Author Description

This work establishes the nature and levels of rivalry and dispute between the United States armed services over matters relating to the military application of airpower during the Vietnam period, and assesses the extent to which rivalry may have distorted US operational policy in Southeast Asia. This book focuses on tactical airpower in South Vietnam between 1961 and 1968. It examines a number of issues including command and control of airpower, the use of airpower at the tactical and the operational-strategic level of war, the role of helicopters, and different service understandings of the proper role of airpower in a counterinsurgency. Interservice rivalry has always been endemic among military establishments in the modern age, yet there are few monographs that deal specifically with the subject.