While there’s no shortage of threats to our national security, it’s the ability of our adversaries to affect Americans through cyberspace that has emerged as one of the most pressing concerns of the 21st century. The United States Armed Forces need a coherent solution to the looming threat of debilitating cyber attacks today and a path forward to leverage the field of cyber to our advantage on the battlefield of tomorrow.
As a former United States Air Force officer, I was taught the history of military aviation and specifically the era before the Air Force’s establishment in 1947. Through the 1920s and 1930s, when the Army was largely charged with managing military aviation, its leaders (frequently non-aviators from the ground forces) downplayed, diminished, and underappreciated the revolutionary potential of air warfare. Collectively, the limited vision and poor understanding by Army leaders of the new domain led to the treatment of aviation as a mere support function to the Army’s ground formations. After the Army’s repeated aviation-related missteps in WWII, the full promise of air power was finally realized, leading to the independent U.S. Air Force we have today.
Ironically, the Air Force mismanaged space responsibilities by falling prey to many of these fundamental mistakes. For nearly 30 years, the Air Force failed to invest in critical space capabilities, neglected essential national requirements, and generally under-appreciated the potential for the space domain. History repeated itself when escalating frustration with the Air Force’s fumbles culminated in the establishment of the U.S. Space Force in 2019.
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