I scanned the original manual at 600 dpi.

In Selling Air Power, Steve Call provides the first comprehensive study of the efforts of post-war air power advocates to harness popular culture in support of their agenda. In the 1940s and much of the 1950s, hardly a month went by without at least one blatantly pro-air power article appearing in general interest magazines. Public fascination with flight helped create and sustain exaggerated expectations for air power in the minds of both its official proponents and the American public. Articles in the Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest, and Life trumpeted the secure future assured by American air superiority. Military figures like Henry H. "Hap" Arnold and Curtis E. LeMay, radio-television personalities such as Arthur Godfrey, cartoon figures like Steve Canyon, and actors like Jimmy Stewart played key roles in the unfolding campaign. Movies like Twelve O'Clock High!, The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, and A Gathering of Eagles projected onto the public imagination vivid images confirming what was coming to be the accepted wisdom: that America's safety against the Soviet threat could best be guaranteed by air power, coupled with nuclear capability. But as the Cold War continued and the specter of the mushroom cloud grew more prominent in American minds, another, more sinister interpretation began to take hold. Call chronicles the shift away from the heroic, patriotic posture of the years just after World War II, toward the threatening, even bizarre imagery of books and movies like Catch-22, On the Beach, and Dr. Strangelove. Call's careful analysis goes beyond the public relations campaigns to probe the intellectual climate that shaped them and gave them power. Selling Air Power adds a critical layer of understanding to studies in military and aviation history, as well as American popular culture.

The U.S. Air Force is developing new force capabilities appropriate to an emerging array of threats. It is clear that advances in information science and technology (IS&T) are essential for most of these new capabilities. As a consequence, the Air Force is finding it necessary to refocus its IS&T basic research program to provide stronger support for reaching these goals. To assist this effort, the AFOSR asked the NRC for a study to create a vision and plan for the IS&T-related programs within the Office's Mathematics and Space Science Directorate. This report provides an assessment of basic research needs for Air Force systems and communications, software, information management and integration, and human interactions with IS&T systems. The report also offers a set of priorities for basic IS&T research, and an analysis of funding mechanisms its support.

The First World War had seen the mechanization of warfare. Battle fronts had become immobilized in the grip of machine-guns and heavy artillery, leading to slaughter on an unprecedented scale. The end of the war saw exhausted governments extricating themselves from the carnage, but some leaders were concerned that, sooner or later, another major war would follow. As France’s Marshal Foch put it, the Treaty of Versailles was only a ‘twenty-year truce’. The overriding concern was to find ways in future of avoiding the kind of static battle fronts that had consumed so many in such futile efforts. Military aviation was seen as the one great innovation that had the potential to do this by revolutionizing warfare. It would not only augment the effectiveness of ground forces in a tactical role, but it also had the means of reaching out strategically beyond the battlefronts to strike at the enemy’s trade, supplies, communications and industrial production. All through the war, military aviation had been firmly under the control of army commanders but there was soon a fierce debate over the way it should develop. The development of an ‘air doctrine’ within each of the major European powers was fraught with difficulty as the nascent air arms struggled, with varying degrees of success, to free themselves from army control to find a new, independent identity. This book examines the way in which these air arms competed for prominence within the military structures of six major European nations – Germany, Britain, France, Soviet Union, Poland and Italy – with different resources, ambitions and philosophies, in the years from the beginning of aviation right up to the start of the Second World War.

The hastily mounted invasion of French Northwest Africa in November of 1942 was a gamble. It exposed American inexperience. That inexperience went from Roosevelt on down to the soldier in the foxhole. Half-trained men were pitted against Vichy France and didn’t know whether to expect open arms or open fire. Later, those same inexperienced men would meet Rommel at the Kasserine Pass. This naivete was exhibited by both men and leaders. Torch was Eisenhower’s first major operation--a gigantic airlift and sealift preceded by months of intrigue. The outcome of the campaign settled several air power issues and revealed many lessons. The battles fought by the United States forces during the North African Campaign of 1942 and 1943, particularly the Battle for the Kasserine Pass in February 1943, were a breaking and testing ground for much of the employment of those forces during the remainder of the Second World War. Three air power key lessons were learned on the North African battlefield. First was the need for coordination between air and ground forces. Second was the folly of sending untrained airmen into combat. Third was the importance of tactical air targeting by ground force commanders.

This volume examines the theory and practice of air power from its earliest inception.