Air Space Power Journal Fall 05

Colonel Slife chronicles the influence of the late Gen Wilbur L. "Bill" Creech7a leader, visionary, warrior, and mentor7in the areas of equipment and tactics, training, organization, and leader development. His study serves both to explain the context of a turbulent time in our Air Force's history and to reveal where tomorrow's airmen may find answers to some of the difficult challenges facing them today. Colonel Slife, who addresses such controversial topics as the development of the Army's AirLand Battle doctrine and what it meant to airmen, is among the first to describe what historians will surely see in years to come as the revolutionary developments of the late 1970s/early 1980s and General Creech's central role. Creech Blue enlightens the Air Force on its strongly held convictions during that period and challenges the idea that by 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Air Force had forgotten how to wage a "strategic" air campaign and was dangerously close to plunging into a costly and lengthy war of attrition had it not been for the vision of a small cadre of thinkers on the Air Staff. In exploring the doctrine and language of the decade leading up to Operation Desert Storm, Colonel Slife reveals that the Air Force was not as shortsighted as many people have argued.

This volume covers a timely debate in contemporary security studies: can armed forces adjust to the rising challenge of insurgency and terrorism, the greatest transformation in warfare since the birth of the international system? Containing essays by leading international security scholars and military professionals, it explores the Fourth-Generation Warfare thesis and its implications for security planning in the twenty-first century. No longer confined to the fringes of armed conflict, guerrilla warfare and terrorism increasingly dominate world-wide military planning. For the first time since the Vietnam War ended, the problems of insurgency have leapt to the top of the international security agenda and virtually all countries are struggling to protect themselves against terrorist threats. Coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq are bogged down by an insurgency, and are being forced to rely on old warfare tactics rather than modern technologies to destroy their adversaries. These theorists argue that irregular warfare—insurgencies and terrorism—has evolved over time and become progressively more sophisticated and difficult to defeat as it is not centred on high technology and state of the art weaponry. Global Insurgency and the Future of Armed Conflict will be of interest to students of international security, strategic studies and terrorism studies.

The war on terror, launched by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, has been waged inside as well as outside the U.S. borders. Perception of threat and efforts to ensure national security have led the United States to major reforms in its national security policy, involving new military, security and legislative concepts. On the level of waging war outside the U.S. borders, the United States has introduced the system of Unmanned Aerial vehicles (UAVs), autonomous aircrafts without human pilot aboard, opening the possibility of highly effective computer game-like targeted killing. On the domestic level, new pieces of legislation and other antiterrorism measures have been raising privacy awareness and concerns whether the U.S. government keeps observing the Constitution. Nowadays, as advanced technology offers wide range of possibilities how to intrude one´s privacy and effectively kill people, legal and ethical considerations have to catch up the reality. This work therefore seeks to elaborate on the statutory and constitutional framework of the current U.S surveillance measures as well as the limits of utilization of UAVs.