The New Air Power

George Will - By itself it won in—over—Kosovo, but it will never completely supplant ground forces. As has been said, no one surrenders to an airplane

Retired Gen. Richard Hawley, who as a young man flew 433 missions in Vietnam, remembers that when he graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1964 the hot plane was an F-100, a single-seat fighter he describes as “a motor and a gas tank and a gun.” It is to today’s stealthy F-22 as a Model T Ford is to a Ferrari. The accelerating sophistication of the U.S. air arsenal almost compels a kind of unilateralism because it becomes increasingly difficult to integrate most other nations’ forces into operations.

Except for the U.K., France, Germany, and some Russian, no one has any military equipment about as good as ours. Spending as much as the next 15 most powerful countries does that.