D An early balloon used for reconnaissance during the American Civil War Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
INTRODUCTION ommanders had long recognized the advantage that could be gained from controlling the skies over a battlefield However it was not until the time of the French Revolutionary Wars and the American Civil War that they could realisti cally achieve that advantage Those conflicts saw the first uses of observation balloons to monitor an enemy s movements The inability to reliably steer balloons their vulnerability to enemy fire from the ground and their lack of offensive weaponry made balloons more of a novelty than a direct threat to opposing troops Nonetheless the skies had been mili Second tarized and the 20th century would see radical H e changes in military doctrine to accommodate this new frontier in warfare and defense This to book will profile the technologies and tactics that have led to the growth and evolution of air forces from the earliest lighterthan air craft to the unmanned aerial vehicles of the 21st century battlespace One of the core concepts of military sci Hence is force projection Force projection is the ability of a country's military to conduct operations outside that country's established borders The greater a country s force projec tion capability the greater its influence both I n
THE HISTORY OF AIR FORCES AROUND THE WORLD politically and militarily around the world Early armies exercised force projection by maintaining frontier garrisons or patrolling roads that were frequently used by merchants or pilgrims The British navy maintained con trol of the world s sea lanes as a measure of force projection during the era of the British Empire it retains some measure of that con trol to this day through its overseas territories The expansion of air power revolu tionized the way in which countries could project force The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 demonstrated that naval air power could be used in a devastating man ner to strike targets thousands of miles away The Berlin airlift which utilized air trans port to bring relief to the blockaded city of West Berlin in 1948 49 was a classic dem onstration of soft power projection The development of strategic weapons systems such as long range bombers and innovations such as in air refueling greatly expanded the sphere of action for air forces and targets on the other side of the world were suddenly within reach The launch of the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik in 1957 inaugurated the satellite age and ignited the Space Race as the United States and the Soviet Union sought to assert control of the Io
INTRODUCTION final frontier The Apollo astronauts went to the Moon and private companies joined national governments in the orbital skies as telecommunications satellites transformed the way in which information was transmit ted around the world The Navstar Global Positioning System GPS a constellation of satellites originally used by the United States Department of Defense for military purposes has fundamentally changed the way in which humans navigate the world around them Recognizing the soft power implications of a single country controlling such a powerful tool Russia China and the European Union have all embarked on similar programs Whether through soft power or hard power air forces provide modern military planners with a range of options and challengesundreamed of by those early balloonists II
