Toward an Airpower Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century

TO LEAD IS to choose. Choosing commits one’s group to courses of ac ­ tion and to consequences. In 1995 the leaders of the United States Air Force asserted that long-range planning in the Air Force was “broken” and that they would fix it. Doing so requires vision, asense of the evolving environment, and aprocess for link­ ing visions to strategies andtasks. Bureaucracy without vision mistakes activity for progress. Vi sion without the wherewithal for change is called dreaming. Today, planning matters because the Air Force, in our view, is poised between two courses—one to “live in fame,” the other to “go down in flame,” as the Air Force song goes. Bad choices forebode institutional irrelevance or, worse, disintegration and defeat . Some people may find