the sum total of military power through joint operations. This inherent capability is limited, though, because of a lack of an in-depth aware of each other's capabilities and limitations. Following this exposure to the possibilities of joint operation, the author's tour in the LANTIRN office at Headquarters TAC convinced him that future air warfare must include night combat. He felt that the tactical capability provided by the emerging night technology was too great to be neglected. Each of the armed services had or was developing the technology for night warfare, but there was no formal program to develop or train for joint night tactics or operations. When offered the opportunity to compete for the PACAF command-sponsored research fellowship at AUCADRE, he saw this as an opportunity to point out what he considered an oversight and propose a solution to the issue. Although this book was started well before the events of Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm, the author was gratified to see his initial assumptions validated. Joint operations, including joint night operations, are a critically important part of modern war. The success of Operation Desert Storm was the result of joint development and training efforts during the months of Desert Shield. Continuous efforts must be made to ensure a future capability. This report has a proposed training method for ensuring that capability.

“Laslie chronicles how the Air Force worked its way from the catastrophe of Vietnam through the triumph of the Gulf War, and beyond.” —Robert M. Farley, author of Grounded The U.S. Air Force’s poor performance in Operation Linebacker II and other missions during Vietnam was partly due to the fact that they had trained their pilots according to methods devised during World War II and the Korean War, when strategic bombers attacking targets were expected to take heavy losses. Warfare had changed by the 1960s, but the USAF had not adapted. Between 1972 and 1991, however, the Air Force dramatically changed its doctrines and began to overhaul the way it trained pilots through the introduction of a groundbreaking new training program called “Red Flag.” In The Air Force Way of War, Brian D. Laslie examines the revolution in pilot instruction that Red Flag brought about after Vietnam. The program’s new instruction methods were dubbed “realistic” because they prepared pilots for real-life situations better than the simple cockpit simulations of the past, and students gained proficiency on primary and secondary missions instead of superficially training for numerous possible scenarios. In addition to discussing the program’s methods, Laslie analyzes the way its graduates actually functioned in combat during the 1980s and ’90s in places such as Grenada, Panama, Libya, and Iraq. Military historians have traditionally emphasized the primacy of technological developments during this period and have overlooked the vital importance of advances in training, but Laslie’s unprecedented study of Red Flag addresses this oversight through its examination of the seminal program. “A refreshing look at the people and operational practices whose import far exceeds technological advances.” —The Strategy Bridgei

February issue includes Appendix entitled Directory of United States Government periodicals and subscription publications; September issue includes List of depository libraries; June and December issues include semiannual index