Air Force adapts to 'different kind of war'

The military's role is tied directly to U.S. foreign policy, national security and now homeland defense. Their strategies need to be both offensively and defensively linear and non linear to accomodate what is termed as war in the 21st century. Post World War II and up to the fall of the Soviet Empire our military strategy could be considered linear, e.g. victory through U.S. primacy. What evolved after the fall was not a state entity to plan against, but an adaptive version of extremism that moved itself through various nation states who would not act to destroy it. U.S. primacy meant nothing at that a point without permission to enter and destroy. The entrance into Iraq was the old story of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" resolution supported by the consensus of the U.N. The only reason it seems to be working now is because of the resolve of the Bush administration and the adaptiveness and intellect of our modern military. We can use the lessons learned to formulate the approach to the non linear (stability) portion of our national defense strategy in the future, however the military must still must maintain a linear approach (victory) as long as there are nation states with the capability of challenging our military power. The dilemma is like the Hydra, convincing the Congress of which head to feed, e.g. resources for linear or nonlinear with regard to the threat outlook and current the political environment. The tactical plan is Executive while the strategy lies strictly with the Congress.

Our nation still needs the Air Force to maintain air supremacy. We could have never marched/rolled our troops into Baghdad without incurring numerous casualties if we had not already had complete control of the air space over Iraq.